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Rapid Rise In Methane Emissions In 10 Years Surprises Scientists (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane have surged in the past decade, threatening to thwart global attempts to combat climate change. Scientists have been surprised by the surge, which began just over 10 years ago in 2007 and then was boosted even further in 2014 and 2015. Concentrations of methane in the atmosphere over those two years alone rose by more than 20 parts per billion, bringing the total to 1,830ppb. This is a cause for alarm among global warming scientists because emissions of the gas warm the planet by more than 20 times as much as similar volumes of carbon dioxide. In the meantime, emissions of carbon dioxide -- the main component of manmade greenhouse gases in the atmosphere -- have been leveling off. The new research, published in the peer-review journal Environmental Research Letters, suggests that the world's attempts to control greenhouse gases have failed to take account of the startling rises in methane. The authors of the 2016 Global Methane Budget report found that in the early years of this century, concentrations of methane rose by only about 0.5ppb each year, compared with 10ppb in 2014 and 2015. The scientists speculate that agriculture may be the main source of the additional methane that has been recorded. However, they cannot be sure of all the sources, owing to a lack of monitoring. At least a third of methane comes from the exploitation of fossil fuels, including fracking and oil drilling and some coal mining, where methane is viewed as a waste gas and is frequently allowed to escape or, in some cases, flared off, which is less harmful. Unlike carbon dioxide emissions, however, which have been tracked in various ways since the 1950s, emissions of methane are poorly understood and could represent a threat that scientists have still not accounted for.
Between fracking, livestock & warming tundra, I expect methane emissions to keep rising sharply and that will handily offset any thing we can do in the short term to limit CO2 emissions.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
"Rapid Rise In Methane Emissions In 10 Years Surpasses Scientists"
When you wake up and misread a title like this, you know you need a bit more sleep.
Thought for a minute there we were reporting on quite a flatulent demographic...
Stop farting
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Do Your Mind-Uploading Now Because The Arctic Is Bubbling Like Ginger-ale"
Who has tried it?
For Gas-X !
" Now you can eat burritos without the embarassment of 'those noises' and 'that smell'...
But Wait! There's More! *
You can fight global warmng! "
* key phrase used by Billy Mays, telemarketer and infomercial star
Thanks Obama!
Since our efforts in combating climate change are futile at best, we may as well continue on as we've always done until our time comes.
They really need to do something about all this Fake News!
I am sure we can find a correlation between number of vegetarians and Methane gasses.
And of course, everybody knows that the vegatarian cow is way more dangerous to the environment than a sweet little pig.
We have already unlocked runaway processes.
How hot can in be in summer time there?
You're a breath of fresh moron.'
Nuclear power. Nuclear power? Nuclear power!
We can keep burning coal and natural gas, reduce our standard of living, or build more nuclear power plants. Those are our choices as of right now. We can wait for wind, solar, and battery technology to get cheaper but that does nothing for the carbon we'd be producing while we wait.
Reducing energy use, by personal choice or by imposing it on others with taxation, is a reduction of our standard of living. That might seem acceptable by many given the potential benefits for society in the future but you are going to get push back from people that are disbelievers in global warming and those that already take cold showers, ride the bus to work, eat little meat, and so forth because of poverty. Imposing expensive energy sources on people with regulation, like wind and solar, is just as detrimental to the poor as a direct tax on energy. Subsidizing these higher cost energy sources with taxation only means reducing the wealth available to society, causing reductions in wages to those that have jobs, and reducing the chances of getting a job for those that can't find work now. Taxing the fossil fuel industry means nothing to them, they just pass that cost onto the poor people that have to buy their products to heat their homes, cook their food, and travel.
If we are to assume that burning methane is bad because of leakage to the environment and the CO2 contribution it has when burned then we'd want to find an alternative that both reduces these emissions and is just as inexpensive. If it costs more then we are again imposing poverty on people. If it does not reduce these global warming gasses then we're just making things worse. Nuclear power is both inexpensive and has a carbon footprint even lower than wind and solar.
