Siberia's Methane Release Larger Than Previously Thought

An anonymous reader writes "New research suggests that the amount of methane being released from Siberian permafrost is much larger than previously thought. From the article: 'Thawing permafrost gets a lot of attention as a positive feedback that could amplify global warming by releasing carbon dioxide and methane, both of which are greenhouse gases. Because of this, a lot of effort goes into studying Arctic permafrost. An international group of researchers led by Natalia Shakhova at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has been plying the remote waters of the Siberian Shelf for about a decade to find out how much methane was coming up from the thawing permafrost. They didn't expect to find it bubbling.'"

Comments

methane ice underwater

[Gothmolly]

Methane ice under the ocean also does this. Interesting?

Re:methane ice underwater

[hey!]

Sure. That Methane Clathrate is at the bottom of the sea, so it can't possibly do any harm.

Those scientists should stop messing about with things like the bottom of the ocean. If God wanted us to know about stuff on the bottom of the ocean he'd have put that bit on top.

Re:methane ice underwater

[giorgist]

Those two put out what they swallow. The undersea stuff ... not so

Re:methane ice underwater

[dpilot]

I've often heard the "methane is 17 times stronger than CO2 as a greenhouse gase", and that's repeated (without the specific number) in the referenced Wikipedia article. It's equally "well known" that CH4 has a much shorter lifetime than CO2 as a greenouse gas.

That begs the question, what happens to methane to limit its greenhouse lifetime? The carbon is still there, as is the hydrogen, so it must be either precipitated out of the atmosphere or chemically recombined. My bets would be on the latter, and that the methane ends up turming into CO2 and either water or plain old H2, with the reaction influenced by ultraviolet light. So it turns from a very potent greenhouse gas into a merely potent one?

I realize I'm asking a serious question on a funny thread, but this seems to be the most appropriate point.

Re:methane ice underwater

[khallow]

That begs the question, what happens to methane to limit its greenhouse lifetime?

It reacts with oxygen, and perhaps ozone and atmospheric oxides. The resulting CO2 doesn't plug up long wavelength infrared as well as methane does.

So it turns from a very potent greenhouse gas into a merely potent one?

Right.

And "begging the question" is a fallacy of assuming what you want to show.

Re:methane ice underwater

[sackvillian]

That begs the question, what happens to methane to limit its greenhouse lifetime?

It's not pretty. Essentially, the C-H bonds in methane are vulnerable to radical reactions. This allows for a variety of removal processes, many leading to the formation of water vapour and/or CO2 itself.

While that may not sound so bad, don't forget that water vapour is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases when it's found in the atmosphere, which is why, for example, the effective carbon emissions of intercontinental flights are so significant. So the end result is methane, an awful greenhouse gas, lives a relatively short life but ends up as either a worse or slightly less awful different greenhouse gas. In other words, methane stinks!

The only solution is workers revolution

[For a Free Internet]

We need a world Soviet planned economy. Capitalism will kill us all!

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Free Pussy Riot!

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Please quit giving socially minded individuals a bad name with your trolling. I have offered links and the names of organizations to you in the past that provide great materials to people spreading the idea that capitalism isn't the answer only to be countered with some outdated stereotypes.

Why am I even wasting my time... :/

If you are actually interested in helping to change America then start here: http://www.answercoalition.org/

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

You had me at Free Pussy.

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[blue trane]

The universe is the ultimate free lunch.

Quantum mechanics showed that certain events, such as atomic transitions and nuclear decays, happen spontaneously. Accidents happen (including accidental violations of the first law). Everything that occurs in the Universe is not pre-determined by natural law. In fact, our so-called laws just apply to ensembles of systems, only guaranteeing the statistical behaviour of the ensemble while leaving the behaviour of an individual system to the vagaries of chance.

So, free lunches are statistically likely.

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[Charliemopps]

God damn it. Capitalism is not a style of managing an economy. Capitalism is how money works when left alone. Any government regulation that does anything other than inform the public is NOT capitalism. The only pro-capitalistic regulation would be something like weights and measures, it informs by governing a system of common measurement preventing deception.

