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Massive Methane Release In the Arctic Region
Taco Cowboy writes "Arctic methane release is a well recorded phenomenon. Methane stored in both permafrost (which is melting) and methane hydrates (methane trapped in marine reservoirs) are vulnerable to being released into the atmosphere as the planet warms. However, researchers who are trying to map atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations on a global basis have discovered that the amount of methane emissions in the Arctic region do not total up. Further research revealed that significant amounts of methane releases came from the Arctic ocean (abstract) — as much as 2 milligrams of the gas is released per square meter of ocean, each day — presumably by marine bacteria surviving in low-nutrient environments."
Algae farts!
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
I bet a good amount is trapped in all that Arctic Ice. Human's also contribute a large part with Live Stocks, and Land Fills
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Shhh. It's hard enough to get deniers(I hate that term, is there an less biased term that doesn't give them undue credibility like "skeptic" does) to understand the concept of a second derivative, and its importance to the whole thing. Involving diff-eq is just going to lose even more.
People have been concerned about the possibility of a Clathrate gun for a while. Is this another potentially lethal feedback loop?
And if it fires, or has already fired, will we notice immediately?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
How much methane can you get by rotting stuff once it warms up enough to rot? Or is that the simple words version of "stored in ... permafrost"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Excuse me
Love,
Mother Earth
Uranus also emits a lot of methane.
Too much hummus.
*BRAAAP*
Pardon.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Except the planet has not been warming for the past 15 years. IIRC Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia CRU said this during an interview a year or two ago.
Everything, -body farts, including good ole' Mother Earth. pffffft, now another methane hydrate crystal. Sheep, swamps, anaerobic groundwaters, anaerobic seawaters....methane is a child of Nature. Get over it.
20 times better at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Warmer planet = more melting permafrost = more methane release = warmer planet.
http://www.epa.gov/methane/
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... that I think naturally come up with stories like this. Despite my science background from college (marine bio, actually, but I never use it), I find it hard to answer questions that true science novices might have such as:
(o) Why is methane bad? It's one of the gases that get trapped in the atmosphere and prevent light from escaping, which warms the planet. Um... I think.
(o) If it floats ups into the upper atmosphere, doesn't it just float into space? Uh.... no. Gravity.... I think.
(o) So those trapped gases must have been in the air at some point, millions of years ago, and then planet did just fine. So what's there to worry about? Uh.....
Sounds great it my brain, but when I vocalize it I realize how easy it is for uninitiated to suspect bullshit and assume there isn't anything to worry about, that this is just a ploy to funnel more money into the coffers of the science research community. Very frustrating.
What happens moments after Santa says pull my finger?
I assumed that the north pole would be far enough away from polite society to let loose, but apparently I've just made an ass of myself once again.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Its pretty much too late to do anything useful. There are some way out there schemes but the most positive effect for species survival now is figuring out how to sustain our population on a warming Earth. We're going to have to get used to more extreme weather limits and redo our calculations and weather models for starters.
I suspect that cephalopods are about to be in for a pretty wild ride. As the ocean acidifies, shell fish will have less and less protection as the calcium carbonate that makes up the bulk of their shells gets dissolved more rapidly than they can replace it. This may lead to a population boom which will be quickly turn in to a starvation scenario.
If this happens, large marine predatory fish will go through a smaller version of this, which could be followed by the replacement of these fish in their niche by large predatory cephalopods. (most likely the D. gigas or A. dux)
Of course, that's just a guess. Everything in the ocean that relies on calcium carbonate is in for a rough time. This includes fish teeth and cephalopod beaks.
Another whammy is that as the ocean acidifies, the calcium carbonate reacts with the acid to form calcium bicarbonate and carbon dioxide, further increasing the saturation of the surrounding water resulting in a lower pH and a more intense feedback loop.
Chilli is good cold weather food.
Most people who "believe in" AGW are the same...