So, if we assume global warming is bad and is caused by people burning methane and other fossil fuels, then we need to turn to nuclear power or make a lot of people very angry over their reduced standard of living. Or rather those that survive will be angry, the people that die of hunger, exposure, or being unable to purchase proper medical care will still be dead. Waiting for solar and wind energy to get cheaper is foolish. We've been giving all kinds of money to the wind and solar industry for decades, through taxation and subsidies, in the hope it would be cheaper than coal someday. How much longer do we have to do this before it meets the definition of insanity?
I think we blew past the line of insanity with ludicrous speed a decade or three ago, so fast that few people even saw it go by. We can argue about when that line was crossed exactly or we can stop the insanity and change course.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I was under the impression that this was highly anticipated, and they even have a short note about it in the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions
But methane has an incredibly short life in the atmosphere
http://chartsbin.com/view/2407
This concludes the interruption you may now go back to your regularly scheduled doom.
20X acceleration in methane concentration over 16 years, I doubt we have changed our methane emissions that much over that time? Didn't we have bunch of articles some time ago about melting permafrost, bubbling tundra and the positive feedback loop this creates? Kind of sounds more probable source than cows or whatnot, we have not started to have that many more cows over such a short period after all.
Has anyone noticed the strong correlation between green house gasses and the Social Justice Liberals. In the 1950's we had a cool climate and everyone was racist. Now in 2016 we have catastrophic climatic change and everyone is always worried about micro aggressions.
We have had 8+ years of increased climate change under President Obama. However since we have elected that racist Donald Trump. I have suddenly noticed that we have an unprecedented cold spell. My theory is that racism stabilizes the climate, whereas constantly worrying about social injustice really fucks up the environment. I know it may sound crazy, but it has as much scientific validity as the latest scientific study proving that coffee may increase your risk of toe fungus as reported by the 9 o' clock news.
If we want to save the white polar bears living in the arctic we need to go back to slavery. If we want to have a nice climate where we can finally settle the South Pole and swim in lake Vostok, we need to elect one of those whinney liberals to president.
To me this is the only rational argument for liberalism. I really don't like the cold.
Most likely the cause is fracking. Mining companies have been under-reporting and trying to cover up the levels of methane released by fracking for the past decade. We know this from several scientists in the United States that have done ground water testing and shown entire water supplies which can be lit by a match.
I vaguely remember something about a huge spill of methane in California US. Said to be 100.000 tons of methane gas, though I can't help but wonder if maybe the real number could be even higher.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35659947 ("California methane leak 'largest in US history'")
No, not really. The main thing runaway is the process by which climate change "scientists" are spinning more bullsh*t.
Since the carbon dioxide bit is turning out to be wrong (due to some involved mechanism they did not know of!) the climate change charlatans need to change the story to something else.
As for all the previous times they've been wrong, forget about that, that's in the past. It doesn't matter now. This is the current emergency!
There is so much research nowadays that it becomes a problem to track all of them now and to look at the big picture. It has been known for years that methane emitted from farming has a huge impact on the greenhouse effect. There has been some research on this field meant to reduce it: https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/11/20/012220/feeding-seaweed-to-cows-eliminates-methane-emissions
This is just one example, which I am aware of. The other, obvious solution would be to stop having a diet which relies so much in meat.
Anyone who considers Methane a waste gas, is more than welcome to pay my heating bill
The damn rate of increase leveled off. That means we have a constant linear increase instead of over linear. It is still increasing. This is what , the third or fourth time I see this error here ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
From the abstract: "the thermal maximum is characterized by warming up by 3-9degreesC in winter and by 2-6degreesC in summer". So 6 degrees in prehistoric times is the relevant temperature (plus 9 degrees in winter is much less than plus 6 degrees in summer) which we surpass quickly nowadays: http://siberiantimes.com/ecolo...
Sorry that was me bad curry the other night I guess
Every kilowatt generated by wind stops coal from producing almost twice that in thermal power. So yes, it does have an impact on reducing carbon as soon as it is implemented.
Why? Technology has already adapted and it became viable to have LED lighting hit the market. This is an assumption that precludes adaptation by the market to fill a market niche.
This is not a political issue here, it's a question about if you have an open or closed mindset. Innovation happens all the time. Living standards will just change, and the idea of what a higher living standard is will change.
