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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
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?
The rotting has long since happened. The most likely source are methane clathrates sequestered for ages and now getting destabilized.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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.
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.
Its normal in that this has happened before in the past. The difference is that humans weren't depending on living on the Earth at the time.
Good news: We're still in the middle of an ice age. It's not as hot now as it was 2.5 million years ago (when there was no ice on the poles).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.
Sure. Grant money is the sole motivator of all scientific endeavor. All that cash must be the reason why all scientists are driving around in their shiny Ferraris, two bitches alternatingly sucking their cocks all the time, while snorting coke from the dashboard. Or something like that. Fascinating to see how the "poisoning the well" smear campaign by the usual conservative think tanks permeates the debate these days.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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.
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.
(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."
'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?
If that news is good for anybody, I guess it would be dinosaurs. 2.5 million years ago is 12 times as long as anatomically modern humans have existed.
It has been warming.
I don't remember the exact details, but I thought it was like this:
If you cherry-pick the two years 1998 and 2008 (1998 being quite warm and 2008 a bit colder than the trend), and fit a line on the 10 temperatures from that particular 10 year period, then you can't say with 95% certainty that there's an upward trend, but only with less certainty IIRC. And they put Phil Jones on the spot "can you say with 95% certainty that it became warmer in that 10 year period?". So he had to say no.
I used the emotionally laden word cherry-pick because if you take another recent period of 10 years, or another period ending at 2008, or another period starting at 1998, then the upward trend is much clearer.
Please look at the graph: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif .
Guess why the years 1998 and 2008 were taken. Get the data yourself (from NOAA or HadCRUT3), and plot it with something that can draw a linear regression line from the past 15 years that you mentioned (1996 to 2011) or just use a ruler and some common sense to draw a line through the points.
Then do the same for 1998 to 2008 (the cherry-picked data), and finally to see the famous "hockey-stick" one from 1898 to 2008.
Don't waste your time arguing why I'm wrong or stupid, just go download that data and draw it for yourself. I dare you.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
That's great. Now we just have to adjust our civilization to work the same as that other advanced civilization that existed 2.5 million years ago, and we're all set.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
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.
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
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
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.
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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.