Shhh. It's hard enough to get deniers(I hate that term, is there an less biased term that doesn't give them undue credibility like "skeptic" does)
'False skeptic' is an accurate term for many deniers. They claim to be skeptical, but aren't willing to look at all the evidence as a true skeptic would do. Instead many strategically (or subconsciously) select the bit's and pieces that serve their goal of undermining the larger body of evidence for anthropogenic climate change. A true skeptic is open to being convinced by the evidence.
Parent post:
How combustible is high-pressure methane VS something like propane?
Most "natural gas" contains a fairly significant chunk of methane and is often piped for home furnaces, stoves, heaters, etc.
So with all this methane, why not find a way to capture, compress, and use it. Seems that this algae is essentially doing what may of the biogas projects are intended for anyways.
So I wondered just how much methane 2 mg/m^2/day is, and here's the breakdown:
2 mg/m^2/day times the area of the Arctic ocean (13,986,000 km^2) is 27,972,000 kg/day, or about 10.2 Tg/year.
10.2 Tg/year can be compared on this chart to other sources. This is not an insignificant amount, but is an order of magnitude less than just the contribution from farm animals.
I'm not a climate scientist, and can't say what this may or may not mean for AGW, but it puts the size of the emission into perspective.
Anyone who thinks the word "skeptic" lends credibility is a dolt who fails at English, and should be treated as such.
I'm skeptical of your understanding of the English language.
...distribute it to all energy importing countries, and address as much of their energy needs as possible that way.
Yes, it's a perfectly NATURAL gas! Environmentalist commie tree huggers who say otherwise are HYPOCRITES who actually HATE NATURE!
Our BODIES produce methane all the time, to GREAT COMEDIC EFFECT!
And it's PLANT FOOD! (Assuming the plants are from Zeta Gamma VII, which happens to be the home world of our new alien terraforming overlords.)
Nonsense. Once we finally run out of food and drinking water the inevitable nuclear holocaust should solve global warming straight away. Which works out great because we're overdue for both another global extinction event and another ice age. Three birds with one stone!
No need to waste time over the cause, I think those two camps are entrenched and few will change their minds on the actual cause. The fact is the feedback loop is already starting which means it's likely self-perpetuating or soon will be. It also means the increase can be much greater than any of the projections since no one is sure how much methane can be released so most haven't factored it in to projections. It's unlikely that the climate change can be stopped but that's no reason to not limit CO2. There was always a much bigger issue that rarely gets mentioned and that's ocean acidification. Acid oceans kill fish and coral and we don't get our oxygen and food from rain forests we get most of the oxygen and a lot of our food from the oceans so killing them is a bad idea.
Its so simple! Its like we should have encouraged global nuclear war in the 80s instead of all of this namby-pamby SALT non-sense and wall removal.
Wow, what fools we were.
What wrong with calling them deniers? You have a bias against them, an entirely appropriate bias based on their behavior, so why try to hide it?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Could you clarify? Is there some sort of skillset that you feel is lacking in the observations of people who would identify AGW as factual? I, of course, don't mean "people in the street" kind of way, but people making public arguments about AGW?
What I observe in debates I've seen are people saying things like changes in temperature exist in a natural cycle, we've seen them before, and that current temperatures are not unprecedented in nature. But these observations neglect the incredibly high second derivative of temperature over time in the past century or two.
You mean like moving from sprawling, single family ranch-style homes, which are expensive to cool, into the city? And planting trees and other vegetation in order to reduce the urban heat island effect? And switching to energy efficient appliances and using them at night in order to reduce cooling costs?
Seems the way to sustain our population on a warming earth is to do what we should have been doing all along.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Second derivative? You are just repeating what you have heard! The data is noisy. The second derivative is much noisier.
You are thinking of the first derivative. Have you even passed real calculus? (not the business/CS major version)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When they come to get a few AC's please volunteer to be frozen.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
(I hate that term, is there an less biased term that doesn't give them undue credibility like "skeptic" does)
Anyone who thinks the word "skeptic" lends credibility is a dolt who fails at English, and should be treated as such.
you even provided a link to the meaning of the word yet you failed to grasp how your meaning isnt correct.
