WeatherRusty

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I decided to just grab a random timeframe off of Detroit's Jan averages. I first went and started as far back as the monthly log on Wunderground went back and took 12 years. The proof is in this pic, I compared them to 2000-2011 and heres what I randomly got.

Do that same thing for every reporting station on Earth for every month on record and what do you get? The Earth is about 0.5C warmer since the 50s.

Good Idea Jonger, any topic goes in here....right? No such thing as off topic. A place to bring off topic interludes from other threads. So what if it's a disaster confined to this thread....

So what do you propose we do? Cut down CO2 emissions and throw the world's economy back to the stone age?

There are 7 billion of us on the planet and most are extremely poor and destitute. They need energy and many

third world countries have coal, natural gas and oil but are being forced to use clean energy alternatives that

are not efficient. Hundreds of millions or more are living shortened life spans because they use

charcoal for heating and cooking. They abuse their local environment by cutting down all their trees for

charcoal and their average life span because of the smoke in their homes is in the 40s!! We have got

to let these third world nations develop a power grids. "Green" energy just is not efficient enough at this

time. Pure and simple. So basically we should continue to emit to keep the world's economy from

imploding (God knows we are close to this anyway) and let science work on making more efficient

carbon neutral energy sources...solar panels....geothermal....waves...and maybe wind. I hate wind energy

because it destroys the beautiful mountain tops where I live and is a bird and bat shredder. I see wind

as a mean form of green. We will have to learn to adapt to the changes in climate...however severe.

But climate change seem to be slow right now...what? around .2C/decade. I think this is the lesser of

two evils. World anarchy or a warmer climate? Winners and losers, that is what it will be. If you look at

history...there are always winners and losers as centuries go by for whatever reason. So this climate

change issue will introduce another factor that mankind will somehow adapt to.

But please don't wipe out the world's economies!!!! It's bad enough already....

Do you really believe the proposed efforts to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels are meant to plunge us into poverty and deprive the world of energy utilization. That's just foolishness. That people go around believing we wish to cut off our nose to spite our face is propaganda spewed by the developers of the denier play book. Don't buy it, we seek practical solutions to our problems otherwise what's the point?

Small percentage? Large portion?

Who cares?

What is the likelihood of of an extra 50Gt being released suddenly or more slowly over time?

How about 1,400Gt?

50Gt over 100 years would be plenty bad enough, generating a climate forcing the equal to a doubling of CO2 and effectively doubling warming due to human activities alone.

Have you researched the effect of the sudden release of up to 1,400Gt of CH4?

I apologize for not looking it up myself, but I'm distracted by a large tax problem that requires my attention between now and the end of the month.

Terry

Hint: 12X the atmospheric load of methane derives from 50Gt.

Hypothetically, in the low likelihood of course...............

It's been stated in the monstrosity of a thread that we are talking about a timescale of thousands of years not a 100 years for a "large portion" to be released. The accepted numbers are 50Gt of the 1,400Gt is subject to sudden release. The amount of warming that would be necessary for "a large portion" to be released would take many centuries to millenniums. Wake me up when the world is ending when a catastrophic climatic calamity commences.

http://www.cosis.net...008-A-01526.pdf

Just to note that a release producing 12X (see above link) the current atmospheric burden of methane would result in a radiative forcing (3.7W/m^2) the equal of a doubling of CO2 at current concentrations.

Taking a doubling over pre-industrial of CO2 in the next half century for granted and a climate sensitivity equaling 3C, we would expect a 6C global increase in temperature at equilibrium.

Peer reviewed papers please.

Some of you (not you in particular) scream about the peer review process. You won't find serious scientists who believe the ESAS is on the verge of a catastrophic methane release. We are thousands of years away from such an event if it ever does happen.

Like I said, we don't know what will happen. Don't count me as one who claims a catastrophic methane release is immanent. I doubt it actually, at least in terms of a human lifetime. As I have pointed out before, the previous interglacial period 125,000 years ago appears to have attained global warmth about 1C warmer than today and did not trigger a run away methane release.

The actual concern involves an increased rate of methane release from thawing permafrost and potentially the sea floor clathrates, rather than some sudden burst. Added to the anthropogenic rise in CO2, upwards of 400ppm and likely much higher, a slow but hastening arctic methane release stands to accelerate the process in a way humans would have little to no control over.

I'm a democrat who supports President Obama and can't stand Bush. Try again.

In 2008 the United States Department of Energy National Laboratory system^[14] identified potential clathrate destabilization in the Arctic as one the most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change, which have been singled out for priority research. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program released a report in late December 2008 estimating the gravity of the risk of clathrate destabilization, alongside three other credible abrupt climate change scenarios.

