skierinvermont

"Losing the Arctic summer sea ice will accelerate the already rapid rate of Arctic warming, which will increase the rate of methane being emitted by the warming Arctic.

This emergency situation for survival

must go straight to the top of the global climate change agenda."

http://www.arctic-me...ncy-group.org/#

"Professor Peter Wadhams, on behalf of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, spoke about this critical issue at the December 2011 American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in San Francisco, USA. Key elements of his talk have been widely reported, following an article in the UK's Independent newspaper. (Please find copies of this and subsequent articles attached.)

The substance of our concerns – and the basis for these media reports – is outlined in the attached 16-page document entitled Arctic Methane Alert. To summarise:

• The loss of Arctic summer sea ice and increased warming of the Arctic seas threaten methane hydrate instability and a massive catastrophic release of methane into the atmosphere, as noted in IPCC AR4.

• Research published by N. Shakhova* shows that methane is already venting into the atmosphere from seabed methane hydrates on the East Siberian Arctic shelf, or ESAS (the world's largest continental shelf), which, if allowed to escalate, would likely lead to abrupt and catastrophic global warming.

• The latest research expedition to the region (September/October 2011), according to Professor I. Semiletov, witnessed methane plumes on a "fantastic scale," "some one kilometer in diameter," "far greater" than previous observations, which were officially reported in 2010 to equal methane emissions from all the other oceans put together.

• The loss of Arctic summer sea ice and subsequent increased Arctic surface warming will inevitably increase the rate of methane emissions already being released from Arctic wetlands and thawing permafrost.

• The latest available data indicates there is a 5-10% possibility of the Arctic being ice free in September by 2013, more likely 2015, and with 95% confidence by 2018. This, according to the recognised world authorities on Arctic sea ice, Prof. Wadhams and Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski, is the point of no return for summer sea ice. Once past this point, it could prove impossible to reverse the retreat by any kind of intervention. The data indicate the Arctic could be ice free for six months of the year by 2020 (PIOMAS 2011)."

http://www.arctic-me...ders/4558749249

Ken Caldeira, Professor of Environmental Earth System Sciences, Stanford University, US;

Ed Dlugokencky, PhD, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), US;

Michel Halbwachs, Professor of Physics, University of Savoie, France;

Veli Albert Kallio, Chairman of the Frozen Isthmuses’ Protection Campaign, UK/Finland;

Jon Egill Kristjansson, Professor of meteorology, Oslo University, Norway;

Mike MacCracken, PhD, Climate Institute, Washington, US;

David Mitchell, Associate Research Professor, Division of Atmospheric Sciences, DRI, US;

Brian Orr, PhD, former Principle Scientific Officer, Department of the Environment

Stephen Salter, Emeritus Professor of Engineering at Edinburgh University, UK;

Natalia Shakhova, PhD, International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska, US;

Igor Semiletov, PhD, International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska, US;

Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics, Cambridge University, UK;

Leonid Yurganov, PhD, Dept of Physics, University of Toronto, Canada.

Skier, if you are going to accuse someone of "a complete lie", at least have something to back it up. Are you accusing these guys of making up a complete lie and sending it off to world leaders?

At no point do they say that recent emissions are related to recent warming. In fact several of the scientists quoted specifically say it is not. All that the above quotes say is that in the future warming may cause methane release.

What then is the reason global methane values have drifted more upward the past 4-5 years?

Hard to say for sure, as we have a poor accounting of the global methane budget. But humans continue to spew vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere. A slight increase in our emissions, or a slight decrease in the natural buffering capacity would send methane levels rising again, as they have risen from 750 to nearly 2000ppb in the last 150 years due to direct human emissions.

On the one hand the theoretical scientists are saying "its impossible", on the other hand the field scientists are saying "its happening"

This is a complete lie that has been corrected multiple times throughout this thread. The field scientists are not saying 'it's happening.' They are also saying that it's not happening and that it is unlikely that recent methane release is related to recent global warming.

Nor does the amount of methane occasionally emanating from the arctic and unrelated to recent global warming appear to be significant on a global scale.

Semiletov and Shakhova..who were the source for the original article say "We would first note that we have never stated that the reason for the currently observed methane emissions were due to recent climate change."

http://dotearth.blog...imate-concerns/

They go on later "Observations are at the core of our work now. It is no surprise to us that others monitoring global methane have not found a signal from the Siberian Arctic or increase in global emissions"

http://dotearth.blog...apocalypse-not/

Revkin echoes my point from an earlier post" it’s important to get a handle on whether these are new releases, the first foretaste of some great outburst from thawing sea-bed stores of the gas, or simply a longstanding phenomenon newly observed.”

The Barrow readings of methane mean little. It's like taking the temperature reading of one city and claiming that represents global climate change. Of course if the Barrow readings went off the charts that would be something different. That's not happening.