Nuclear is extremely carbon intensive in the mining phase to extract the ore using traditional mining methods, if you are not pumping mega litres of sulfuric acid to do in-situ extraction (and destroying water tables in the process). 500tons of ore for 1 kilo of uranium, ~150 tons of uranium for the core of one reactor, 1/3 refuel every 18 months or so IIRC. It's roughly one third of the energy the reactor will produce over its lifetime.
Nuclear is extremely carbon intensive in the enrichment process as CFC114 is much more potent than methane as a greenhouse gas. IIRC, thousands of times more potent. You can't *not* enrich the fuel either.
Nuclear is extremely carbon intensive in the decommissioning and demolition phase, an energetic cost yet to be realized by the industry, because traditional methods of demolition cannot be used.
On the other hand the way wind scales is probably the biggest thing it has in it's favour, because existing sites can be retrofitted with upgraded technology, which lowers the energetic cost of maintain wind capacity.
Why not in parity with the Price-Anderson act, which has been extended repeatedly since the dawn of time for the nuclear industry which needs government assistance to cover its insurance liabilities. Or, why don't we just repeal the act and see how long the nuclear industry can remain?
One of Roosevelt's core 'New Deal' Act the PUCHA was repealed to benefit the nuclear industry with little fanfare from the press. Only for it to be subverted by the coal and oil industry who use proposals to build nuclear plants so they can get tax breaks for not building them. This is corporate welfare on a scale that makes social welfare looks like a kids pocket money. PUCHA was put in place to prevent a re-occurrence of the US depression from utilities doing *exactly* what they are doing now to raid the taxpayers wallets.
You can read it here in the 2005 US energy policy act SEC 600-635, and at the end of the document for the repeal of PUCHA.
me thinks you assume too much.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
yeah - seeya over there. bye bye now.
It's spelled "arctic", fool.
How can that be when we are burning more fossil fuels than ever?
A lot of the time it isn't measured and they don't even know, which is a lot more simple than a coverup. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to not giving a fuck.
I'm not going to worry about it until the numbers have meaning.
The models used to predict and support climate change theories are only as good as the assumptions that go in to them. Here is more proof that the assumptions are based on an incomplete knowledge of the processes at work. So the science behind climate change is flawed and we are being fed half-truths BUT BUT BUT
Climate change is likely happening for reasons we don't fully understand however why does fear of it have to be the reason we do things? Why does it take fear to motivate us to use resources more efficiently, harvest resources less destructively, and consume more prudently? Why can't we do those things simply because it is the only rational and reasonable way to proceed?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I read a study about this and it found that the increase in methane emissions has been correlated with a substantial increase in the number of Taco Bell restaurants in recent times.
We'll make great pets
Won't be anything anybody can do about it when the numbers have meaning. So just make sure you get a good 'bug out' bag ready and you'll be good.
They seem clueless as to the source.
I wonder if carbon dating would provide any useful clue.
Shhhh! Stop trying to prevent the flow of money to ClimateScience(TM) and CorporateClimateCronies!
20 bpb represents around a 1.1% increase not a .000002% increase. It went from 1810 to 1830 bpb.
Most likely the cause is fracking. Home
Hardly. The rise was manufactured by them in response to their untenable political position. Climate activism has failed.
I perfected my chili recipe 10 years ago.
I thought we discussed this recently. Here's an excerpt from:
http://www.sciencealert.com/ad...
"Adding seaweed to cattle feed could reduce methane production by 70%
That's equivalent to taking India's CO2 emissions off the map.
If we add dried seaweed to 2 percent of sheep and cattle feed, we could cut methane emissions by more than 70 percent, scientists have found.
With livestock responsible for 44 percent of all human-caused methane - a gas that has 36 times the global warming potential of CO2 - this could cut a huge chunk of the 3.1 gigatonnes these animals release into the atmosphere each year in burps and farts..."
...omphaloskepsis often...
A few ppb makes a large difference when the optical pathlength through the atmosphere is so long. You don't need much CH4 to make a big difference in light absorption. In this case it went up 10 ppb in two years, out of 1800, so it's a 0.5% increase. Much more than 0.000002%.
To be clear, methane has been monitored for more than a few years. See here
It is also been indirectly measured via ice cores back hundreds of thousands of years.