To say this is a joke or should not be taken seriously is your opinion, but it is not shared by those charged with those investigating this phenomenon. This sort of thing can happen and has likely happened before in the paleo record.

We don't know what is going to happen, but this methane time bomb is definitely worthy of serious concern, especially if human activities raise arctic temps several degrees above what has naturally occurred for potentially many millions of years.

You may have misread my OP. I was objecting to the idea that a large portion of the methane trapped in the ESAS has reasonable potential to be released in the next hundred years.

Two things to remember:

1) Any increase in the rate of methane emission from the arctic represents an uncontrolled release of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

2) The threat is not in the short term. Long term this will add to the eventuality for atmospheric CO2 concentration to exceed 600ppm.

You are SO full of it. Whenever I've posted real science in here the response from you is a flurry of random graphs that are usually off topic.

This entire place is a trollathon for anyone that doesn't believe in extreme AGW, so the discussion has become personal attacks all the time. When I first started posting here I was trolled and insulted relentlessly even though I was trying to be cordial, and now I'm basically doing the same. You guys win, you can roll around in your own stupid ideas without me bothering you.

Please don't leave! You have to realize one thing. It is mainstream science which is under attack and people like Friv are frustrated by the relentless beating climate science is taking. Anger is the response.

I understand you probably have a different perspective on it.

It is not "extreme AGW" which is under attack, it is any and all things related to AGW in any form. To us the skeptics are the ones being totally unreasonable.

Are you guys reading the same subtitle I am? But you really think that? huh... what a fooking joke. It's people like Vergent and TerryM who give the Climate Change subject such a terrible name.

Crisis; critical cryospheric carbon clathrate causation. catastrophic climatic calamity could commence.

While methane clathrates and thawing permafrost are major concerns of climate science, I don't share the immediate concern implied by the thread title. Does there appear to be some escalation in methane release from certain areas? The evidence I have been presented indicates...maybe. This is one area of research which will require additional information to be placed into proper context.

The threat is very real, but the more immediate concern is CO2 and inevitable rise in temperature it is producing. That rise in temperature is what will destabilize the locked up methane clathrates and the rotting of plant material frozen in the permafrost.

Phillip - I think you are wasting your time with him. I found using the Ignore button to have great utility...it improved my mood at once.

Lots of folks view these threads and individual posts with the hope of maybe learning something without ever posting here. The trolls need to be countered with credible information representing the side of mainstream science. Let the reader decide who makes the better case.

We can't convince those who can not be won over, but if we stay true to the science maybe we can influence the inquisitive and undecided.

Your usage of the phrase "watts per year" tells me you do not know what the term watt means. A watt is a unit of power not energy.

From Wikipedia:

The watt, defined as one joule per second, measures the rate of energy conversion.

Confusion of watts, watt-hours, and watts per hour

The terms power and energy are frequently confused. Power is the rate at which energy is generated or consumed.

For example, when a light bulb with a power rating of 100W is turned on for one hour, the energy used is 100 watt-hours (W•h), 0.1 kilowatt-hour, or 360 kJ. This same amount of energy would light a 40-watt bulb for 2.5 hours, or a 50-watt bulb for 2 hours. A power station would be rated in multiples of watts, but its annual energy sales would be in multiples of watt-hours. A kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy equivalent to a steady power of 1 kilowatt running for 1 hour, or 3.6 MJ.

Terms such as watts per hour are often misused.^[17] Watts per hour properly refers to the change of power per hour. Watts per hour (W/h) might be useful to characterize the ramp-up behavior of power plants. For example, a power plant that reaches a power output of 1 MW from 0 MW in 15 minutes has a ramp-up rate of 4 MW/h. Hydroelectric power plants have a very high ramp-up rate, which makes them particularly useful in peak load and emergency situations.

Major energy production or consumption is often expressed as terawatt-hours for a given period that is often a calendar year or financial year. One terawatt-hour is equal to a sustained power of approximately 114 megawatts for a period of one year.

The watt second is a unit of energy, equal to the joule. One kilowatt-hour is 3,600,000 watt-seconds. The watt-second is used, for example, to rate the energy storage of flash lamps used in photography.

when in the last 800,000 years have we been in a similar situation?

In terms of radiative forcing we have not been in a similar situation for a lot longer than just 800,000 years. More like 15,000,000 years, the last time CO2 consentrations were as high as today. It also happened to be much warmer back then with likely no permanent northern ice cap. The Antarctic ice cap had formed 34,000,000 years ago when CO2 consentration dropped below 600ppm.