As such there is no truly capitalistic society in the world. If anything the economics of rural Africa are more capitalistic than any western society. The majority of the problems we have in the west with regard to our economies are our poorly thought out, half implemented attempts at socialism. If we'd just go all in, it would probably not be so bad. But as things are, we institute weak regulation which interested parties with large capital then manipulate to their advantage usually to the detriment of those the regulation was intended to help. Look to our financial markets to see some real regulatory abuse.

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[femtobyte]

By "money is left to its own," one of course means "the rich are left to their own" (being the ones with the most money, which controls how money is used to produce more money for the rich, etc.). "Capitalism" left to its own is an inevitable slide into oligarchy, with an oppressive tiny elite at the top. The "invisible hand of the free market" is not a beneficent God working for the good of all if only entrusted with our full hearts; it is the manipulating iron fist of whoever has the most money, squeezing the labor and life out of those with less.

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[Artifakt]

Adam Smith himself defined his perfect "Free Market" as including everyone knowing how much the productive process cost, and broke this down into such costs as labor, raw materials, and financial charges in his examples. Even by a very strict pro-capitalist model, that sounds like the government would be legitimately supporting capitalism by providing a lot more information than just weights and measures. Consumer safety information for one example, or average salaries for a given area, or an acurately derived inflationary index for others. (Of course, modern capital theory claims there would be no inflation in a pure capitalism, but even so, the government would need to accurately index inflation in a mixed economy trying to move towards that pure state - not reporting it would be retarding the motion). I'd point out too, that all of these could also fit your clause about preventing deception to a greater or lesser extent. But, that still means a medium-large role for governments, although yes, it's theoretically much less in some areas than what we see currently.
          Such things as a business holding trade secrets while continuing to seek the protection of patents or copyrights are not really part of theoretical Capitalism, by Smith's original work. Most modern business and all publicly traded corporations would not want anything like this level of "money being left alone" This is another reason why we aren't moving towards what you call "truely capitalisitic society" - the people crying out the loudest for more capitalism actually oppose many of the most basic elements of it, and fear the very possibility.

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[starworks5]

Did you even bother to read the definition of capitalism:

a way of organizing an economy so that the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) are owned by individual people and companies rather than by the government

You don't even address the main point, that capitalism inherently produces market failures, for instance what we call externalities. If you think that the failures of socialism is bad, nearly every ecological indicator that we see seems to indicate failure, most of which are borne from a market failure of capitalism.

Furthermore what people refer to as "the third way" or otherwise known as a hybrid of socialism / capitalism IS actually the most stable, as it provides checks and balances to prevent excessive corruption from either the public or private sectors, they are two halves of the same coin the introverted and extroverted locus of economic growth.

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[femtobyte]

I want to be rich. Is it so horrible to want to have enough money to fund my dreams?

If your dream is to mercilessly grind millions into poverty, then yes, you are horrible for wanting to fund them. I actually have no problems with people who build up money to satisfy "dreams" of the "travel around the world by sailboat" or "establish a youth symphony orchestra for inner city kids" type. However, this represents a minuscule proportion of the apparent "dreams" of the ultra-rich, which generally seem to revolve around becoming ever richer and richer with no regard for human life and suffering.

I'm willing to accept being poor for a while in order to have a chance to get what I want.

How generous of you. However, a shitload of people aren't given a chance to accept being poor, but are thrust into it from birth, with infinitesimal chances of ever reaching beyond grinding poverty. I wouldn't object to a world where a person living a decent, comfortable life could choose to lower their standard of living on a gamble for greater gains. But, that's not the case today --- the rich start with much and get more, stripped from the poor who start with little and end with less.

The nice thing about pure capitalism is that the people who gain power are the ones who work for it

Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Oh, my sides! I'm sure the Walton (Wal*Mart) heirs who were *born* into immense fortunes have personally put in so much more work than the approximately *half of all US families* who together own the same amount of wealth. Not to say that the ultra-rich don't sometimes have to put in some work; but it's not the work that distinguishes them from people who put in immense lifetimes of work and never come anywhere near being rich.

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[Dasher42]

The parent is right. The people who work their way to the top are the rare exceptions, and nobody born into wealth is going to understand what that took. Inter-generational wealth doesn't mean inter-generational lessons, and it rapidly turns into entitlement to use wealth as social clout to secure more wealth.

