Guest post by Steven Goddard
The climate panic headline this week has been that the warming Arctic is burping out dangerous quantities of greenhouse gas Methane.
Published on Friday, March 5, 2010 by Agence France Presse
Huge Methane Leak in Arctic Ocean: Study
WASHINGTON – Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from unstable permafrost in the Arctic Ocean faster than scientists had thought and could worsen global warming, a study said Thursday. From 2003 to 2008, an international research team led by University of Alaska-Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov surveyed the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which covers more than 772,200 square miles (two million square kilometers) of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. “This discovery reveals a large but overlooked source of methane gas escaping from permafrost underwater, rather than on land,” the study said. “More widespread emissions could have dramatic effects on global warming in the future.”
Methane is 30X more potent a greenhouse than CO2, so this sounds very alarming. Or does it? From the New York Times:
Dr. Shakhova said that undersea methane ordinarily undergoes oxidation as it rises to the surface, where it is released as carbon dioxide. But because water over the shelf is at most about 50 meters deep, she said, the gas bubbles to the surface there as methane. As a result, she said, atmospheric levels of methane over the Arctic are 1.85 parts per million, almost three times as high as the global average of 0.6 or 0.7 parts per million.
The first problem with the statement is that it is incorrect. The average global methane concentration is ~1.8 ppm, (1786 ppb) not 0.6 ppm as seen below in this graph from NOAA:
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/images/methanetrend.jpg
The author also says that the Arctic is belching out nearly eight million tons of methane per annum.
She estimated that annual methane emissions from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf total about seven teragrams. (A teragram is 1.1 million tons.)
Sounds like a big number – except that burping/flatulating cattle produce ten times more methane than the Arctic. According to the EPA:
Globally, ruminant livestock produce about 80 million metric tons of methane annually
Is 1.85 ppm a large number? Let’s look at an analogy of what a population concentration of 1.85 parts per million really represents. If the population of Wyoming (544,270) represented all the molecules in the atmosphere, there would be only one methane molecule in the entire state. At 1.85 ppm, there would be fifteen methane molecules in New York City, out of population eight million. There would be on average zero in Nunavut, Canada.
I wonder how much methane Taco Bell indirectly generates per annum? I also wonder why so many Arctic/Greenland studies include only the years 2003-2008. Perhaps they are only interested in reporting data from unusually warm years in the Arctic?
Speaking of the Arctic. What is up with this?
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Methane, The Panic Du Jour
The climate panic headline this week has been that the warming Arctic is burping out dangerous quantities of greenhouse gas Methane.
Published on Friday, March 5, 2010 by Agence France Presse
Huge Methane Leak in Arctic Ocean: Study
WASHINGTON – Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from unstable permafrost in the Arctic Ocean faster than scientists had thought and could worsen global warming, a study said Thursday. From 2003 to 2008, an international research team led by University of Alaska-Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov surveyed the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which covers more than 772,200 square miles (two million square kilometers) of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. “This discovery reveals a large but overlooked source of methane gas escaping from permafrost underwater, rather than on land,” the study said. “More widespread emissions could have dramatic effects on global warming in the future.”
Methane is 30X more potent a greenhouse than CO2, so this sounds very alarming. Or does it? From the New York Times:
Dr. Shakhova said that undersea methane ordinarily undergoes oxidation as it rises to the surface, where it is released as carbon dioxide. But because water over the shelf is at most about 50 meters deep, she said, the gas bubbles to the surface there as methane. As a result, she said, atmospheric levels of methane over the Arctic are 1.85 parts per million, almost three times as high as the global average of 0.6 or 0.7 parts per million.
The first problem with the statement is that it is incorrect. The average global methane concentration is 1.8 ppm, not 0.6 ppm.
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/images/methanetrend.jpg
The author also says that the Arctic is belching out nearly eight million tons of methane per annum.
She estimated that annual methane emissions from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf total about seven teragrams. (A teragram is 1.1 million tons.)