In addition the the current surge, what should be alarming is the following:
In the past 100 years, the concentration of atmospheric methane has nearly doubled from 925 ppb in 1916 to >1800 ppb now. In the past 250 years it's nearly tripled. That's very fast and very far outside of statistical variation and is clearly not slowing down.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
(Yes, the "up to 9 degrees warmer" is according to peer reviewed climate science)
Damning with faint praise.
...the rising number of legume eating vegans and their associated digestive emissions. Save the planet. Eat a burger.
I thought scientists knew everything? I thought scientists had explanations for everything, including existence? After all, scientists killed God, and replaced Him with themselves. So, I expect scientists to be able to explain everything.
What gives here?
Nuclear is extremely carbon intensive in the mining phase
I've seen figures for the carbon emissions associated with mining uranium in Nigeria which, from a back-of-the-envelope calculation, exceeded the total carbon emissions for the entire country. There's a lot of bullshit out there on the subject.
It's roughly one third of the energy the reactor will produce over its lifetime.
This smells like some of it. The cost of uranium is 5-10% of the cost of nuclear power, because most of the money goes into building and running the plant. You're telling me that a company will burn diesel fuel to produce uranium that's worth 5-10% of the electricity a nuclear plant can produce, when they could just burn the diesel fuel in a cheap generator (without paying for expensive mining equipment!) and produce 33% of the electricity that the nuclear plant would? Take the option that earns them 5-10% of X when there's an easier option that earns them 33% of X? Pull the other one: it has got bells on.
You can build a fast breeder reactor which will convert the U-238 to Pu-239, which is fissile. The problem there is that plutonium is easy (relatively speaking; you're chemically processing obscenely radioactive material) to chemically separate from the other material in the fuel, so it's attractive for weapon production.
So we can not enrich the fuel; we just think that in the big picture, it's better to do the enrichment. I can't clam which is really the right choice, just that it's a choice we've consciously made.
And when these things are measured back for hundreds of thousand of years via ice cores you learn 2 things, (1) the current temperature is well within the bounds of natural variability and (2) there's little to no reason to believe that CO2 leads temperature, rather you learn precisely the opposite, that temperature goes up first, then CO2 and methane.
If you go back further you also discover that current CO2 concentrations are very low compared to the past.
Trump did it, the dirty fucker!
Look, you can't criticize Bush II for adding $5.8 trillion to the deficit and then give Obama a free ride for adding $7.9 trillion. The hypocrisy of the alt-left has now easily matched the stupidity of the alt-right. The problem is, the alt-left is now far more mainstream than the alt-right ever was.
You're all idiots.
Last night I spent a while looking at comments on slashdot from 2005, and the change pretty much explains why the site is dying. In 2005, posters were complaining about how some people were taking fake news seriously, and worried about how this might become the norm. Here it is 11 years later, and that's exactly what has happened. News has been replaced by gossip, speculation is more valued than proof, opinion is now figuring more prominently than facts even in main-stream media.
Who ever thought that the sort of "reporting" that paid shills like Maureen O'Gara engaged in for SCO would become the new normal?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You _can_ have nuclear power without enrichment. see CANDU. By using heavy water the neutron leakage due to absorption by hydrogen in a CANDU reactory is reduced sufficiently to allow criticality using natural uranium. If certain countries would reprocess their spent fuel instead of stockpiling it (as a future source of weapons grade plutonium), it would not only provide additional fuel, but also solve many of the current storage issues.
In 2014, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that nuclear power has the lowest lifecycle emissions of any electric generating technology, except for wind energy.
* Graph of 2014 IPCC lifecycle emissions findings.
The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory released its analysis of life-cycle emissions in 2012 and concluded the following about nuclear:
"Collectively, life-cycle assessment literature shows that nuclear power is similar to other renewables and much lower than fossil fuel in total life- cycle GHG emissions."
How has the lobbying for nuclear power plants to be built worked out? They're not being built, therefore we might as well give up on trying to make new and more nuclear power plants.
Or, if that is a specious argument, point it right back at your assertion.
Since it was up to 9 degrees warmer in Siberia (and other tundra-rich locations) earlier during our interglacial, ~8000 years ago, why would the methane suddenly be released now when it (apparently) wasn't then?
Because methane is a biproduct of decaying biomass.
You know, that stuff that has been growing in the tundra since the iceage and didn't decay due to freezin' or near-freezing temperatures.