1. a person who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual. 2. a person who maintains a doubting attitude, as toward values, plans, statements, or the character of others.
"Remember, politicians and diapers should be changed often and for the same reason."
It will stop eventually at a new equilibrium. Of course the coral reefs and many other species will be extinct but hey, mass extinctions happen all the time on this rock.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I am, however, personally interested in not taking part in the next one, especially not on the side of the extinct species.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It's actually not a positive feedback loop.
Calcium Carbonate + Carbon Dioxide Calcium Bicarbonate
So, calcium carbonate does *not* react with carbon dioxide to produce calcium bicarbonate and another carbon dioxide. That would violate conservation of mass. The reaction between calcium carbonate and carbon dioxide produces calcium bicarbonate which should precipitate out and increase the pH of the water to more neutral levels!
'News' about global warming... AGAIN??
... I got better.
When do we stop chasing that ghost and get over it? Really...
The big freeze, acid rain, a gap in the ozon layer, and now this witch hunt. *sigh*
Can we, for the sake of Cowboy Neal, just stop doing this, get real and do some real science?
It all sounds like:
Sir Bedevere: What makes you think there is global warming?
Peasant: Well, the global warming turned me into a newt!
Sir Bedevere: A newt?
Peasant: -meekly-
Crowd: (shouts) Stop driving your car anyway!!!
Zjeeeez...
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Dinosaurs lived at much higher temperatures.
They ate all the people back then though.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
You mean like moving from sprawling, single family ranch-style homes, which are expensive to cool, into the city?
Seems someone already suggested a means to hurry that part of it up, starting with the skeptics. To wit:
"We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued."
(...mind you, this is originally posted in jest, but it points to some pretty scary shit that some folks are willing to suggest, just to whip up the crowds.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Yes, changing our living situations and expectations are a part of it, as is changing the way we manufacture and receive goods, distribute food, etc.
You're absolutely right that we should have been doing these things all along, but dammit, there was just so much profit to be made.
I read the blog post you linked, and it struck me as a bit of a Tom Swiftian solution. However, I think there is a kernel of wisdom in there. If you don't remove the short-term incentive for a behavior or set of actions, you will have a much harder time controlling it.
That's how regulation is supposed to work, but along comes regulatory capture to stop all that noise.
Its sad really, that the short term has taken such a superior position in the thought and actions of many people and corporations. Its almost as if, as a culture, we have lost a critical ability to think metaphorically ahead of our next meal.
gregmark mused:
(o) So those trapped gases must have been in the air at some point, millions of years ago, and then planet did just fine. So what's there to worry about? Uh.....
The carbon component of "those trapped gases" (i.e. - methane) may well have been "in the air" at some point in the past - but likely not as part of a methane molecule. Methane is a gas mainly produced by the decomposition of organic material. When the last ice age descended (most likely because of a meteorite or cometary impact event), it swiftly buried boreal forests in ice, and Arctic temperatures have kept the ground that they're now buried under frozen solid (which is why it's called "permafrost"). As the temperature warms, and that permafrost thaws, the decay process that the ice suspended will restart, and cause the dead and buried plant life to rot, producing very large quantities of methane gas from the carbon that used to be part of that plant life.
As for how methane clathrates (the other very large source of methane gas releases) are formed, I have yet to see a convincing explanation of the mechanism. That notwithstanding, the fact that they DO exist is indisputable - and, when deepwater temperatures rise far enough, they definitely will melt, releasing their cargo of methane into the atmosphere (the so-called "methane clathrate gun" effect) more-or-less all at once.
