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Numerous Methane Leaks Found On Atlantic Sea Floor
sciencehabit writes Researchers have discovered 570 plumes of methane percolating up from the sea floor off the eastern coast of the United States, a surprisingly high number of seeps in a relatively quiescent part of the ocean. The seeps suggest that methane's contribution to climate change has been underestimated in some models. And because most of the seeps lie at depths where small changes in temperature could be releasing the methane, it is possible that climate change itself could be playing a role in turning some of them on.
That methane dissolves into the water long before it reaches the surface and re-emerges, I would be surprised if even a small percentage of it make it to the atmosphere because bacteria would consume the dissolved methane before it can reach the surface. Even in the atmosphere where there is very little life the methane only lasts a couple decades, but in the ocean where it's teaming with life I doubt very little of it makes it to the surface.
A lot of people discuss this notion, and it's only rarely contextualized in terms of what's actually happening.
Methane is big. A huge greenhouse gas. It knocks the socks of carbon in all ways except that there's not that much of it(yet). It also doesn't "clean up" nearly as nicely after a couple of centuries of forest expansion/ocean calcification.
And a lot of evidence suggests warmer temperatures are going to release more big-time. It's scary because: we can't just stop producing it in bulk like CO2 the heat will release a lot of it naturally(and keep warming things). It's scary because: we have no (economically plausible) geo-engineering solutions like we might have to CO2. It's scary because geologic history suggests the runaways in the past last on the order of thousands of years.
We really really really don't want this.
Nature usually creates negative feedback loops that contribute to equilibrium. The textbook one is if there is population growth in a prey species, the population of predators will increase to check that growth.
In this case we have a positive feedback loop. Increases in temperature will cause more methane hydrate to melt, which causes an increase in temperature.
This is a very not good situation that does not have easy solutions.
Earth farts......
No this is naturally occurring seeps. We have known about them in the past but recent discoveries have shown that more exist than was thought and with methane being 30x more potent of a green house gas than CO2 it throws the models and calculations off.
There is however the hypothesis that we create the CO2 that causes the base warming and the because we are warming the oceans it may be causing more methane to be released.
However, this is not known for sure and the extent at which methane is being released from natural sources is still in question.
fish farts are making the earth hotter
very possibly.
most of the seeps lie at depths where small changes in temperature could be releasing the methane
in other words, the warming that is already occurring has (surprise surprise) a positive feedback loop. one of many. whether or not the initiator was man-made in origin (hint: it was and is).
And let's break from the summary and go to the article for an even more damning quote(emphasis mine):
Jens Greinert, who heads the deep-sea monitoring unit at GEOMAR, downplays the effect of the new seeps on the atmosphere or ocean chemistry because the magnitude of the releases is dwarfed by human-associated inputs, such as livestock, or even other marine sites. “These little bits of bubbling here or there will not make a memorable impact,” Greinert says. He is more interested in what will happen as the world warms. “It becomes interesting only if you have a catastrophic release,” he says.
From TFA, they discovered these plumes and this is the first time they have mapped this much area.
That means they have a starting point, one datum for how much methane is coming from these areas. That's nice. Now keep measuring on an annual basis.
If you think this means "global warming", it's not even as bad as measuring the temperature in the morning and mid-day to prove your point. It's as bad as measuring the temperature ad mid-day and extrapolating through that one point.
Regardless if it is all naturally occurring seepage or if man contributed to exacerbating seepage, we must still be taxed to pay not just carbon credits but methane credits.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
interesting.... however the problem lies in the fact thats it is higher than they thought, meaning it COULD still be worse than they thought, meaning AGW MAY NOT be the doom and gloom some make it out to be.
this little bit of information is not a gotcha moment, but it leads credence to the idea that we still have no idea
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Methane offgassing from submarine frozen methane (clathrates) has been well known for a long time. The freezing point of methane is a function of both pressure and temperature. As pressure is increased, the freezing point also increases. As sea level rises, pressure at the seabed increases and offgassing decreases. So if seabed methane is a contributor to global warming, then it will cause sea level rise, thus limiting itself. Conversely, if the climate cools, then icecaps expand and sea level drops, causing increased methane offgassing. This a self-limiting scenario, not a positive feedback loop.
Setting: two people with their ankles handcuffed together
Says the left man: "We just don't know exactly how fast that car is going, your radar gun reading 67.432 MpH is based on sketchy theories I don't trust(and how did you get all those sigfigs?), and I'm guessing it's less than that, and think about how much effort it would take to move out of the way. Your 'get hit and die' theory is faulty, so we should clearly not move."