You're welcome. Glad I could help.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
srs
If we don't know and, as in this case, not knowing meant we UNDERESTIMATED 20-fold,then this isn't a rason for caution about doing something, but panic that we need to do much more and quicker.
If you find the brakes on your car aren't working properly, you don't go "I have no idea why, but I'll be cautious about stopping the car by letting up on the accelerator, because this was unexpected".
Yep, thousands of cows are burping methane gas. Time to go vegan.
Air pollution at record levels
Lowered life expectancy
Maxed out national debt
Untamed terrorism
Such is Obama's legacy
Trump is a breath of fresh air
You think the debt is max out now?
Wait until Trump with a Republican congress get's into power--40 Trillion here we come!
And fresh air, not after Trump's boi dismantles the EPA.
Untamed terrorism, like the 9/11 under shrub & multiple investigated embassy attacks under shrub? The crackers in the white sheets are gonna unleash a shit-storm that hasn't been seen since the 19th century, and the judges are going to be calling their families victims too--just like the cracker in the dylann roof trial.
I suppose the Pentagon, announcing that climate change is the biggest foreseeable threat, is in on this too? They want some grant money?
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
Sure, why not? There's an endless supply of taxpayer dollars, and government money is the best kind of money. Although this Pentagon thing you mention is a bit worrisome. Aren't they supposed to be concerned with matters other than (non-war) unspecified bad things happening in unspecified places some time in the unspecified future? Maybe?
full of shit, so it is not unexpected that they would also be releasing significant amounts of methane as well. Maybe we should put them on a high-kelp diet to help reduce harmful emissions?
We can wait for wind, solar, and battery technology to get cheaper but that does nothing for the carbon we'd be producing while we wait.
May have been true in 2011, but this is 2016 and the game has changed already. Coal is no longer cheap and natural gas/wind is MUCH cheaper than nuclear on a levelized cost of energy basis. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Imposing expensive energy sources on people with regulation, like wind and solar, is just as detrimental to the poor as a direct tax on energy.
Nuclear? That's your "inexpensive" alternative? That's crazy expensive compared to wind, natural gas, and hydro. We ought to be replacing coal with natural gas and wind as quickly as possible (which I think we are currently doing).
Nuclear power is both inexpensive and has a carbon footprint even lower than wind and solar.
No, we already saw that claim is false.
Waiting for solar and wind energy to get cheaper is foolish.
Agreed, since we don't have to wait. That's already the situation today.
We've been giving all kinds of money to the wind and solar industry for decades, through taxation and subsidies, in the hope it would be cheaper than coal someday. How much longer do we have to do this before it meets the definition of insanity?
Wrong again. Solar is already cheaper than coal in many markets. Coal isn't the cost standard anymore, it's natural gas. Get with the program.
TLDR: Solar and wind are already cheaper than both coal and nuclear in many markets. Wind is cheaper than that. Nuclear is an expensive option and definitely not the panacea that it's touted as every time these stories appear on /.
Its funny to read this new fake news article. All the people here showing alarm and wanting to find christ through the UNIPCC and the guardian for redemption from their sinful ways.
What is sinful? Well, according to an accused rapist who ran the UNIPCC, you are the problem. You have microbes in your gut that breaks down food into methane, therefore you are the sinner. Satan is within your core but you can repent by being a 24/7 man made global warming activist.
Deny your biology becuase you're all killing the planet by 1 part per billion... *gasp* alarm.
Funny how I have yet to see any of the recent papers exposing the mathematical mistake in applying electrical force feedbacks to mother nature (aka Gaia for those who know nature only by that name).
Why does /. persue fake news when real news is so much jucier.
Cow farts are killing us.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
In 2014, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that nuclear power has the lowest lifecycle emissions of any electric generating technology, except for wind energy.
The IPCC accepted data on this subject from Vattenfall, a company with heavy investments in Nuclear power.
The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory released its analysis of life-cycle emissions in 2012 and concluded the following about nuclear:
Thank you. I appreciate you sending information instead of hyperbole, I'll check that out.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
As far as I can tell the Price Anderson Act has only cost the taxpayers 65 million dollars.
Personally, I don't think nuclear power + humans is a safe deal. Humans show significant risk to start cutting corners and ignoring procedures within a decade or two.
