UPDATE: Some readers took exception to my title, and I can see why now. I regret my choice of wording for the title. “Regulate its escape into the atmosphere” is where I was going. “Regulate” from my perspective in engineering things and making things work is different than what others might think. I wasn’t implying legislation. Recycling and recovery systems is what was in my mind. Gas regulator valves and all that. This passage from the story below was my focus: “Since we already know how to capture methane from animals, landfills, and sewage treatment plants at fairly low cost, targeting methane makes sense,”.
I’ve amended the title [in brackets] -Anthony
…
According to the 2007 IPCC AR4 Methane has a “global warming potential” of 25 times that of CO2 over 100 years. Here’s a CH4 budget pie chart. Note that there are several sources where we can manage methane without affecting energy creation. Starting on Methane, rather than CO2, is an idea that I could get behind because it can be recycled and used for many things.
A new paper from Drew Shindell from NASA JPL prompted Roger Pielke Jr. to write:
For years my father has been arguing that:
. . . attempts to “control” the climate system, and to prevent a “dangerous intervention” into the climate system by humans that focuses just on CO2 and a few other greenhouse gases will necessarily be significantly incomplete, unless all of the other first order climate forcings are considered.
His views are now being robustly vindicated as a quiet revolution is occurring in climate science. Here is how PhysOrg reports on a study out today in Science by NASA’s Drew Shindell and others:
According to Shindell, the new findings underscore the importance of devising multi-pronged strategies to address climate change rather than focusing exclusively on carbon dioxide. “Our calculations suggest that all the non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases together have a net impact that rivals the warming caused by carbon dioxide.”
In particular, the study reinforces the idea that proposals to reduce methane may be an easier place for policy makers to start climate change agreements. “Since we already know how to capture methane from animals, landfills, and sewage treatment plants at fairly low cost, targeting methane makes sense,” said Michael MacCracken, chief scientist for the Climate Institute in Washington, D.C.
This research also provides regulators insight into how certain pollution mitigation strategies might simultaneously affect climate and air quality. Reductions of carbon monoxide, for example, would have positive effects for both climate and the public’s health, while reducing nitrogen oxide could have a positive impact on health but a negative impact on the climate.
“The bottom line is that the chemistry of the atmosphere can get hideously complicated,” said Schmidt. “Sorting out what affects climate and what affects air quality isn’t simple, but we’re making progress.”
Of note, Shindell et al. cautiously suggest that the entire framework of international climate policy may be based on an overly-simplistic view of the human effect on climate, by focusing on carbon dioxide equivalencies in radiative forcing (i.e.,g “global warming potential” or GWP), from their Science paper out today (emphasis added):
There are many limitations to the GWP concept (25). It includes only physical properties, and its definition is equivalent to an unrealistic economic scenario of no discounting through the selected time horizon followed by discounting to zero value thereafter. The 100-year time horizon conventionally chosen strongly reduces the influence of species that are short-lived relative to CO2. Additionally, GWPs assume that integrated global mean RF is a useful indicator of climate change. Although this is generally reasonable at the global scale, GWP does not take into account the rate of change, and it neglects that the surface temperature response to regionally distributed forcings depends on the location of the RF (26) and that precipitation and circulation responses may be even more sensitive to RF location (27). Along with their dependence on emission timing and location, this makes GWPs particularly ill-suited to very short-lived species such as NOx, SO2, or ammonia, although they are more reasonable for longer-lived CO. Inclusion of short-lived species in agreements alongside long-lived greenhouse gases is thus problematic (28, 29).
Read his complete commentary here
Here’s the press release from NASA/JPL with comments from Drew Shindel also.
This map shows the distribution of methane at the surface. New research shows that methane has an elevated warming effect due to its interactions with other substances in the atmosphere. For decades, climate scientists have worked to identify and measure key substances — notably greenhouse gases and aerosol particles — that affect Earth’s climate. And they’ve been aided by ever more sophisticated computer models that make estimating the relative impact of each type of pollutant more reliable.
Yet the complexity of nature — and the models used to quantify it — continues to serve up surprises. The most recent? Certain gases that cause warming are so closely linked with the production of aerosols that the emissions of one type of pollutant can indirectly affect the quantity of the other. And for two key gases that cause warming, these so-called “gas-aerosol interactions” can amplify their impact.