Says the right man: "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah"
That's one possible interpretation. On the other hand this could be an early sign that the current modest levels of man made global warming are triggering a clathrate gun similar to that which may have caused the Permian-Triassic extinction event. It's fairly common for complex natural systems to have "tipping points" where a slow series of gradual changes suddenly goes parabolic before settling into a new stable dynamic.
thats actually not what i was saying at all. where did i say do nothing? what I am saying is that the "models" are wrong, because they dont have all the variables in place, as such we can take them with a grain of salt AND AT THE SAME TIME... work on ways to reduce our contribution to the "problem"
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
And because most of us in here are software types, we will carefully extract the car from the wreckage, put new wheels on it, push it back up the hill, close all the windows, and nudge it downhill again so that we can see if it does the same thing again.
No, you just imagine that. The evidence is just rather overwhelming that man's contribution to CO2 levels massively disproportionate, and overwhelming natural sinks.
Hasn't this been a known issue since the investigation regarding all of the airplane disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle? The methane threw off their altimeters by making it look like they were climbing at a high rate, causing them to dive right into the ocean. Also, boats having been in the wrong places at the wrong time have had methane "bubbles" from the sea floor cause the water underneath them to get extremely "thin", which causes the boats to sink.
Less Discovery Channel for you, buster.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The fact that the amount of seepage is higher than previously thought does not mean it is actually growing.
Stop arguing with strawmen. I really hope you got upvoted by shills, because the alternative is that some people have actually bought into the propaganda, which sickens me to consider.
The science that is settled is:
a) The average global temperature is rising
b) Increased CO2 levels cause increased temperatures
c) Humans are releasing far more CO2 than can naturally be absorbed
Those are the settled science - or as most people call them, facts. You will see GW defenders trot out the "settled science" line because people still try to deny those fundamental facts.
Those three facts lead to a settled conclusion:
d) Human activity is causing increases in global temperature.
Again, if you're arguing that, you are either grievously misinformed, or do not understand how logic works, or have decided that you want to argue for a point you know to be wrong.
That humans are contributing is settled science. The extent to which we are contributing is mostly-settled - we know we are the largest factor, but we don't have a complete and clear picture as to how secondary effects (ie. global-warming-caused global warming) or natural effects (solar variance) affect things.
The precise models of "given conditions A, B, C and D, what temperatures can we expect in the next X years at places Y and Z?" are not settled. Further, the data we give those models is not entirely precise, because getting absolute perfect knowledge of the entire planet is basically impossible.
But this does not invalidate the entire argument. You can say "physicists don't know how gravity works for supermassive singularities at nuclear scales", and say that physics is not "settled science". You would be correct. However, if you try to use that to argue that scientists don't know why the Earth orbits the Sun, you're committing serious errors of logic.
And if you then try to argue that you can build a giant but rickety skyscraper over the city, because it can't fall over because gravity isn't a settled science, well, you're just using broken logic to try to make a quick profit despite the fact that you will inevitably kill people when it falls over because hey, science may not be able to figure out the exact second it's going to collapse but we know it's not gonna stay up forever. I hope you managed to understand that metaphor there.
" what I am saying is that the "models" are wrong, "
No, you are wrong.
The models are excellent models. That have even 'shown' thing we didn't know about, but when we went and looked there they where.
That means they are excellent models.
"because they don't have all the variables in place,"
That doesn't make them wrong.
Are they 100%? No
Are they wrong? No.
You should problem make and effort to understand 2 things:
Climate models
Error Bars.
If someone falls off a building and and I say "My model predicts when will hit the ground and die in 45 seconds. And he hits the grounds in 44 seconds, that doesn't mean he won't hit the ground and die." It cold be the resolution of my tools wasn't fine enough, it could be a strong updraft I didn't know aboput. It could mean he was wearing parachute pants and the extra drag slowed him.,
But that does not make my model wrong, broken, invalid or useless.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
According to your logic my toxicity model for iron in well water in Nowhereistan is unaffected by the fact that arsenic levels was elevated by 15000 times above normal in the data samples, because it was at that level all along.