Most of all - it's used to trample the ability of others to negotiate what they earn from their work. Come on, if you're not a CEO or major shareholder - how likely is it that capitalism is working to create profits? Most people are being reduced to a minimum or less in this system, and Adam Smith didn't write with ultra-wealthy and ultra-poor people in mind. That would just be feudalism by any other name. Students of history know how dark that gets.

Re: The only solution is workers revolution

[xelah]

If the highly rich we're left to their own they'd starve to death, whilst trying to manage each other and stab each other in the back. Their money would have little value if they couldn't use it to obtain huge quantities of other people's output, at vast multiples of those people's hours of work compared to what's required of their own. Money and economic exchange is a fundamentally social bargain, not private property. It's not illegitimate to democratically adjust it (it's just much more often a bad idea than people might like).

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[gtall]

Pure capitalism generates monopolies. Monopolies are bad, just look at the railroads in past years and the oil companies in the early part of the 20th century...or MS today. Pure capitalism generates banks that are too big to allow to fail lest they take the entire economy with them, car companies that are too big fail lest they take unemployment to ridiculously high levels, insurance companies (AIG) that couldn't be allowed to fail without taking down the credit markets, etc. Pure capitalism generates unacceptable levels of pollution, i.e., smog in L.A. before the EPA cracked the whip, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, etc. Pure capitalism will put fake medicine on your pharmacy shelf without a whimper of remorse. Yes, it will get taken down again after enough people die, but not until.

Pure capitalism gave us the cigarette industry and their special form of scientific reasoning about how cigarettes don't cause cancer. It helps to generate tainted food (see China and the melamine in baby formula, or the fresh produce in the U.S. which kills a few yearly before U.S. health agencies get on the case and figure out how to stop it).

Pure capitalism means no social security for grandma, no medicare for grandma, no disability for workers broken in serving capital producing industries. It means shyster lawyers with no training, shyster doctors with no degree, oil companies drilling in your back yard and fouling your water supply with no recourse by you. It means coal companies dumping their waste anywhere they see fit, even upstream of your property, it means cars with no emission controls so you get to breathe their raw exhaust (mmmm, good).

And I'm a conservative Republican although I cannot stand the ignoramuses currently running the Republican party.

Siberian traps all over again?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There must be something in Siberia that makes people and nature go genocidal. First the Permian extinctions, then the gulags, now the methane. Go figure!

Re:Hmpffff

[ColdWetDog]

Fossil Fuel summer.
Nuclear Winter.
The world goes round in circles,
Yin / Yang.

Burma Shave.

Re:Hmpffff

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, the earth has never been hotter than now. It's got to be a runaway process, no way back. O wait ... LOL @ slashdot.

Re:Hmpffff

[c0lo]

Studying doesn't reduce it. Looks like a runaway process to me. Mars-like surface to come at the end - thanx a lot. Probably not the only idiotic failure in the universe.

However, studies show an interesting fact: it is not (yet) a runaway process. TFA (at the end):

Finally, this is not the first time this region has experienced warmer temperatures. During some of the warm periods between past ice ages, it has been as warm as, or warmer than, it is today. No sudden spike in atmospheric methane shows up in climate records from those times, however. That tells us that, fortunately, it takes a pretty strong kick to awaken a methane giant.

(mind you, I'm not saying that we are out of Siberian marshes yet: the previous ace ages didn't have an industrious population of hominides willing and capable to burn fossile fuel at a massive scale. We are still in the race for that "idiotic failure" prize that you mention).

Cowtan & Way 2013 trend is inside HadCRUT4 err

[khayman80]

Cowtan and Way 2013 compensated for missing HadCRUT4 surface temperature measurements in places like the Arctic and Africa by using the spatial pattern of satellite data to produce a hybrid satellite/surface dataset. Jane and Lonny ponder the differences between Cowtan and Way's hybrid dataset and HadCRUT4:

I keep asking: what's wrong with my basic premise: that if your measurements are shown to be off by 100%, there's something wrong with your science? That was my point. [Jane Q. Public]

... They are saying that it is not the 0.05 degrees C per decade that the AR5 report gives for the last 15 years, but that it is, instead, 0.12 degrees C. Which is actually a difference of not 100% but 140%, for the most recent 15 years. [Jane Q. Public]

