PhillipS
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About PhillipS
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Apologies if I'm splitting hairs, Bluewave, but August didn't see an increase in Arctic SIV, it saw a decrease in the anomaly. Arctic SIV continued to drop, albeit at a slower rate.
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It's easy to just focus on the recent melt seasons but I got a jolt when I looked at the PIOMAS sea ice volume plot. The SIV is currently around 6.75K km3, just behind 2012 as ORH reported above, but the 1979-2001 average for this time of years is almost 17,000 km3, more 10,000 km3 greater than today - a loss I find sobering.
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Dr Barry is welcome to come here to engage.
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More open Arctic ocean -> increased evaporation -> increased water vapor -> increased precipitation. But GIS Surface Mass Balance is only half of the situation. It does not include dynamic GIS processes such as glacial calving, basal melting, or meltwater runoff. Look at the Total Mass Change data for the complete situation. As you can see, the GIS has lost around 3,600 km3 (3,600 Gtons) of ice since 2003.
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Here is the CH4 in-situ hourly average data at the Barrow AK observatory. There does appear to be a plume of CH4 in recent months. Looking at just the 2014 to present data makes it clearer. It looks like a series of CH4 events starting last Fall.
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I think most readers on this forum have read the recent reports of large craters being found in Siberia, and the discussion of their origin. There was a post on the IFLScience website [link] that may be of interest. Here is an excerpt: An expedition from the Scientific Center of Arctic Studies found methane concentrations of 9.6% at the bottom of the crater – 50,000 times the atmospheric average. The possibility that methane released by melting permafrost produced the crater had been a favored hypothesis from its discovery in mid-July. Nevertheless, plenty of other theories were circulating, and scientists urged caution before leaping to conclusions. The extraordinary concentration of methane, on the other hand, seems unlikely to be a coincidence, particularly since methane is slightly lighter than air. The 2012 and 2013 summers on the Yamal peninsular, where the crater is, were around 5°C warmer than normal. Expedition leader Andrei Plekhanov told Nature that the high temperatures probably thawed the permafrost to the point where it collapsed, releasing the trapped methane. If my math is correct, 9.6% is 96,000 ppm, or 96,000,000 ppb (which is how atmospheric CH4 is usually measured). Current CH4 readings at Barrow are around 1880 ppb so the crater levels are alarmingly high. And given that CH4 is lighter than air, those levels aren't the result of CH4 pooling in the deep craters. I think that it would be interesting to monitor the levels on a periodic, say, weekly, basis to learn if the concentration is rising, falling , or stable.
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There is a good column on the Shakova paper and global methane trends at RealClimate. The take-away, in my opinion, is that global methane concentrations aren't rising fast enough to be alarming at this time. The rate of methane increase is at least an order of magnitude smaller than what would be needed to significantly affect climate. Here is the conclusion from the column: Shakhova et al (2013) did not find or claim to have found a 50 Gt C reservoir of methane ready to erupt in a few years. That claim, which is the basis of the Whiteman et al (2013) $60 trillion Arctic methane bomb paper, remains as unsubstantiated as ever. The Siberian Arctic, and the Americans, each emit a few percent of global emissions. Significant, but not bombs, more like large firecrackers. So it appears that methane, including arctic methane, is something that we should be concerned about enough to study closely, but it is not alarming as several other AGW effects such as droughts, extreme weather, rising sea levels and ocean acidification.
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There is a new report from Dr Shakova about increased arctic methane releases - that the rate of methane release from subsea permafrost has accelerated to 17 teragrams (17 megatons) per year. [Discovery article]. I'll try to track a link to the paper itself. Methane gas bubbles rising through Arctic Ocean water, seen by a remotely operated vehicle.
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Blizzard should keep in mind, too that CO2 levels during the HTM never rose above about 280 ppm. As we approach 400 ppm (on our way to 500 ppm or greater) we are pushing the climate into conditions not seen for millions of years. [source] If one understands the GHE and the properties of CO2 and other GHGs it is hard to hope that some unknown 'braking effect' will appear and save us from the consequences of BAU.
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Blizzard should keep in mind, too that CO2 levels during the HTM never rose above about 280 ppm. As we approach 400 ppm (on our way to 500 ppm or greater) we are pushing the climate into conditions not seen for millions of years. [source] If one understands the GHE and the properties of CO2 and other GHGs it is hard to hope that some unknown 'braking effect' will appear and save us from the consequences of BAU.
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Your hypothesis is the logical fallacy known as a "False Dichotomy" - asserting that something must be either A or B when the real world is more complex. CO2 is a GHG whose warming effect (the magnitude of its radiative forcing) on the Earth is dependent on its concentration in the atmosphere. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the warmer the globe. Any argument? But CO2 is not the only phenomenon that can warm, or cool the Earth. Any argument? Cold seawater can hold more dissolved CO2 than warm sea water - warming cold seawater can result in the release of CO2. So the ocean can be either a source or a sink for CO2 - depending on conditions. Any argument? The ocean is not the only source for CO2. Volcanism, fires, anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels, thawing of permafrost and other processes all effect the carbon cycle. Any argument? So there are multiple factors, including CO2, that affect the Earth's energy balance. And there are multiple sources of atmospheric CO2, including the oceans under some conditions. So where is the chicken and egg paradox?
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Interesting article. After reading it I did a quick google scholar search of the authors of the Nature paper and found several related papers by Dr Wadham - so she has been researching this topic for a while. What I am skeptical of is the huge reservoir of organic carbon they claim underlies the Antarctic ise sheet. The reason I"m leery is that glaciers, and ice flows within ice sheets, are very good at bulldozing underlying strata down to bedrock. So most of whatever organic material was present in the distant past was over time scraped into the ocean surrounding Antarctica. But I may be completely wrong and their study will be corroborated by additional research.
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A fast google search got the values of 10 - 12 years residency for methane.
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If you think emails to NOAA and our senators and congressmen might help, well, that's easy to do. Sadly, the Texas Senators are in the pocket of the fossil fuel contingent, but my congressman has a good track record with environmental issues.
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DO you have any insight into why the in-situ CH4 program was shut down at Barrow yet is still on-going at Mauna Loa? I would think Mauna Loa would be an ideal site for flask sampling - it is thousands of miles from the major sources of release so the GHGs are well mixed by the time they reach the observatory. There is a very good match between the flask data and the in-situ data which to me indicates that the two programs are somewhat redundant. By comparison, Barrow is ideal for in-situ sampling because it is very close to areas of concern such as the Alaskan permafrost, the Siberian permafrost, and the ESAS. That's what we should be monitoring in near real-time. We know from the data record that the in-situ monitoring picks up event very quickly. If a large release takes place I don't think it's helpful to wait several weeks to find out about it after the lab analyses the flask samples. The NOAA decision is like being concerned about a rumbling volcano but putting the sensors thousands of miles away and getting results by snailmail. WTF are they thinking?!