“We’ve known for years that methane and carbon monoxide have a warming effect,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York and lead author of a study published this week in Science. “But our new findings suggest these gases have a significantly more powerful warming impact than previously thought.”
Mixing a Chemical Soup
When vehicles, factories, landfills, and livestock emit methane and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere, they are doing more than just increasing their atmospheric concentrations. The release of these gases also have indirect effects on a variety of other atmospheric constituents, including reducing the production of particles called aerosols that can influence both the climate and the air quality. These two gases, as well as others, are part of a complicated cascade of chemical reactions that features competition with aerosols for highly reactive molecules that cleanse the air of pollutants.
“Emissions-based” estimates highlight the indirect effects that emissions of certain gases can have on the climate via aerosols, methane, ozone, and other substances in the atmosphere. Credit: NASA/GISS › Larger image
Aerosols can have either a warming or cooling effect, depending on their composition, but the two aerosol types that Shindell modeled — sulfates and nitrates — scatter incoming light and affect clouds in ways that cool Earth. They are also related to the formation of acid rain and can cause respiratory distress and other health problems for those who breathe them.
Human activity is a major source of sulfate aerosols, but smokestacks don’t emit sulfate particles directly. Rather, coal power production and other industrial processes release sulfur dioxide — the same gas that billows from volcanoes — that later reacts with atmospheric molecules called hydroxyl radicals to produce sulfates as a byproduct. Hydroxyl is so reactive scientists consider it an atmospheric “detergent” or “scrubber” because it cleanses the atmosphere of many types of pollution.
In the chemical soup of the lower atmosphere, however, sulfur dioxide isn’t the only substance interacting with hydroxyl. Similar reactions influence the creation of nitrate aerosols. And hydroxyls drive long chains of reactions involving other common gases, including ozone.
Methane and carbon monoxide use up hydroxyl that would otherwise produce sulfate, thereby reducing the concentration of sulfate aerosols. It’s a seemingly minor change, but it makes a difference to the climate. “More methane means less hydroxyl, less sulfate, and more warming,” Shindell explained.
Many atmospheric pollutants compete for access to hydroxyl radicals (OH), highly reactive molecules that “scrub” the atmosphere of pollutants. This diagram illustrates hydroxyl converting methane (CH4) into carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) into sulfate aerosols. Credit: NASA/GISS › Larger image
His team’s modeling experiment, one of the first to rigorously quantify the impact of gas-aerosol interactions on both climate and air quality, showed that increases in global methane emissions have caused a 26 percent decrease in hydroxyl and an 11 percent decrease in the number concentration of sulfate particles. Reducing sulfate unmasks methane’s warming by 20 to 40 percent over current estimates, but also helps reduce negative health effects from sulfate aerosols.
In comparison, the model calculated that global carbon monoxide emissions have caused a 13 percent reduction in hydroxyl and 9 percent reduction in sulfate aerosols.
Nitrogen oxides — pollutants produced largely by power plants, trucks, and cars — led to overall cooling when their effects on aerosol particles are included, said Nadine Unger, another coauthor on the paper and a climate scientist at GISS. That’s noteworthy because nitrogen oxides have primarily been associated with ozone formation and warming in the past.
A New Approach
To determine the climate impact of particular greenhouse gases, scientists have traditionally relied on surface stations and satellites to measure the concentration of each gas in the air. Then, they have extrapolated such measurements to arrive at a global estimate.
The drawback to that “abundance-based approach,” explained Gavin Schmidt, another GISS climate scientist and coauthor of the study, is that it doesn’t account for the constant interactions that occur between various atmospheric constituents. Nor is it easy to parse out whether pollutants have human or natural origins.
Natural sources of methane include wetlands, termites, decomposing organic materials in ocean and fresh water, and a type of ice called methane hydrate. Man-made methane sources include livestock, rice paddies, biomass burning, landfills, coal mining, and gas production. Credit: U.S Dept. of Energy Technology Laboratory
› Larger image “You get a much more accurate picture of how human emissions are impacting the climate — and how policy makers might effectively counteract climate change — if you look at what’s emitted at the surface rather than what ends up in the atmosphere,” said Shindell, who used this “emissions-based” approach as the groundwork for this modeling project.