Also, the subsidy for oil should include the entire cost of the Gulf Wars. So well over 2 trillion dollars.
Plus every penny spent on oil puts money in the pockets of people who want to kill us directly or indirectly.
Plus, we don't have to eliminate oil- we only need to destroy about 2% of oil demand to crush prices.
Solar and wind costs are dropping like a stone and will have low decommissioning costs.
LED saves huge amounts of energy and is cheap to implement on a personal basis and the quality of light is as good as old fashioned incandescent. LED pay for themselves in hot climates within 6 months and in cooler climates in under a year with electriciity at 10c/kwh or higher. Still good but longer payoffs if you have cheap hyrdro power.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
To (1), see this and this and this and the obligatory xkcd. Important take home message - it's not just the raw scale of increase, but the rate of increase. It's well outside of a natural timescale which those same historical records indicate is on the order of thousands of years. What's happening now is 8x faster. Also, we know what natural causes drive global temperatures (Milankovitch cycles, ninos, volcanic eruptions, and other things) and can model that. When we take those into account, the observed warming is NOT recovered. Only including the effects of increased CO2 and CH4 levels accounts for the observations.
To (2), see this, and this and a lot of other refs if you google it. Main take home point: in the past, natural global warming (which should take place over thousands of years, see above links), has lead to the further emission of CO2 coming out of the oceans and other places (see here, hence the lag. This was predicted to be the case by Hansen et al before the lag was discovered.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
I'm no Climate Change denier, but I find it alarming that the media and politicians are still using the wrong language to describe Climate Change issues. The Earth is on a natural cycle of a warming trend. The IPCC is prohibited from considering Climate Cycles in their data or reports on Climate Change ... they can only consider manmade causes. Yet if every human "did the right thing for the planet" ... which means all the billions of us commit suicide, tonight, at midnight, to stop manmade contributions, the planet will still warm over the next century, and Greenhouse Gases will still rise, because that is the point in the natural temperature cycles we are currently in.
However, almost every day I hear totally inappropriate language to describe Climate Change issues. For example, Canada has just adopted a Carbon Price solution. The nation represents about a percent and a half of the world's Carbon emissions, so there will be no remedial effect on the planet itself; it's a "Leadership Position" and is a small step in the right direction (as it will reduce Carbon emissions somewhat, by taxing them).
But I heard the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau say, when announcing the accord with the Provinces, that this position will "fix" ... yes, that is his exact word ... Climate Change. Pure, unadulterated bullshit. There is no fix. Period. There is only mitigation, there is only taking 20 years to emit what we are currently emitting in 10, or some such similar result.
I am dismayed to talk to people who think we can stop Global Warming. We can't. That horse left the barn ... well, it left thousands of years ago when the current natural trend was established, and the mere existence of humans on this planet doomed us to acceleration of the natural trend. Plain and simple.
Folks, there are 7 billion people on our current planet, and increasing exponentially. Like e to the something times time. Each of them wants the quality of life that you currently enjoy. If you think that if you paying twice as much to run your computers is going to fix global warming, or accomplish anything more than praying to the Lady Madonna, then [standard bridge sale offer].
The IPCC accepted data on this subject from Vattenfall, a company with heavy investments in Nuclear power.
Yes, it wouldn't make sense to accept data on this subject from someone who didn't run any nuclear power plants, as they then wouldn't have any data to share, now would it?!
Yes, Vattenfall, which is wholly owned by the Swedish government, owns and operates nuclear power (four sites), but they also owns and operates hydroelectric plants, coal fired plants, wind parks, bio powered plants etc. That's why they're a good company to ask, as while they have nuclear in the mix, it's not dominant by any measure, like it would be if you asked the French for example.
Yes, there's always the risk of bias, but if you exclude everyone with any connection to anything, you'll also exclude anyone who actually has any experience at all. You can't have it both ways. If you want the data, you have to talk to the people who have the data, and those are going to be the ones who actually run/use the things you are asking about. No way around that.
Stefan Axelsson
The Arctic stupid!!! It is thawing out, oceans are warming and thus methane hydrate is breaking down as well. Thawing of the permafrost is underway...this is a gigantic threat. Billions of tones or decay products will be set to release methane and fracking exposed trapped methane to lower pressures and this are released as well. It is a surprise to southern scientists but the ones up here in the north have been sounding the alarm for a decade....