In terms of global temperature, current temp is about as it was 8,000 years ago when CO2 levels were no higher than 280ppm. The increasing radiative forcing of today stands to elavate mean global temp to well above that of the Holocene Thermal Maximum of 8,000 years ago. What this will do to arctic sea ice is evident from past periods of higher radiative forcing.

What this will do to destabilize sea bed methane clathrates is anyone's guess. The previous interglacial period 125,000 years ago which attained a global mean temp about 1C warmer than the Holocene max apparently did not unleach a runnaway methane feedback, but what would happen if temp rises another 2C or 3C?

The only thing alarming here is the willful ignoring of science. The science provides these reasons NOT to be alarmed:

1. The new large plumes found are in previously unexplored areas and so there is little basis to conclude that these plumes are a new phenomenon.

2. The new large plumes were found in deeper water farther offshore than that previously explored. This deep water would take longer to respond to recent agw and it should be the shallow water which responds first. Thus it is reasonable to conclude that these deep water plumes are responding to an old long term warming. This conclusion is strengthened by #3.

3. All modeling studies i am aware of conclude that it will take hundreds of years for arctic methane release to occur and that a large increase in methane concentration this century is improbable.

4. Arctic methane release this decade has been insufficient to raise regional methane concentration seriously, nevermind globally.

5. The long term warming of the last 10k years is both a sufficient explanation for these plumes and by far the most probable explanation according to modeling.

Just so people don't carry away the wrong impression, there has been no long term warming trend over the past 10k years. The natural peak temp of the Holocene period occured about 8,000 years ago and slowly declined over the following 6,000 years. The temperature began to rise about 2,000 years ago with the big jump occuring over the past 150 years which has returned temp to near what it was during the Holocene Thermal Maximum 8,000 years ago.

Yes it should take hundreds of years to destablise the deeply buried hydrates, but what about exasperating those already outgasing and those potentially already close to doing so?

All you are doing is taking the word ready out of context.

If the recently detected activity turns out to represent an uptick in methane emission from natural sources, wouldn't that concern you? I am more concerned with the direction this is headed moreso than the impact of current (increased?) output.

To me this potential is akin to finding the oceans becoming a net emitter of CO2 rather than a sink. Both of these potentails are of valid scientific concern despite BethesdaWX's claims of failure to adhere to "the scientific method".

How can warming (let alone human caused warming) be causing the release of natural stores of methane across the globe when the globe has not seen any statistically significant warming in the past ~ decade?

What irks me about your post is your breaching of the scientific method, it can be argued many ways as to what is causing the warming, so unobjective comments like this seem to clog up the forum with unscientific banter.

Forget whether or not it has warmed over the past decade. Do you think maybe the fact that the globe has gradually warmed ~0.8C and the arctic more than double that in little over a century may have something to do with it? Please try to think longer term when concidering slowly evolving climate changes and feedbacks such as melting glacial ice, melting permafrost and growing ocean heat content.

Sustained warmer conditions answers your question.

Fair enough. It's fine to not get too worked up about it, if thats how it strikes you.

The scorn shown by some here (not you) for being concerned about a potentially big problem with a lot of unknown variables is a good deal less fine.

I tend to agree with you that a "runaway" loop fed by short term CH4 release would not be able to feed itself on causing additional CH4 release directly from the sea floor for the reason that you mention. I am a bit disturbed by the S&S-observed increase in the ESAS, since this seems to be real and reflects a short term increase for this particular site - it is unclear whether the increase is due to AGW or via coincidental attainment of a melting threshold caused by ESAS flooding 8kya. The latter seems like a bit of a coincidence, yes, but that threshold has to be reached sometime.

If there is going to be runaway feedback, it is most likely to be due to thermokarst-related effects.

THAT could be due to AGW, no problem.

Don't get me wrong, the stability of the methane hydrates and thawing permafrost are very much a serious issue which stands to exacerbate anthropogenic induced climate change. That this should occur as the arctic continues to warm is to be logically expected, at least along periphery zones where stability is marginal.

Also, I agree that of more immediate concern is the release of methane from melting permafrost. Again, however it is the relatively slow build up of atmospheric methane and conversion to CO2 which will have the long standing impact rather than some sudden release of methane.

Methane release from tropical wet lands and to some degree releases from the arctic may have been sources of Holocene Period natural background methane concentrations. The addition of methane from human activity has contributed to the rise in concentration over the past couple centuries beyond the natural background, while human induced warming may be speeding up the release from natural stores. Time will tell.

http://www.realclima...ane/#more-10412

RealClimate has a thread up no on the methane story, with the OP taking vanilla......