However, the abundance-based approach serves as the foundation of key international climate treaties, such as the Kyoto Protocol or the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade plans being discussed among policymakers. Such treaties underestimate the contributions of methane and carbon monoxide to global warming, Shindell said.
Unpacking the Implications
According to Shindell, the new findings underscore the importance of devising multi-pronged strategies to address climate change rather than focusing exclusively on carbon dioxide. “Our calculations suggest that all the non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases together have a net impact that rivals the warming caused by carbon dioxide.”
In particular, the study reinforces the idea that proposals to reduce methane may be an easier place for policy makers to start climate change agreements. “Since we already know how to capture methane from animals, landfills, and sewage treatment plants at fairly low cost, targeting methane makes sense,” said Michael MacCracken, chief scientist for the Climate Institute in Washington, D.C.
This research also provides regulators insight into how certain pollution mitigation strategies might simultaneously affect climate and air quality. Reductions of carbon monoxide, for example, would have positive effects for both climate and the public’s health, while reducing nitrogen oxide could have a positive impact on health but a negative impact on the climate.
“The bottom line is that the chemistry of the atmosphere can get hideously complicated,” said Schmidt. “Sorting out what affects climate and what affects air quality isn’t simple, but we’re making progress.”
Don´t touch my barbecue!
Methane is just a head fake and it’s not just happening here. If I get you to go for methane capture, I can throw the deep ball on CO2.
Maybe I should have said “I can get behind you and catch the deep ball of CO2”.
Meh. You will never convince me that methane at a concentration less than 2 ppm can have any effect on temperature.
I saw an article in my local paper earlier this year where it was claimed that the hydrofluorocarbons now used for air conditioning have a GWP 17,000 times greater than CO2. So even though we saved the O3 layer by replacing CFC’s with HFC’s, now we’re gonna cook ourselves with our AC’s. A little data hunting showed that HFC’s are maybe 25 parts per trillion in the atmosphere.
I’m not worried about those, either.
According to the surface methane map, the two global hotspots are Argentina and Iraq.
Why?
OK cattle in Argentina (farting visible from space!), but why Iraq?
Anthony, you have gone off the rails on this one. Methane has a half life in the atmosphere of 7 years. The increase from the pre-industrial level has been 1 ppm, which is equivalent to 20 ppm of CO2, which in turn is 5% of the 388 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. Of that 388 ppm of CO2, the last 20 ppm only contributes 0.02 of a degree C of the 3.0 degrees C that carbon dioxide contributes to the greenhouse effect. So you are willing to contemplate regulations on something produces an infinitessimally small amount of heating?
This sort of rubbish research out of NASA was not meant for us. It is just fresh theology for the warmers.
“Unfortunately, ‘all else’ is never equal when it comes to the Earth’s climate and its many complex feedbacks.” Philip_B
I would bet that there are latent feedback loops just waiting for the need and that the existing ones scale up as necessary.
I remember when PCBs were a big scare. Later it was discovered that some species of bacteria break them down to harmlessness. There are also bacteria that deal with radioactive waste (don’t ask me how, it seems impossible to me). Those little bacteria seem up to anything.
We should take care to not trash the planet but PERSONALLY, if I were God, I would be INSULTED by 1) the ignoring of the wonderful balance of the planet and 2) the dangerous hysteria.
We need a low pass filter and some common sense with regard to all this nonsense.
Too bad we are all stuck on this one planet. I would love to leave this place for a saner one.
Are there imbalances in the world? Yes, but the root causes are a dishonest, corrupt, unstable money and banking model.
Methane as natural gas is very unlikely to run out any time soon, current known reserves exceed that of oil and approach that of coal: and that is only the gas we know about, remember nobody has really been looking for it.
It is the usual question of the price, natural gas is cheap to extract but expensive to ship. In the UK recovery of methane from landfill is used on a small scale but North Sea gas is cheaper. Likewise for many years there was a farm in Northern Ireland that used cow dung to produce methane, and there are similar small scale plants in England: but the gas is expensive.
Fossil fuel, whether coal, gas or oil is cheap and abundant and offers unlimited energy where and when we want and need it. That is why it has supplanted all other energy sources for general use.