Sounds like a big number – except that burping/flatulating cattle produce ten times more methane than the Arctic. According to the EPA:
Globally, ruminant livestock produce about 80 million metric tons of methane annually
Is 1.85 ppm a large number? Let’s look at an analogy of what a population concentration of 1.85 parts per million really represents. If the population of Wyoming (544,270) represented all the molecules in the atmosphere, there would be only one methane molecule in the entire state. At 1.85 ppm, there would be fifteen methane molecules in New York City, out of population eight million. There would be on average zero in Nunavut, Canada.
I wonder how much methane Taco Bell indirectly generates per annum? I also wonder why so many Arctic/Greenland studies include only the years 2003-2008. Perhaps they are only interested in reporting data from unusually warm years in the Arctic?
Speaking of the Arctic. What is up with this?
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
4 Billion,
That’s a point in time measurement. You ask if I think warming is normal… there has been no measured/observed warming. This is just a point in time measurement. Is it scary the way you put it, yeah maybe… but I could just as easily take the same information to posit that since the last glaciation this permafrost has been warming at a rate roughly 1C per 1000 years.
I think it’s also important to note that as close as it may be to thawing, there doesn’t appear to be evidence that it actually has begun to thaw. This could mean the leaks in question were caused by other phenomenon (seismic activity disturbing the protective layer, scientists drilling holes everywhere to look for signs of global warming ; )
Have the ocean waters in the area warmed in recent years?
“…worse than we thought”.
How bad did they think it was in the first place, then?
I think we should be told.
“Karl Maki (19:34:09) :
One wonders how the earth managed to survive before all the climate researchers were on the scene to worry about it.”
And if we hadn’t invented supercomputers and satellites just in time we would be unaware of our impending doom. How lucky was that! 😉
cheers David
Great, the more the better, bring it on!
Methane plus oxygen plus ignition equals heat and light and power and… CO2.
CO2 has flatlined ffor its effect on temperature, log response, yeah?
So what more responsible thing to do than convert all that nasty supposedly climate warming methane into neutral CO2?
Note AGW is to be replaced by CGW where C represents whatever the appropriate word is instead of anthropogenic that says “it ain’t man but cows wot done it.”
That also means we can carry on eating cows ‘cos if we don’t they’ll cause the planet to boil.
That makes vergans climate criminals.
Meanwhile, what are the ants doing?
BGW = Bovineogenic Global Warming…?
And for next month, CGW = ???
Nick B
That would be alot of holes 😉
Siberia is warming pretty fast with warm water runoff flowing out to sea, raising sea temp.
From ‘The Independant’,
“The preliminary findings of the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008, being prepared for publication by the American Geophysical Union, are being overseen by Igor Semiletov of the Far-Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1994, he has led about 10 expeditions in the Laptev Sea but during the 1990s he did not detect any elevated levels of methane. However, since 2003 he reported a rising number of methane “hotspots”, which have now been confirmed using more sensitive instruments on board the Jacob Smirnitskyi.”
“In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through “methane chimneys” rising from the sea floor”
Sea foaming with Methane sounds spectacular, should be on every TV news.
The ridiculous analogy with the population of Wyoming misses the point entirely. It can be seen by the article on this blog ‘The logarithmic effect of CO2’, even very small amounts of trace gases can have an influence on the greenhouse effect. The relatively tiny number of methane molecules in the atmosphere is still enough that radiation from the surface of the planet will possible encounter one or more on its way to space. The methane will selectively absorb and re-radiate certain frequencies of radiation, leading to the greenhouse effect.
A far more convincing argument against this scare story about methane would be that the gas has a very short lifetime in the atmosphere before being oxidised.
Why are we all still here when we know we have had as warm if not warmer periods in the past. Roman Warm Period, Holocene Climate Optimum, MWP etc.,???
http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/02/is-melting-tundra-permafrost-the-co2-tipping-point-of-runaway-warming-peerresearch-says-no.html
4 billion (00:46:34) :
Have you considered how the sea-bottom sediment could ever be colder than the freezing-point of sea-water? In that case the sea would freeze to the bottom, no? Does it ever do that even in the Laptev Sea?
So, yes it is perfectly normal, and yes, all the permafrost on the bottom of the sea will ultimately melt as it has been doing (slowly) for the last 10,000 years, and as it has been doing during every interglacial.