The current consensus is that it was the global release of large volumes of methane in the transition from the Permian to the Triassic Periods that caused the extremely large (20+ degrees Fahrenheit) increase in global temperatures that resulted in what is known as the Permian Extinction - an event that resulted in the extinction of more than 90% of all then-extant species on Earth. What is particularly scary about that event - the worst mass extinction since the Oxygen Catastrophe - is that the release of all that methane seems to have been initiated by a sharp increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the Permian, that surge of CO2 was caused by a huge, long-lasting basalt flow event (a kind of large-scale volcanic eruption) called the Siberian Traps.
Today, however, the increase in atmospheric CO2 is largely manmade. Regardless of its source, the marginal warming effect of all that CO2 our electric power generation, heating, combustion engine-based transportation, and large-scale deforestation is producing will, without question, eventually result in a massive methane release, just as happened in the Permian. Our atmospheric CO2 levels are already very close to those that triggered the methane releases that resulted in the Permain Extinction, and there's no technolgy currently in existence that will allow us to "scrub" that CO2 out of our atmosphere. That, in turn, means that we're pretty much stuck with a future in which the planet warms suffiiciently to melt the polar and Greenland icecaps - and all the world's glaciers, as well - and release the methane clathrate deposits, too. How long this will take is the main unanswered question, now. The international consensus is that it will be on the order of a millenium before the planetary warming process reaches its peak, but there's some reason to believe that the icecaps are what used to be known as "chaotic systems" (i.e. - systems whose existing state is highly unstable, and subject to very rapid change if the conditions under which they are maintained change in relatively modest ways), and, if so, the collapse of the world's ice sheets could happen in as little as a century or so.
This is the problem with the plea for "simple answers". The systems we're talking about aren't simple - they're vast, complex, and (by the timescale of a single human life) slow-moving. The time to get out ahead of global warming was the 1970's. It's far too late now to prevent the planet from warming enough to melt the icecaps and change the climate sufficiently to result in another mass extinction event. At this point, we can only try to slow the process down, not stop
Check out my novel.
we need to simply accept that the earth goes through cycles and we can either adapt or die.
instead of trying to STOP the natural cycle of the earth's cooling and heating we should be spending our energy making sure we can survive the impacts of those natural cycles.
You seem to think you have a choice in the matter. But cheer up, everything dies.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Because deniers and skeptic are two different things.
The would be skeptic if the plied rational thought and learned the facts, science and data. They don't. They cherry pick, spout nonsense, and ignore data - hence deniers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Oh. I thought you were referring to "people in the street".
You value city density too much.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Fifteen or twenty years ago, the buzz was about diminishing rain forests. Before that, it was extinction. It seems like people get tired of a world consumption message, give up on caring, and look for a new "problem" to warn ourselves about. Warming is the new rain forest, which was the new extinction. As a fifty year old environmentalist, I wonder how wise it was to take peoples focus off of habitat and onto thermometers. We need big forests to suck up the carbon. Now, that arrow is gone.
Gently reply
I can assure you that some of the "deniers" I know understand the concept of a second derivative. Perhaps even better than many who call them that. At least one of them is a mathematician specializing in analysis.
First rule of talking about someone who you don't agree with and disapprove of: Paint them as too stupid to know the truth. Failing that paint them as also being deviously clever and hiding the truth.
Don't feel bad. Those on the denial side would do the same to you. Both sides are human after all. And neither side seems to be able to see their own biases.
I wish we could get back to arguments deserving of the level of flames. Like emacs vs VI. ;)
Right, that's why I said he should just go ahead and call them deniers. Do you disagree with something I said?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Hasn't this phenomenon been going on for some time? I understand that if the climate warms we get more turbulence in the Arctic Ocean and (theoretically?) more methane.
This just seems like sort of a trumped up article. They've known about this phenomenon for decades. It's probably been happening for much, much longer.
-
Sorry, no, that's not true at all.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
25*2mg/m^2/day;5400025mi^2?Gton_metric/year
([{25 * (2 * [milli*gramm])} / {meter^2}] / day) * (5.400025E6 * [mile^2]) ? (giga*ton_metric) / year
= 0.25524451 Gton_metric/year
That's about 10% of the greenhouse impact of the US's electrical power generation.