Also, a very small number can be increased by a large percentage and remain incredibly small. Like when people freak out when research shows something increases cancer risk by 20%, even when it only means risk went from .1% to .12%. Methane may have increased by .5% (still not a big change), but the total atmospheric concentration still only increased by .000002%. That's a hard number to get upset about.
To my knowledge, ice cores rapidly lose resolution the deeper you go, with margins marked in centuries if looking back 100+ years. Atmospheric methane could have been all over the place, with wide swings obscured by the fuzzy picture from the cores.
That said, I'm not saying that there isn't a larger problem or that atmospheric methane is irrelevant. Just that 20 parts per billion is a very small change. One for which we do not have a particularly detailed or accurate historical context.
I'm looking at total atmospheric concentration. A very small number (1830 ppb is very small) can increase by a very large percentage and remain very small.
You fucking brainwashed idealist pricks who politicize science instead of listening to fact and reason, this is what you need to hear. Your supreme arrogance that man has or can actually impact the planet to any meaningful degree is based purely on speculation and imagination. And we continue to waste time and money pursuing your childish angst-ridden wishes. You should kill yourselves.
Actually it's a link to all of the data if you scroll down. Click on methane and it'll show you the methane plot.
It is a nonetheless a number to get upset about even though it's small. If you'd like a larger number: the mass of methane in the atmosphere is 5x10^12 kg. That seems like a lot, right? A hundred years ago it was 2.5x10^12 kg.
Feel free to do some research on your own about why 2 ppm is still a significant amount of methane from a radiative forcing perspective. Here is data showing the role of methane in climate forcing. A factor of 2 increase in CH4 will double that "methane" contribution. If you're still not concerned about such a small concentration, here is a link to CFC concentrations. They were only in the part per trillion (yes, trillion) range in the atmosphere when they were wreaking chemical havoc on the ozone. This is an example where small concentrations in the atmosphere can have a large impact.
We have the data in 5 years or shorter increments back to 1000 AD. Also, there is no model that would suggest that such swings could or would happen on such a short timescale. Without external meddling (such as humans), atmospheric concentrations of this kind of gas just don't move around that quickly (however others can).
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
The earth is warming up from it's last ice age and if you want to talk real science one would know the major cause can be attributed to our sun being a variable star, a combination of orbital size, polar tilt and a whole host of variables. They used to teach these things in school. If you think America is responsible for climate change, or for that matter humankind, look no further than to China, India and much of the third world. Now we're talking pollution. It seems our politicians think it's more about control than resolving issues. See what a failure LBJ's "Great America" turned out to be.
Now if you want a unified commitment to resolving massive air, land and water pollution by any nation wanting to do business with us, I'm in. It is my belief we are to be stewards of this earth and a good steward doesn't make excuses, trash the planet or play politics for control. IMHO making trade conditional to good stewardship would resolve any pollution issues far faster than draconian control of our own people while letting our trading partners continue to use their backyard as a junk yard and cesspit.
The IPCC accepted data on this subject from Vattenfall, a company with heavy investments in Nuclear power.
Yes, it wouldn't make sense to accept data on this subject from someone who didn't run any nuclear power plants, as they then wouldn't have any data to share, now would it?!
This is the peer reviewed study used by the European Parliament.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Nope. It's used by the greens in the European parliament. Big difference.
And "stormsmith" in any of its guises is not without problems and criticism. That it's been "peer reviewed" (and given that it hasn't been published I used that term loosely), doesn't mean "correct", it means "not obviously flawed" (but even that's debatable).
Witness instead the IPCC figures. They also state that which "stormsmith" doesn't, namely that you don't get much CO2 from nuclear LCAs unless you assume that the mining and especially the enrichment centrifuges run on coal powered electricity. Now, that may be "true" today, depending on the energy mix, but since nuclear power produce electricity, and there's nothing stopping the use of nuclear electricity in either mining or enrichment, that's a bit disingenuous. By that token wind and solar emit quite a bit of CO2 as well.
