I had heard Taylor Swift’s soft and catchy pop music, harmless at best. Yet, when my daughter secured a precious ticket for Swift’s Eras Tour in Boston, over 680 kilometers away from our home in Eastern Canada, Swift became surprisingly real. With only one ticket, I hesitated to let my daughter go alone.

In the end, I became the taxi driver (or rather, credit card), staying at a hotel next to the stadium while she enjoyed the concert. This journey introduced me to a world I never imagined. Swift’s music is not my type, and I felt the concert scene these days was meaningless and complete nonsense. But I still tried to be a “with-it” TS Nation mom to keep up with the times, despite accidentally referring to myself as a Swiftie, only to be corrected.

Arriving in Boston, my daughter was over the moon, and I found myself in a world filled with cowboy boots and sequins (亮片). The concert experience unveiled the good, the bad and the ugly.

The bad: the secondary market where desperate fans pay up to 20 times the original face value for a ticket. The ugly: the environmental impact of people driving from all over the place to get to the concert and all the trash from 100,000 people.

The good: Okay, I admit it. After an evening of taking it all in, I saw that Swift is a force to be reckoned with. She is young and beautiful, and superbly talented and smart. Her ability to persist, be savvy (有见识的) and entertain makes her an impressive figure.

Once the concert began, I turned and started back to my hotel. And then I stopped and listened. The voice s of a hundred thousand people joined in a joyful song. I knew my girl was having the time of her life, and I sensed something special was happening: the boundless potential of empowered youth. An army of young people was being led by a queen. A queen with so much potential was making people happy and making a difference in the world. Long live the queen.

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is essential to meeting international climate goals, scientists say. Without it, it’s all but impossible to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius, the primary targets of the Paris climate agreement.

Yet carbon dioxide isn’t the only climate-warming gas that needs a sharp cutback in the atmosphere. Experts are turning their focus to methane (甲烷) as well.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine hosted a workshop dedicated to atmospheric methane removal, which is the process of removing methane emissions directly from the air. The workshop included presentations by dozens of researchers and policy experts addressing questions about the science and effectiveness of methane removal, potential side effects and unintended consequences and the ways it should be governed and regulated.

These presentations will be used to inform a forthcoming NASEM report on atmospheric methane removal. The study will examine the global need for methane removal, viable options for carrying it out and potential risks and benefits, while outlining a road map for future research. The subject is more complicated than carbon dioxide removal, which has received more attention and research.

Methane has a far shorter lifetime in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, yet it’s a much more powerful greenhouse gas while it lasts. The world already has warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, and scientists estimate that methane may be responsible for as much as 0.5 degrees.

Reducing methane emissions at their sources is a growing priority. However, Methane removal, by comparison, is more complex. For one thing, methane is far less abundant in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, meaning methane capture systems must process much larger quantities of air in order to make a meaningful difference. For another, there are also uncertainties about unintended side effects of some emerging technologies. Adding chlorine (氯) to the atmosphere, for instance, can actually increase the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere if it isn’t carefully dosed. It can also attack the Earth’s protective ozone layer. Besides, chlorine-based methods could decrease certain other types of climate-warming gases in the atmosphere in addition to methane.