The oil and gas industry may be contributing even more to the climate crisis than we thought.

A study published in Nature Wednesday found that methane emissions from fossil fuel extraction have been underestimated by 25 to 40 percent.

"This indicates that the fossil fuel sector has a much more polluting impact beyond being responsible for the overwhelming majority of carbon dioxide emissions," Dr. Joeri Rogelj, a climate change lecturer at the Grantham Institute who was not involved with the research, told The Guardian. "This is worrying and overall bad news."

While carbon dioxide is the greenhouse gas contributing the most to the climate crisis, methane is now responsible for 25 percent of current global warming, according to CNN.

The amount of methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled since the preindustrial era, according to The New York Times, but it has been difficult to pinpoint its source. Methane is released naturally by the ocean and by formations on land known as mud volcanoes. But it is also released by the fossil fuel industry, and most current estimates of the industry release of methane have been grassroots and not comprehensive, The Guardian pointed out.