From UC Irvine:
UCI studies find different reasons for global methane riddle
One cites less dependency on oil, the other new farming practices
Irvine, Calif. – Two new UC Irvine papers reach markedly different conclusions about why methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, unexpectedly leveled off near the end of the 20th century. They appear today in the journal Nature.
Both note that after decades of increases due to worldwide industry and agriculture, the tapering off of the hazardous hydrocarbon in the atmosphere – which began in the 1980s – was remarkable.
“It was an amazing mystery as to why this occurred,” said earth system science professor Eric Saltzman, a co-author of one paper, which suggests that reduced use of petroleum and increased capture and commercial use of natural gas were the driving factors.
A second UCI paper found that water efficiency and heavier commercial fertilizer use in the booming Asian farming sector provided less fertile ground for soil microbes that create methane, while at the same time increasing nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas.
Associate researcher Murat Aydin, lead author on the first paper, drilled into South Pole and Greenland glaciers to extract trapped air as much as a century old. The samples were analyzed for ethane, a chemical that has some of the same sources as methane but is easier to track.
“Levels rose from early in the century until the 1980s, when the trend reverses, with a period of decline over 20 years,” Aydin wrote. “We find this variability is primarily driven by changes in emissions from fossil fuels.”
The authors posit that replacement of oil with lower-priced natural gas could be key.
The second team measured and analyzed the chemical composition of methane in the atmosphere from the late 1980s to 2005. They found no evidence of fewer methane atoms linked to fossil fuel. Instead, the sharpest trend by far was changes in the Northern Hemisphere linked to new farm practices, mainly the use of inorganic fertilizers instead of traditional manure and drainage of fields mid-season.
“Approximately half of the decrease in methane can be explained by reduced emissions from rice agriculture in Asia over the past three decades, associated with increases in fertilizer application and reductions in water use,” said lead author Fuu Ming Kai, who wrote his UCI doctoral thesis on the work and is now with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research & Technology.
Martin Heimann, director of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, was asked by Nature editors to write a commentary on both papers.
“It is indeed very remarkably rare that two differing studies about the same subject come out from the same department – I can’t think of a similar case. But I think both analyses are scientifically sound and in themselves consistent,” said Heimann, lead author on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. “At this time I would not favor one over the other.”
Heimann has invited members of both teams to a September symposium at which, he said, “we will discuss the two studies from all angles.”
Identifying methane sources is urgent. Research has shown that the fast-acting greenhouse gas is the second-largest contributor to climate change. Scientists around the world were heartened by the stabilizing levels, but there are now signs the hydrocarbon may be on the upswing again.
“We will need to reconcile the differences,” said earth system science professor James Randerson, a co-author on the second paper. “The important thing is that we must figure out – as scientists and a society – ways to reduce methane emissions.”
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Well when alarmists are reminded that CO2 increase by itself cannot possibly cause the massive increase in global temperatures because of the logarythmic nature of CO2 absorbtion of heat energy, noting also that there is not enough physical carbon based fuel on the planet to increase temperatures to catastrophic levels, they fall back on the “positive feedbacks” argument which CO2 increase is supposed to trigger. The methane escaping from the melting tundra is one of these feedback mechanisms. And these papers both show that mechanism currently is NOT contributing to global atmospheric methane concentrations.
This is yet another hole below the bow of the great liner AGW. What the heck will it take to sink this floating collendar?
Methane is an IR reactive gas like CO2 and H2O. Greenhouse Gas is a poor description for a gas that does not do as so described.
Methane is also unstable in the atmosphere and breaks down, oxidises, to CO2 and water.
“Research has shown that black is white, white is black, true is false and false is true. My broken clock has been shown to have the right time twice a day. 23 times a day it has the right time for other time zones.”
A stopped clock is more accurate at times than a working clock that happens to be consistently 5 minutes slow. By climatologists logic, we should all have stopped clocks.
KnR: I’ll trade you 12 cow farts for 20 sheep burps.
China to the rescue AGAIN! First they start burning so much dirty coal that the sulfate aerosol particles act like a sunshade bringing global warming to a screeching halt around the year 2000 and then with all the economic growth that comes along with cheap energy they improve rice farming practices and bring the dramatic, unprecedented rise of an uber-potent greenhouse gas to a halt.
Will wonders never cease? /sarc
is that good methane or bad methane, it’s important to know, so we can boo and chheer athe the appropriate times!
There seems to be something fundamentally wrong with our production of science PHDs. The Polar Bear study, these two studies, and the entire IPCC process all indicate that we have too many science PHDs who are too poorly trained. Casual inspection indicates that the problem is increasing with time. They have reached a critical mass where they favorably review each others thrash.
Perhaps we need a study of our education of science PHDs. Can we track back to the source of the Doctorates of those who produce and review silly results? Maybe there are just a few universities to blame and we can identify them.
Or perhaps we need a super doctorate committee that has the power to suspend Doctorate Degrees when evidence of incompetence reaches a critical level.
Further on my last. An article in today’s internet Wall Street Journal includes the following:
“Since 2001, while the number of papers published in research journals has risen 44%, the number retracted has leapt more than 15-fold, data compiled for The Wall Street Journal by Thomson Reuters reveal.
Just 22 retraction notices appeared in 2001, but 139 in 2006 and 339 last year. Through seven months of this year, there have been 210, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science, an index of 11,600 peer-reviewed journals world-wide.”
More retractions could reflect better post publication monitoring. The thrust of the WSJ article is that they show that more erroneous studies are published..