@ScienceChannel @jimmygle PLEASE tell the Anthropogenic Global Warmists! Yet another report surfaced saying their "science" was off by 140% [Lonny Eachus]

Jane and Lonny's basic premise wrongly ignores the large error bars on these noisy, short-term trends. The SkS trend calculator can calculate the trends and error bars from 1997 through (including) 2012 for both HadCrut4 and Cowtan and Way's hybrid dataset:

1997-2013 HadCRUT4 Trend: 0.049 0.126 C/decade
1997-2013 HadCRUT4 hybrid Trend: 0.119 0.150 C/decade

The hybrid dataset's central estimate is inside the error bars of the original HadCRUT4 estimate.

... they haven't been right yet... They admit that they have no explanation why their models, which projected continued if not increased warming, do not explain why it has dropped by more than half (0.12 to 0.05 deg. C / decade) over the last 15 years. Or, for that matter, why their margin of error (-0.05 to +0.15 deg. C) for the last decade and a half is 4 times the size of their actual estimated warming. Nope... it's pretty damned clear. Something is wrong with their science. [Jane Q. Public]

I calculated error bars on UAH trends. The black line on the second page shows the UAH trend ending in 2012, for different starting years. The error bars are shown in red; they're 95% confidence uncertainty bounds. Note that error bars on longer trends are smaller than the large error bars on shorter trends.

Anyone can reproduce my results by downloading the free "R" programming language used by professional statisticians. Then save this code as "significance.r":

# run using R CMD BATCH significance.r
# outputs to Rplots.pdf and significance.r.Rout
# load custom functions

# for generalised least squares
library(nlme)

# options
xunits="year"
textsize=1.4
titlesize=1.8
colfit="red"
pch1=20#points

# read basin data
indata = read.table("greenland2013/GIS_climate.nasa.txt",header=T)
title="Greenland mass"
yunits="gigatons"
tlims=c(-350,-190)
alims=c(-60,0)
#indata = indata[which(indata$x>2002.0),]

# remove mean
indata$y = indata$y - mean(indata$y)

n = length(indata$x)
n

midpoint=(indata$x[n]-indata$x[1])/2.0+indata$x[1]

# fit model
fit=gls(y~x,data=indata,corr=corARMA(p=1,q=1))
#fit=gls(y~x+sin(2*pi*x)+cos(2*pi*x),data=indata,corr=corARMA(p=1,q=1))
#fit=gls

Onion style satire?

[nitehawk214]

Here is a list of articles on this site:

What Ancient Secrets Lie Within the Flower of Life?
Church Group Kicked Out Of Public Park For Handing Out Thanksgiving Dinners To Homeless
SSDI Death Index: Sandy Hook ‘Shooter’ Adam Lanza Died One Day Before School Massacre?
15 Citizens Petition to Secede from the United States
Will U.S. Troops Fire On American Citizens?
Ceceliafox: Before his Death, Father of ADHD Admitted it Was a Fictitious Disease
Debbie: Mexican Government Releases Proof of E.T.’s and Ancient Space Travel

Re:Hmpffff

[Dasher42]

It is teetering close to a run-away process, and most of the world still has its foot all the way down on the gas.

I am in despair of the industrialized world being any different from the many civilizations that destroyed their land base and then imploded - the Nile, Babylon, Greece, Easter Island, the Maya, the list goes on. The destructive acidification of the soils where tobacco was grown was a major factor in the American Civil War - with that and the Dust Bowl and ongoing topsoil loss, the USA is well on its way to doing the same.

We managed to fix the soil with applications of lime and crushed shells, but we're going to have to learn deeply about the ecology of soil, not just its chemistry, if we're ever to make this. Following this broken system all the way down threatens the planet with a mass extinction like it's never seen.

It's possible to feed humanity and keep the ecosystem thriving in a win-win scenario. That's what the Pre-Columbian Amazon jungle was: agriculture totally unlike that which turned the Middle East into a desert. That's our best hope of getting carbon back into the ground where it belongs in a way that naturally increases fertility. http://www.underwoodgardens.com/soil-building/terra-preta-magic-soil-of-the-lost-amazon/