By the way the North Sea, the Bay of Biscay, the Bering Sea, the shallow areas around New Foundland and sundry other shallow areas were also permafrost during the last glaciation. That all melted long ago, with no noticeable effect on methane levels.
Henry@ur momisugly Gary Hladik (19:52:07) :
Henry Pool (19:11:36) : “Does anyone here know where that assessment in the factsheet comes from that methane is 30 x stronger a greenhouse gas than carbondioxide?”
I’ve seen this sort of claim for years, and finally decided to look it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential
thanks Gary
Noted that CO2 is =1 but 1 compared to what? Who did those initial tests where it was decided that CO2 is a greenhouse gas? Svante Arrhenius? Or do we have some more recent research?
They decided not to give a figure for water vapor which is totally rediculous. e.g. how much EXTRA water vapor is created by all of man’s shallow pools, canals and dams due to human activities?
I am not sure how CO2 could be 1. According to my own thump of the rule (looking at the spectral data) then the cooling caused by CO2 is more or less equal to the warming so that value should be closer to zero. So now we have 30 x more or less zero….at 1-2 ppm’s….
so I don’t think we have to worry much about the methane….!!
Mike G in Corvallis (21:40:15) :
And unpatriotic!
Juraj V. (01:07:57)
Desperation to sell more newspapers.
Question?
Has anyone checked the methane levels in Parliment or the White House?
“For God’s sake son don’t light a match!”
Baa Humbug (22:44:32) :
Regards methane. Here in Australia, we have about one million feral camels. According to the UN carbon auditing method, the methane from feral camels is NOT considered for auditing purposes. BUT, the few thousand domestic camels, well, their methane IS counted. Feral farts are different from domestic farts apparently.
**********************************************
Yes, because “feral” = “free-range”, and every eco-activist knows that “free-range” is Better. Duh.
Methane again? Talk about grasping at straws! Their cargo cult science is rapidly reaching a tipping point, where it will simply implode, leaving the detritus of ruined careers, trials involving charges of fraud and malfeasance, civil lawsuits, and the public trust in all science in tatters. It will take decades for society to fully recover from the harm the CAGW/CC cargo cult science has done.
Love the cartoon, Josh. Keep ’em coming.
Henry Pool (19:11:36) : “Does anyone here know where that assessment in the factsheet comes from that methane is 30 x stronger a greenhouse gas than carbondioxide?”>>
Been asking the same question. Wikipedia refers to it, quotes APCC AR4 in one of the references. That quotes Ramaswamy et al 2001. Can’t find that paper but found an update analysis of Methane forcing on IOP:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/4/4/044007/erl9_4_044007.html#erl324255s2
Basicaly says it has no significant forcing of its own, but it breaks down into CO2 and then they have some math I don’t get to show that the extra CO2 counts for 30 times the same number of CH4. But since we’re already tracking the CO2, INCLUDING that derived from Methane, they’re pretty much counting come of the CO2 twice methinks.
I’ve actually pointed out oceanfloor (and other methane sources) before. Part of that methane cycle is isotope loading. Being geological methane for a large extent (and being further ‘lightened’ by biological action via some as yet unknown method) the carbon isotopes fairly closely match ‘man-made’ carbon in isotopic ratio. There are very deep methane sinks. Not all of these (in fact very few of these) are of man-made origin.
Sometime look at the burning methane fields in Russia. Too hot to approach at this point, almost impossible to put out.
Methane is CH4. It is broken down by biological action (when small amounts occur) into Carbon Dioxide, and when burned water and carbon dioxide.
The methodology for locating man-made carbon dioxide is here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V79-3VWKNJX-32&_user=10&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F1996&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=c5294553a0fc0525e23d02c29e73e6f1
They utilize the carbon isotope ratio, which is apparently fairly fixed for oil and methane.
Methane clathrate (and volcanic methane and carbon dioxide trench carbon dioxide clathrate) is also carbon-light, given that the sun appears to be the only major source for carbon 14.