Seastead this.
does that not push the adaptation accelerator
yeah, bigger organisms adapt to eating more of dead carcases, and then they adapt to getting fatter, and then they adapt to being subjected to scary spice on jenny craig ads
YOU are released in the arctic!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
The comments on that article show just how entrenched positions have become. A lot of conservatives got wind of it via Alex Jones, who painted the whole thing as "The cult of AGW wants to burn your house down," which is preposterous to anyone who bothered to read the article. It very clearly doesn't say that. Yet somehow there are many replies along the lines of... well I'll quote: "Come to my house with matches, pal. You'll be leaving on a stretcher under a plastic sheet." Also: "Wow Steve, you ride a bike and burn down people's houses. You really are a moron. Not just that but a dangerous psychopath to boot. Shouldn't you be in jail or institutionalized in a psychiatric facility?" And so on and so forth.
I can't stress this enough... the two sides aren't even speaking the same language. It's was already apparent that both sides have their own talking points, their own debunkers, their own pejoratives, even their own scientists. What only became clear to me here was that they can look at the same sentence and come to totally different conclusions- not just about the import of the sentence, but about the literal meaning of the sentence.
Right. As if believers wouldn't. As if Al Gore didn't exist. As if warmists didn't have extreme position on climate change. As if the climate-gate emails never existed. As if nobody pretended that Himalaya glaciers would melt within 50 years when they are in fact expanding. As if ...
Come on, make a list of what "skeptics" made as famous mistake, and try to compare with the list above, then you tell me who's selecting "bits and pieces that serve their goal".
Yeah, we haven't had a P-Tr event since, well, the Permian-Triassic boundary some 250 million years ago. The planet's quite due for another one of those.
Who wants to bet that humans will be in that 30% of surviving vertebrates?
In other news, scientists have concluded that the P-Tr event was caused by a highly advanced ancient life form that burned vast reservoirs of coal for energy and denied the negative effects of global warming up until the very end. Oh, and they were trying to mine asteroids too.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Second derivative? Maybe you mean the slope, i.e.the first derivative? You're not exactly doing yourself any favors by using terms you don understand well incorrectly.
They ate them so bad they set the human evolution back a couple of million years and they even ate all the bones!
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
It's was already apparent that both sides have their own talking points, their own debunkers, their own pejoratives, even their own scientists.
Well, one side has scientists. The other has a weatherman.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Nothin' wrong with a little urban homicide.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
uh oh, we're in trouble :p
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Bullwinkle, was that you?
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
So, what you're saying is literally something I acknowledged directly in my post. That doesn't clarify and help me understand what crucial skill set is missing. It always seems like when I'm discussing global warming, there's always two conversations going on. The one I see, and one that seems to exist in a parallel universe where I said something different. It's really quite odd.
Please, I'm begging you, help me understand what I'm actually missing, not fairly basic data I already am familiar with.
No, I was referring to "making a serious claim about the nature of things". But that's fair.
You're missing that I made a joke. About the climate being much warmer in the past, when life existed just fine. Except for humans. That's the dichotomy, and I made a cheap joke off of it.
Don't take everything so seriously.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
... pulled God's finger!
Just blame it on the dog. The big, huge dog.
I'm afraid that seriously is just how I prefer to take things. It wasn't much of a joke, either.
Actually, it's the suburban residents who rely more heavily on tax breaks, which infers a central government, to finance their lifestyles, than urban residents.
But don't let facts cloud your view of the world.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Since my comment got more upmods than yours, I'd say my joke was better than your comment.
Lighten up, Francis.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Now we're playing this game. Your comment got "informative" and "insightful" upmods. Which means people thought it was introducing some useful fact. It wasn't, you're taking the fact that other people are basically ignorant as a meaningful measure of whether you were making a good point. That's incredibly dense of you.
EMACS, a wonderful OS/programming environment that's still in search of a good editor.