Ans also why in just two hundred years wehave grown so wealthy in material terms. And a very good thing too.
As for the levels of atmospheric methane if human activity had anything to do with it they would not have stopped rising a decade ago, even allowing of rthe recent blip.
Kindest Regards
The great climate scientist Steve Martin had some amazing insights on this subject 30 years ago….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epm4Q8qJfkg
Skip to the 55 second point unless you just want to listen to Steve.
“but why Iraq”
In Iraq, the capture and use of gas obtained from oil wells was until recently considered too expensive for too little value. The infrastructure just wasn’t there to make economic use of it so it is vented or flared off. Only now is the infrastructure being put into place to use a lot of that gas.
Power plants, for example, are now being built which can utilize that gas and pipelines are being built to move the gas the short distance from the oil field to the power plants. Iraq’s older plants were designed to use oil which could be moved by rail or truck in addition to a pipeline that didn’t have to be “gas” tight.
Regulate what?
http://www.carboncommentary.com/wp-includes/images/methane.png
David Archibald (17:45:51) :
Hello David.
If the panic-stricken would stop to think for a second (and that’ll be the day) and wonder how the energy got into the Methane in the 1st place, they might just get it.
It’s nothing more than organicly stored Solar Energy.
Nature’s battery. Use it or lose it.
Whether it’s prehistoric green energy or contemporary green energy, it was made by the same Earth organic processes which continue to this day, and it stores the same solar energy that it did millions of years ago.
I guess you can say that you cannot teach new dogs about old tricks.
And I’ll say here that there are those amongst us who do not appreciate the wonderful source of energy that millions of years of Earth organic processes have saved for us.
Instead, they want to ruin it for everyone.
Maybe it’s fitting. They owe thier lives and leisure time to dream up anti-Earth theories to this energy they so despise.
Let them have a go without it.
Survior: Warmist. Place: Greenland. Enjoy the ice. Camp out with the Polar Bears, but remember to bring some Diet Coke & sunglasses to appease the bruin.
Bill Illis (16:32:39) :
“At some time in the future, Methane will be the energy source we use the most.
We might as well start building up better infrastructure now to re-capture it from natural and other sources. Natural gas is 98% Methane so a lot of that is already in place but when the oil and natural gas starts to run out, re-captured and manufactured Methane will be the energy source”.
If oil runs out?
We currently have the biggest oil reserves ever and more is found every day.
Peak oil is the second hoax of our times.
http://www.fwbusinesspress.com/display.php?id=9155
I used to read the Book of Revelation and be shocked at all the people killed but now I learn that some humans wish to kill billions or at least prevent them from ever living.
I guess all the Lord will have to do is step out of the way and we’ll do much of it ourselves.
David just wished to commit secret adultery but ending up being driven to murder of one of the top 37 men in his army. Where did we err? I would bet in 1913. That must have been one weird generation.
Interesting, there is one direct human source of methane that I don’t see covered in the graphic. Tobacco smoke contains more methane than co2. Isn’t global cigarette consumption in the region of 10 billion per year? If as we are told in the case of co2 to stop leaving lights on or electrical equipment on stand by surly the same would apply to smoking?
I really thought that some scientists had learnt a lesson,seems not.Doomed to make the same mistakes over and over.I would be happy to see the government cease all funding to climate studies and research.Take all the money being wasted on dictator science,and spend it on medical research.
Iraq methane hot spot.
Not looked at the map but one might suggest it could be to do with un-draining the southern marshes?
As I recall Saddam had them drained and dried in order to gain economic (etc.) control over the local Marsh Arabs who are not Sunnis. I read that this policy is being or has been reversed.
Clearly from an AGW perspective whoever allowed this to happen should be prosecuted. My guess would be that the decision would have been strongly supported by big NGO on the basis of human rights. Which would be quite ironic in some small way. (Assuming my theory is correct of course ….)
It’s late fall and the Indians on a remote reservation in South Dakota asked their new chief if the coming winter was going to be cold or mild.
Since he was a chief in a modern society, he had never been taught the old secrets. When he looked at the sky, he couldn’t tell what the winter was going to be like.
Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he told his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect firewood to be prepared.
But, being a practical leader, after several days, he got an idea. He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked, ‘Is the coming winter going to be cold?’ ‘It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold,’ the meteorologist at the weather service responded.
So the chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more firewood in order to be prepared.
A week later, he called the National Weather Service again.
‘Does it still look like it is going to be a very cold winter?’
‘Yes,’ the man at National Weather Service again replied, ‘it’s going to be a very cold winter.’ The chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of firewood they could find.
Two weeks later, the chief called the National Weather Service again. ‘Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?’
‘Absolutely,’ the man replied. ‘It’s looking more and more like it is going to be one of the coldest winters we’ve ever seen.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ the chief asked.
The weatherman replied, ‘The Indians are collecting firewood like crazy.’
Remember this story whenever you get advice from a government official!
“I would be happy to see the government cease all funding to climate studies and research.” Noelene
Police yourselves scientists or be prepared to see all government funding cut. (Actually, that would be a good thing. We could get back to gentlemen scientists.) We expect better from scientists. I’ve pretty much forgotten the scientific method but it is not my job to remember it. It is yours!
I’m sorry, but, allowing the Gubmint to regulate ANY naturally occurring atmospheric gas is insane!!!
What is wrong with methane? Nothing. Use it or lose it.
You don’t need to regulate it. You don’t need to tax it to death. You don’t need to endure endless nightmares of being chased by methane monsters. You don’t need to hear alarmists going bonkers over it’s existence.
You just need to capture it and put the energy to good use.
What could be more simple?
What’s wrong with C02? Nothing, if you are a plant.
This whole agenda thing reads like a sci-fi thriller. People are abducted by aliens who get them to outlaw all forms of carbon compounds, which the aliens cannot tolerate. Then, when the Earth is rid of life, the aliens can colonize. George Lucas, where are you?
As i suspected WUWT is just another believer that what we know about climate is enough to act. Unfortunately the same WUWT puts enough of data here that goes against what WUWT believes.
A sad state of affairs.
[REPLY – WUWT tries to be open minded and covers both sides of the issue(s). Anthony encourages participation by all sides. ~ Evan]
One other thing that should be mentioned. Most discussions of methane and other GHGs, as above, give the greenhouse warming potentials as the amount of warming over 100 years. But if we are looking at, say, the next 20 years, then the GWH of methane — prior to this article — jumps from 24 to 75. In other words, 3 times as much. Now, with this article, it should jump further.
Too many of us on WUWT make climate change an either-or thing. Many say global warming isn’t anything to worry about because people who come up with hockey sticks and other false Al Gore-like propaganda must be wrong, or else why would they come up with such BS. It’s hard not to feel that way.
The way I look at it, we know that increasing CO2 will increase warming (everyone from Richard Lindzen to John Christy to Roy Pielke Jr. and Sr. to Patrick Michaels agrees), but we don’t know how much. It might be at the low end or lower than the IPCC, which is why I don’t support GHG legislation right now — the present lack of warming suggests to me that the positive feedbacks in the climate models are likely to be overstated, perhaps by a lot. So I worry that any benefits of GHG legislation might be far worse than the costs to our jobs and economy, and I think we should do R&D to bring down costs of, say, algae for renewable fuels and solar for electricity.
But, if we can reduce methane for relatively low costs, and if that might buy us some time just in case CO2 turns out to be more of a problem than Prof. Lindzen (among others) thinks, then I’m all for controlling methane more. I think this may be what Anthony was suggesting?
Whatever happened to water vapor.
Much of the original research concluded that all the
atmospheric gases combined had less impact on radiation
than water vapor. Has this changed?
If not why are we still debating the pro’s and con’s
of Carbon dioxide and methane.?
Philip_B (16:45:22) :
Which means the theory behind GHG warming is sound, because increased GHG concentrations should, all else being equal, decrease the amount of radiation lost to space.
This is not possible in an open system. Thermal expansion of the gas increases entropy and equilibrium is rapidly achieved if the energy input remains constant.
Equilibrium may be delayed by the addition of more gas at a given rate but entropy increases in lock step.
The rate of a few parts ppm by man over periods of years can have no measurable effect on the climate through retarding entropy in the absents of other gases.