Chicken Little newspaper stories does not help climate research

Yep papers were posted earlier stating that it's not physically possible for the methane release to be occurring due to recent climate change because it takes longer for the sea floor to warm.

Good to know that even the lead researchers investigating these plumes do not believe them to be due to recent climate change. And yet some in this thread are latching onto this study as proof of imminent CAGW

Still no idea what those charts are showing.

I remain unconvinced either way as to the validity of the Barrow readings. I would have expected to see more of a spike at Poker Flats considering it's not that far away. There's not spike at all at Poker Flats, while BRW shoots up nearly 300ppb and has remained elevated for 3 weeks. I also don't know what that graph of the flights from Greenland to BRW are showing.. the axis is 'elevation'??? what does this have to do with Ch4?

I don't see any other data corroborating the BRW readings. Supposedly Alert and Svalbard show no such spike, and the boiling sea observations were occurring in the Laptev and ESB.

Note that the amounts are in nanomol/mol, there's not much CH4 to begin with, and it's only increased slightly relative to the total amount of CH4.

Wrong... 'normal' CH4 over the last 2000 years was near 750ppb, It's now approaching 3X that at 1900ppb globally.

I'm showing that there is nothing wrong with the equipment at Barrow. SF6 is the least noisy gas they monitor. Barrow is in perfect agreement with the Greenland station.

By the way mass spec is one of the most accurate measurements in science, it counts molecules. You get as many significant figures as you want.

It could be a leak somewhere in the equipment only certain gases are being affected. There's no reason for CO2 to be spiking and H2 to be crashing.

The barrow mass spec is clearly bonkers.

What is it you are trying to show?

The CO2 and Hydrogen measurements are also out of whack.

More elevated methane measurements at Barrow. It still has'nt shown up else where, but AO+ traps air in the arctic.

Ouch - Much easier to ignore 2 anomalous readings.

I wonder what the readings would be if that "ice hurricane" hadn't mixed things up?

The Barrow readings are probably incorrect. Other atmospheric measurements from the station are out of whack as well.

It is generally wise to be suspicious of such anomalous readings.

I think that this conclusion is based on the comparison made by the investigators themselves between conditions in the Northern Laptev this year vs past years, plus inferences drawn from the failure of earlier surveys to see things of this magnitude in the ESAS (or for that matter anywhere).

Not ironclad, but reasonably convincing, especially given the extreme description of hundreds of km-wide plumes in a 10,000 square km area.

Like I said, there may be other reasons, but the rise of CH4 which is largely/entirely attributable to direct human emissions, is not one of them.

Thank you for the link to the research paper. Not being an AGU member and being too cheap to buy the full article I can only read the abstract, but it seems to me that there is more meat to the paper than there was to the Colin Schultz EOS article you originally linked to.

However, I still have concerns about the simplistic permafrost model they used since we know from measurements that the actual methane hydrate deposits are more complex than that. And I am skeptical of their conclusions that today's methane release is simply the continuation of a process that began 8K years ago. The current CH4 values are around 1900 ppb and rising. Here's a plot of the full instrumental record at Barrow AK.

As we can see, the atmospheric methane levels have risen from around 1700 ppb in 1983 to today's 1900 ppb. Which works out to a rate of increase of 200 ppb in 28 years, or about 7 ppb/year. Extrapolating back the 8K years at a constant rate would indicate that the Earth had an atmospheric methane level of -54,000 ppb at the start of this interglacial - if their conclusions are correct. Hmmm, a negative CH4 concentration seems a bit questionable. Well, some of the observed methane increase is from AGW so let's split the observed CH4 increase into natural and AGW. Picking values out of thin air, let's assume 99% (6.93 ppb/year) of the observed increase is from AGW and 1% (0.07 ppb/year) is from the natural process proposed by the paper's authors. This time for the extrapolation I'll assume 150 years of AGW methane release in addition to the 8K years of natural CH4 release. I come up with a combined AGW and natural release of 1600 ppb which when subtracted from today's readings gives a starting concentration of around 300 ppb. That's a lot easier to believe than -54,000 ppb if all of the release is natural.

Now, before people start beating on me, my assumptions above are just a back of the envelope math exercise and only meant to illustrate how to be an honest skeptic and use available data to assess a paper's assertions.

The data available today, limited though it may be, indicates that CH4 release is increasing as a consequence of AGW so anybody claiming otherwise has to show some solid evidence as to how this could be natural.

The rise of CH4 concentrations over the last 20-100 years has nothing to do with natural methane release. It is a product of anthropogenic emissions. Humans represent HALF of global CH4 emissions, natural and anthropogenic (by comparison we are just 1 or 2% of CO2 emissions). That's why CH4 has risen from 750ppb to 1800ppb in the last 120 years.