John Marshall, Andre and others, who have no experience with chemical reactions & combustion processes, why not look at a physical/chemcial data reference book (eg Perry’s Chemical Engineering Handbook) but I suppose ignition temperatures, rate constants, energy of formations etc are beyond your capability. It seems to be beyond the capability of the pseudo-scientist lead authors of the IPCC as well. I repeat look at the post http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2011/07/natural-gas-more-polluting-than-coal-only-according-to-the-ipcc-a-note-from-cementafriend/
The decades old forecast of the world dying out because of farts is still true. The difference is that they are all in Congress,now.
wayne Job says:
August 11, 2011 at 1:24 am
Is it possible to re-educate all these so called leading edge researchers in such a way that they are employable in the real world?
=============
probably not, they replaced lick it yourself stamps with glue…and I can’t think of anythoing else much they would be good for
“Levels rose from early in the century until the 1980s, when the trend reverses, with a period of decline over 20 years. We find this variability is primarily driven by changes in emissions from fossil fuels.”
I would like to see the evidence for the belief that emissions have reduced since the 1980s. I suspect that their view on this is restricted to their own backyard. What are we doing with all of that oil that we are pumping?
That’s not to say that “suggestions” of a current increase in methane should be of no concern. After all, if we get to the point that there is enough of it to form a Stefan Boltzmann solid surface, we are going to cook!
The real conclusion: They have no clue.
And they said the carbon credit market was dead!
Lower petroleum consumption?
http://watd.wuthering-heights.co.uk/chartpages/c/c01oilconsworld.html
Do these guys think we have already shifted significantly to electric cars? Have cows stopped farting? Are vegetarians turning to carnivores. (http://bing.search.sympatico.ca/?q=vegetarians%20and%20farts&mkt=en-ca&setLang=en-CA)
“….commercial use of natural gas were the driving factors”
Do they not know that nat gas is METHANE!!! These academics have to get out more.
Bill Illis: “Here is Methane back to the height of the last ice age. As Revkin noted today, there is no Holocene Optimum signal in Methane so the permafrost is not going to melt away and cause a Methane apocalypse.”
The rise in temperature of the soil that is supposed to create the methane apocalypse starts the trees growing much faster than the rotting of the vegetation in the ground. If the methane emerges as a result of temperature, it is far more than compensated for by increased biomass growth. It is a paradisical apocalypse.
And, how did that biomass get into the permafrost in the first place??
Oh yeah…
Why would flaring increase atmospheric methane? You’re burning the methane.
Brendan says:
August 10, 2011 at 11:58 pm
Ken Hall says:
August 11, 2011 at 2:20 am
I find many of the arguments in climate science very irritating, but the permafrost alarms are near the top on that scale. I can’t tell if these people are just incredibly ignorant or are being deliberately deceptive. It seems to me that all the alarmists statements about melting permafrost try to convey the implicit assumption that permafrost refers to ground that is all permanently frozen. In reality almost every area of permafrost has what is known as an active layer, which like the waxing and waning sea ice, melts and refreezes annually. Permafrost means that at some depth below the surface, which ranges from about 3′ to more than 20′, the ground remains frozen for more than one year. When they are hyperventilating about melting permafrost what they are talking about is ground, that is on avg. at least 7′ below the surface, which used to stay below freezing that is now at 1 or 2 degrees above. If you know anything about the process of decay you’ll realize that development is hardly likely to generate a huge spike in methane production, especially when you consider, given the glacially slow rate of soil creation in permafrost areas, that soils at that depth have probably been through hundreds if not thousands of annual melt cycles already.
Even if large areas of permafrost were to disappear, the natural process is for boreal forests to move in fairly rapidly and the resulting uptick in plant production would more than compensate for any increase in methane releases.
“Associate researcher Murat Aydin, lead author on the first paper, drilled into South Pole and Greenland glaciers to extract trapped air as much as a century old”
As discussed before at WUWT,( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/26/co2-ice-cores-vs-plant-stomata/ ) if Murat is digging into something a century old, then its firn, not ice. It doesn’t yet have sealed bubbles and can exchange gas with the atmosphere by diffusion. So any trend found over a period as short as 20 years is likely to be spurious.
“What if there are multiple studies, and the sum of their effects is greater than 100% of the change?”
That’s okay, it’s a feedback effect.
lol, I love they way the first study starts out by saying (paraphrased) “well, we didn’t actually study METHANE, exactly, but we kinda sorta studied something a lot like it, so we’ll just pretend like we studied methane.”
Yeah, and the initial assumption that it’s gotta be something man made is great too. Wouldn’t want to investigate anything else because you won’t get published that way.
By far, the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect is hydroxl acid. In comparison, Methane has an insignificant effect.
http://www.mindspring.com/~boba4/Dhmo.html
/sarc
“Scientists around the world were heartened by the stabilizing levels, but there are now signs the hydrocarbon may be on the upswing again.”
By which they mean they were disheartened, worried, and depressed by the stabilizing levels, just as they have been by the warming having flatlined and Arctic ice failing to go into its “death spiral”. But now that there are “signs” methane “may” be on the upswing again, they have a glimmer of hope that their CAGW gravy train will continue to rumble along for a bit longer.
These are indeed tough and worrying times for Warmist “scientists”.
Maybe methane is food for some life forms. If so, it would seem an abundance of methane would increase the population of methane consumers.
There was a study several years ago that attributed the drop in world methane levels to the fall of the Soviet Union and the cessation of their wasteful releases of methane in the extraction and refining of petroleum. Made sense to me then, though no one seems to recall it among the commenters here. I am not an acedemic. Perhaps others could chase that one down.