Should be worth watching

Like skier, I haven't gotten to overly worked up over the latest methane scare. I like David Archer's article because it explains the likely consequence of a growing (not a catastrophic, sudden release) arctic methane release to be an escalating factor in the atmospheric accumulation of CO2. Like human caused emissions of CO2, degrading methane to CO2 will produce a longer term forcing on climate which will ultimately result in an even warmer climate decades and centuries into the future.

It takes decades and centuries to warm up the oceans in response to a change in climate forcing, any sudden, huge release of methane would degrade to CO2 long before the enhanced methane forcing had time to really warm things up. The much longer lasting atmospheric lifetime of CO2, even though producing a weaker instantaneous forcing, does allow it to add to the ocean heat content.

EDIT:

I believe a 12 fold increase in sustained methane concentration over today's levels would be required to produce the same forcing as one doubling of CO2. Molecule to molecule, that's still a whole lot less methane than CO2 required to produce the same forcing.

GISS attempts to arrive at a globally averaged surface temperature by measuring surface temperatures, infilling sparsely represented areas and correcting for known contamination by statistical techniques.

UAH attempts to determine the temperature profile of the troposphere by measuring the total column "brightness" of an oxygen isotope by satellite and applying algorithms to arrive at the most likely temperature at various levels. RSS and UAH use the same satellite raw data, but arrive at somewhat different estimates because the two analysis techniques differ somewhat.

Do I have that basically correct? All these methodologies are full of extrapolations, to claim one better than another is based on what?

And yet peer reviewed papers posted in this thread don't support that position at all. The source(the authors) of the article that prompted this thread reject that position also. There is no history beyond several years to even speculate on methane release. (Not even a hockey stick with cherry picked tree data as proxy to temperature. Tree data that is replaced with real data the last 50 years because real data does not match the proxy.)

There are many things we do not know about climate change. Somehow massive releases of methane have not doomed the planet in the history of the planet. Even when dinosaurs roamed the poles.

Thanks for the reassurance! It's comforting to belief that as temperatures continue to rise in the arctic that the melting permafrost will not increasingly release methane (estimated 900 billion tons) as the organic material it contains decays.

Vergent.....Reading through all this......could you please explain what your point on Methane is? In your own words.

There exists several times the global warming potential from mankind's burning of fossil fuels locked up in the frozen arctic environment. If it becomes warm enough up there due to AGW, then the melting tundra and sea floor should release methane in increasing quantity. Unlike the burning of fossil fuel, we have no control over that process and the threat is if this potential is unleashed the worst case global warming scenarios become inevitable and beyond our potential to control.

And exactly how would blanket worldwide acceptance of AGW have prevented anything if there were absolutely no dissenting opinions as of say, 1992?

The thing about these methane releases is that this was going to happen anyway. Therefore, we can't really blame anyone for it. Stuff happens. People live. People die. People get rich. People with private jets tell me that I am a cancer on the planet.

X

I start by accepting the risk of AGW as a real threat based on the scientific evidence. From there it is reasonable to think of ways to minimize that threat. To ignore the threat is a fools gamble.

Fossil fuels are a finite resource, they won't last forever, especially as the demand continues to rise across the world. It is imperative that we develop and deploy complimentary and replacement sources of energy..and the sooner the better. We are unique among species in that we consciously alter our environment on a global scale. Since we can be aware of what we are doing, we stand a chance to rectify the problems we create. It's our decision to make. Also, natural climate variability is not poised to raise global temperature by several further degrees in the coming decades and centuries. It hasn't been as warm as we stand to make it for at least the past 15 million years.

If we can't or won't do it then we are in big trouble from both AGW and energy deficiency.

Methane releases from the frozen arctic tundra and seabed clathrates are not something which has to be inevitable. They will only worsen if the ambient temperature continues to rise, and if it happens that a tipping point has already been exceeded then you are correct, but we don't know that to be the case as of this time.

Dude... "We're in deep touble, the Earth is in trouble, we're emitting too much CO2"... way to fix it is... "rich countries reduce emmisions and pay poor countries, to deal with climate change"

I'm getting too political and will put a sock in it, but come on, really obvious what is going on.

It's obvious alright. You may have won the political and PR battle but you have not and with not defy science and Mother Nature without paying the bill. The sad thing is, future generations and the environment will be paying the bill.

Going to be hard on the politicos who just wanted AGW as a means of consolidating transnational political control.

Sort of hard to sell a solution when nothing can be done.

Sent from my Milestone X

Conspiracy theorists everywhere. Can the collective of humanity actually allow themselves to be directed by these people? If so, we are doomed for sure.