Thus concluding that the current arctic bubbling is 'not normal' simply because global concentrations have skyrocketed makes no sense. Global concentrations have skyrocketed because of direct human emissions, not the arctic.

Whether arctic methane release is contributing significantly to the global increase in CH4 concentrations is a valid question which I don't have an answer to. But the global increase is not proof in and of itself that arctic emissions are abnormal or significant.

And despite all this alarmism, methane concentrations in the atmosphere remain way below where the IPCC predicted just 5 years ago. They've only recently begun to inch back upwards and nobody even knows if this is due to the arctic, or due to the massive amount of methane produced by human activity. Methane release is a serious concern, but the fact that plumes exist in the arctic doesn't add an incredible amount of knowledge to what we already knew. It remains to be seen exactly how stable these methane deposits will be in the long-run.

A lot.

Agreed. I'd like to know how much this is on a global scale.

Methane plumes may take a while to disperse through the atmosphere - Also CH4 is much lighter than air and could be expected to rapidly attain considerable height. Last fall we experienced an unexpected opening of an Arctic Ozone Hole - Methane reacts with ozone.

Notice the scale.. pretty much the whole earth is within +/- 3 or 4% of the mean, just like CO2 which also varies slightly from the mean locally. Yes there are slight variations locally, but Methane concentrations 4% greater than the global mean in the arctic are not going to make much difference in temperature at all.

Outgoing longwave radiation is dominant in the radiation budget during the arctic winter, so the relative effect of the greenhouse gas effect would actually be be maximized right now. That alone would suggest that some kind of indirect effects are likely elsewhere on the globe, although I have no idea what they would be or if they even matter.

My guess is that the biggest and most immediate impact of the methane release was a skyrocketing of the frequency of the words "skeptic" and "alarmist" on the internet.

Methane is a well mixed atmospheric gas like CO2. Local concentrations only vary slightly from global concentrations.

Ok...I guess the better question would be why has it slowed down since the mid 1990s? I realize it's just a short term change, but so is the "increasing trend" since 2006 (and that is a shorter term trend even). Per the other chart you posted, there was clearly a sharper rise in methane from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s.

I don't think anybody knows for sure exactly.. the IPCC wasn't able to predict the pause.

But unlike CO2 in which humans represent only a very small fraction of CO2 emissions (something like 1-2% I forget exactly), we represent a large fraction of methane emissions (nearly half).

So either

1) our emissions were lower for a period

2) natural sinks sped up

3) the breakdown of methane in the atmosphere increased (which is controlled by a chemical reaction with hydroxyl radicals)

Do you know why it was rising so fast prior to the mid 1990s?

Methane actually started rising from around 750ppb in 1800. It had stayed near 750ppb for most of the last 10,000 years.

So the rise is definitely anthropogenic given the rise coincides with rapidly increasing human methane emissions (primarily related to livestock and energy production). The pause is probably due to some natural factor temporarily overriding human emissions.

Here's a chart showing the rise.. current concentration is around 1810ppb:

I get called an alarmist. And whatever BS, but this report is sickening.

I guess some of the folks reading this want to deny it. But this isn't good. Let's hope this is a seasonal event. And was in response to high end in situ warming and not a long term thaw. But that is not the likely reality.

Can we tell how long this particular methane has been there?

Is there any studies out with their actual measurements?

How long before the Methane shows up on obs like Barrow or Hawaii?

What is the methane forcing formula? Like w/m2 per how much?

Before trying to answer your questions, I'd like to agree with other posters who've said that the newspaper article was a bit biased/frilly in using words like 'deadly' to describe the gas. But the possibility of rapid methane release is of great scientific concern. And it appears that arctic emissions are beginning to ramp up.

What I am not entirely sure of is how significant these methane releases are on a global scale. I do know there is enough methane stored in the arctic to cause massive global warming (like enough to turn earth into venus if it were all released into the atmosphere) but what these studies of recent surface emissions never answer is how significant the current emissions are on a global scale. Vergent claiming a 100000X increase may or may not be true on a regional scale, but that may still be quite small globally.

It appears that global CH4 concentration has again begun to rise in the atmosphere since 2006. See chart below. This may be a response to the increased arctic emissions, or to some other source of emissions, I do not know.

Methane is 25X more potent as a GHG than CO2 (per unit of mass).

BTW the BLS summary Don posted somewhat concurs with this statement stating that those in this field will face "keen competition" which is defined as job seekers growing faster than the number of available positions. It is one of 3 categories, the others being "good or favorable opportunities" (job growth and applicant growth in rough balance) and "excellent opportunities" (job growth outstrips the number of qualified applicants). It also says that those with graduate degrees will have better prospects (obviously).

The posters comments may be a slight exaggeration, as hard work will probably get you a job in the private sector at least, maybe even public. But the general surplus of met majors is a real phenomenon.

Is baroclinic_instability TIp???