Nature Geoscience 7, 459–463 (2014); published online 4 May 2014; corrected after print 13 June 2014.

In the version of this Article originally published, the last sentence in the caption of Fig. 4 should have read 'The most likely lead of temperature over methane emissions is 4.5 years'. This error has now been corrected in all online versions of the Article.