So that's a crap analysis, basing any decisions on that sort of reasoning would preclude increasing nuclear in the energy mix, even though that would substantially decrease the CO2 load from nuclear. (Same with "concrete". The reason that's CO2 intensive is heating. There's nothing in principle stopping that heat coming from nuclear or other sources as well. In fact we ran a nuclear reactor for district heating in Sweden for many years, with zero electric output).
Stefan Axelsson
It has been tabled by the European parliament by the greens then, have the opposition tabled a similar work? No - because Vattenfal's work could not be tabled.
Why, you ask? Because instead of peer review Vattenfals analysis required a *certification*, which lapsed years ago, so any criticisms of the stormsmith work must keep in mind that no equivalent work exists.
To be completely clear on this, Vattenfal's marketing paper to the IPCC is now obsolete, whereas "stormsmith's" work remains. Can you provide a link to the original Vattenfal work?
It has been peer reviewed, published and revised four times. Given the level of detail it is clear to see why, it is a large, dynamic work attempting to document the scope of an extremely large and complex industry whose primary externality are radioisotopes that we are yet to figure out how to store properly. These reactors will *all* have to be dismantled eventually and that will be a huge energetic cost, yet to be incurred. Couple these two things and you have an enormous body of knowledge we are still trying to understand for an industry that is large and well funded, so of course it has been criticised.
I think the first criticism was the method of calculating the industrial energetic inputs, until those critics discovered that Vattenfal's analysis used the same method and so on.
Besides, do you expect the supporters of Nuclear power to table a neutral work that shows Nuclear Power's inherrant conceptual flaws? The Stormsmith work was not created with the intent of criticising nuclear power, it was created to explore the energy return of the entire Nuclear industry.
Vattenfal's work is biased and less detailed. You can't accuse stormsmith of being biased, so which other work not funded by the nuclear industry would you suggest?
So you exchange the Carbon externality with in-situ acid leach mining's externality of hundreds of megalitres of radioisotope laden, radioactive sulphuric acid in tailings dams and thier "assumption" that the remains won't leak from uninspectable geological voids and pollute the water table...
then exclude the energetic costs of dismantling the reactor...
then you start to understand why I don't accept the figures in the IPCC figures, because they are from a biased source.
So how would you propose to get the electricity to these remote regions. Build thousands of kilometres of powerlines to nowhere - how would you do that in an open cut mine? Why wouldn't you just build the powerlines to geothermal or wind sources? I don't think you have thought that through.
that's a bit disingenuous.
If you accept Vatanfal's crap, biased analysis.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
So how would you propose to get the electricity to these remote regions.
The same way we do in Sweden. Build a line. Even though we have (close to) the least population density in Europe, all our rail is still electrified. And the mining operation, and esp. the rail to take away the ore was the driver. (We're still suffering from the technological choices made way back when, as they're not compatible with the rest of the grid).
Now, that wouldn't be a problem as our uranium is more centrally located, and Norwegian Thorium is the same. (They also have more electricity).
And that's just using conventional technology. Remember we're talking nuclear here. There's absolutely nothing stopping the siting of a small reactor so close to the mine that transmission won't be a problem. In fact "Blykalla" is developing a reactor that would be very suitable for such a use case, even if the use case they're aiming for is slightly different. Still very remote though.
As for the rest, if you call IPCC biased, I can't help you.
Stefan Axelsson
So how would you propose to get the electricity to these remote regions.
The same way we do in Sweden. Build a line.
Then why not build the line to where geothermal areas exist and send the community the electricity generated by that. If you are going to invest billions of dollars in a reactor, why not build a wind farm and the same transmission infrastructure and get direct financial returns. How would an investor find a justification for doing such a thing commercially when an investor can yield direct returns from infrastructure investments that actually generate returns in their lifetime, instead of sometime, maybe?
As for the rest, if you call IPCC biased, I can't help you.
I didn't call the IPCC biased, I called Vattenfal biased. I call the IPCC "deceived". You are not helping me, *I* and helping *you* to understand that the nuclear industry is a failure and the nuclear revival is still born. Nuclear power is a relic of the cold war and, like many of its failing legacies, takes a long time to die.
I get it that you think that nuclear power will save the world, it hasn't been able to. There are a lot of reasons why this is so some energetic, some economic. I respectfully suggest you educate yourself on this matter using non-biased sources.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.