You did oversimplify. There's really no sense in talking about the "extent to which we are contributing" because of various positive feedback loops. I suppose that if you just say "we are a major contributor to global warming" you would on safe ground, but anything finer than that an things get really complicated. Even this article talked about how a warmer ocean causes increased release of methane....which causes a warmer ocean...which... (Well, the article didn't expressly mention that this was a loop. And only one of many.) Fortunately there are also some negative feedback loops...but they don't appear to be as strong. Or perhaps they're just slower. If deformation of the earth's crust (by melting the glaciers that acted as weights holding it down) sets off a chain of volcanos, then we may end up dealing with a global cooling problem.
FWIW, the drying out of western North America has caused deformation of the earth's crust in that area, as the weight of the water has been removed. It's only about (IIRC) 6cm/year, but volcanos have been active in the US west coast that had long been dormant. Probably a coincidence, but do look up the "Deccan Tapps". And remember that we can't yet predict volcanos or earthquakes.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
the hiatus? that scientists now think is being caused by heat being sent to the deep oceans? where we're now seeing significantly increased methane seeps?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
a) What hiatus? The hiatus only appears when you use incomplete data. citation
b) Uh, what? I don't even know what you're talking about there.
c) Plant (and algae) growth is a negative feedback loop on CO2, but it doesn't work on the same timescales. We're dumping centuries worth of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. And we're combining that with deforestation. By the time plants have grown to stabilize the temperature, we'll be stabilized several degrees over our current temperature, and that's assuming any positive feedback loops don't override it (look at the "clathrate gun hypothesis" for an example of what could happen).
The average depth of the ocean is ~4000 meters. Sea level has gone up, what, a few inches? Fuck. For argument sake call it 2 whole meters. According to Wolfram, The water column pressure for 4000m is 392.266 bars. the water column pressure for 4002m is 392.462. Are you saying that two-tenths of a bar is going to make an appreciable difference in the freezing point of methane? Same goes for temperature. The mass of the oceans is ~1.33 x 10^21 kg. The mass of the earth's atmosphere is 5.14 x 10^18. Meaning that even a 2C increase in atmospheric temperature that ALL went into the ocean, the ocean will warm up a whole .002 degrees C. If two-thousandths of a degree. This is just ridiculous to think that either of these things make a lick of difference to how much methane the bottom of the ocean expels.
Clearly a troll, but for the benefit of anyone who may miss that point, I will simply state that there is no known mechanism for farts causing rain, whereas the greenhouse effect is a thoroughly understood and experimentally verified mechanism for CO2 causing warming.
This is unrelated to arctic methane release, so it is still a question.
interesting.... however the problem lies in the fact thats it is higher than they thought, meaning it COULD still be worse than they thought, meaning AGW MAY NOT be the doom and gloom some make it out to be. this little bit of information is not a gotcha moment, but it leads credence to the idea that we still have no idea
Scientists discover something new, which suggests they were wrong before, which means they could be completely wrong about everything. Just like when scientists discovered a new species of butterfly, proving we still have no idea if life exists on Earth.
Only for the subject of global warming can scientists discover a potentially new way in which climate change could accelerate over time due to man induced warming of the deep oceans, and that is used as evidence that maybe its not happening at all.
If the seeps are not growing in size or quantity, the atmospheric methane due to the seeps should remain constant, and the models should be unaffected.
If the models underestimate the amount of methane, and the models have hard-coded adjustments to make the hindcasts agree with the temperature record, then the models underestimate the warming due to methane and over-estimate warming due to CO2; the models are wrong. There really isn't any other logical way to spin this.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Petroleum and coal have only been forming for some 100's of millions of years, basically since plants colonized the land and pseudo-forests started to grow. (Some petroleum may have been formed earlier by algae). For the first period of perhaps 60 million odd years there were no fungi to break down the plant matter and much of current fossil fuels were created, sequestering lots of carbon which we're now releasing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Pope's are
Grammar is not your forte. Neither is rational thought.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
All models are wrong. There is no such thing as a perfect model outside of trivial classroom models e.g. spherical cow. Modeling fluid dynamics for aerodynamic lift, structural integrity models for bridges and buildings, etc . all have errors. They don't account for all variables and it is impossible to do so.
Science isn't built on models. Models are built on science. As with any other branch of science models are used to help get a better understanding of the phenomena being studied. Models are TOOLS that are built out of the results of science.
As to GCM's in particular, there is plenty of information out there describing the models, their error bounds, what they account for, what they don't, so on and so forth. For a layman's summary the IPCC does a fairly decent job describing the models, what they're used for, and accuracy.
~X~