At least one known clathrate contains toxic amounts of hydrogen sulfide, as well as traces of carbon, and other sulphate compositions.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V61-3T0TFMG-4&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F30%2F1998&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1238645918&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=4f63b6b5b3f186be9b2c515c6f4245c1
The methane presumed to exist is in the gigaton range.
http://ethomas.web.wesleyan.edu/ees123/clathrate.htm
and is assumed to be both biogenic from plant and animal decomposition at depth, as well as from biological action on deep petroleum.
Some interesting stuff. Reminds me of an airplane report from the 1950s, flying over the Puerto Rico trench. A sighting was made of a large boil, described ‘like a cauliflower rising from the ocean’ by the aircraft pilot and passengers flying over. This is typical of a large methane ‘burp’, as the methane converts rapidly from a solid to a gas occupying 255 times its own volume as it goes through warmer water, and often breaks off in rafts.
Indicative of anything? Damned if I know. I’m just your average idiot.
From the following new scientist article
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18614-methane-bubbling-out-of-arctic-ocean–but-is-it-new.html
“Shakhova and her colleagues are calling for “urgent” investigations to determine whether the methane venting they have found is an ongoing phenomenon or signals the start of a larger release.”
So there is the reason for the drama, they want more money to do more research. To say nothing to see here folks would simply put themselves out of business.
Unethical claims
In today’s economy it is hard for the greedy to get research funding, Her only chance is to add fear and urgency.
None of the above posts mention the release of CH4 from rice paddys. If it is so terrible, attack the asians and other folks that grow rice. She is apparently racist.
Today the most serious form of CH4 production is the landfill. It means our city dwellers are the problem.
hmmm…according to a number of studies, green plants produce and “exhale” methane via some unknown process! Please see:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0111_060111_plant_methane.html
Note their retraction about the GHG significance of this!!
RUN AWAY, THE PETUNIAS ARE KILLING THE PLANET! I mean really, this is getting sillier by the day.
Henry chance, I posted yesterday regarding rice paddy agriculture.
If you want to attack folks who grow rice, may I suggest Riceland Rice in Stuttgart, Arkansas, or perhaps set your sights on California. The USA is a big producer in its own right.
OK I think I figured out how they get to 30x.
1 mole of CH4 breaks down to 0.61 mole of CO2.
The intermediate processes wind up creating more H2O as well as O3.
So combined forcing from the end products is the total of the CO2, H2O and O3
THEN they argue that methane from rice paddies etc doesn’t matter because for every CH4 they produce, they have to consume one CO2. So a cow producing CH4 is a WAY bigger issue than a rice paddie. As soon as I saw that explanation I thought…. hmmm…. they lining up to propose a tax on beef?
Sigh. Yes.
http://fixtheclimate.com/uploads/tx_templavoila/PP_Methane_Johansson_Hedenus_v.2.0.pdf
Anything to come up with a boogyman that needs to be controlled at a global level.
It’s a solution in search of a (non-) problem:
As the cartoon suggests.
But, also, as the cartoon suggests, the timing of this story is evidence that AGW is a spent political force, sure there will be spasms of frenzy in an attempt to reignite the political agenda — but the revelations of the last months have all but broken the back of the AGW political agenda — and that’s a good thing.
As soon as I saw that explanation I thought…. hmmm…. they lining up to propose a tax on beef?>>
..which of course, would make them “cash cows”
looks like CH4 absorption is minimal and does not occupy any unique spectral bands.
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Transmission_png
” davidmhoffer (07:49:58) :
hmmm…. they lining up to propose a tax on beef?
Sigh. Yes.
http://fixtheclimate.com/uploads/tx_templavoila/PP_Methane_Johansson_Hedenus_v.2.0.pdf ”
And I guess they don’t bother counting the fact that cows eat grass in large quantities that have trapped CO2 in it’s creation.
This brings up the eternal question:
If a cow patty falls, and an tree grows from it, is their global warming?
Juraj V. (01:07:57) :
This comment and this comment:
Carbon-based life form (18:11:47) :
Ummm… yeah. Was it CO2 that caused the warming now? Hey, I have an idea. The natural oscillation of Arctic ice caused the MWP by outgassing methane from the Arctic, rendering Greenland arable land for the Vikings.
Problem solved. CO2=double plus good.