"This finding is important because methane is estimated to be 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and it could indicate that global warming is about to accelerate dramatically" Or, conveniently left out of the horror story, is that fact that since it was just discovered it could have been going on for a very long time and the effects are already covered in the temperature data and it makes no difference at all except as an interesting find. But balanced and thoughtful reportage wouldn't grab so much attention.

OK, some things are going to be tough to quantify. But I suspect that at least some if not most of your responsibilities consist of putting out fires, right? I am not a sysadmin, but I know ours at my last job ended up fixing lots of stuff. When I was working in an electronic test support group, we used mean time to repair and mean time between failures to track our efforts. it does require logging problems and tracking time, but you should be doing that now anyway.