From Florida State University and the department of we’ve heard all this before comes this story
Researchers: Permafrost thawing could accelerate global warming
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A team of researchers lead by Florida State University have found new evidence that permafrost thawing is releasing large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere via plants, which could accelerate warming trends.
The research is featured in the newest edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We’ve known for a while now that permafrost is thawing,” said Suzanne Hodgkins, the lead author on the paper and a doctoral student in chemical oceanography at Florida State. “But what we’ve found is that the associated changes in plant community composition in the polar regions could lead to way more carbon being released into the atmosphere as methane.”
Permafrost is soil that is frozen year round and is typically located in polar regions. As the world has gotten slightly warmer, that permafrost is thawing and decomposing, which is producing increased amounts of methane.
Relative to carbon dioxide, methane has a disproportionately large global warming potential. Methane is 33 times more effective at warming the Earth on a mass basis and a century time scale relative to carbon dioxide.
As the plants break down, they are releasing carbon into the atmosphere. And if the permafrost melts entirely, there would be five times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere than there is now, said Jeff Chanton, the John Widmer Winchester Professor of Oceanography at Florida State.
“The world is getting warmer, and the additional release of gas would only add to our problems,” he said.
Chanton and Hodgkins’ work, “Changes in peat chemistry associated with permafrost thaw increase greenhouse gas production,” was funded by a three-year, $400,000 Department of Energy grant. They traveled to Sweden multiple times to collect soil samples for the study.
The research is a multicontinent effort with researchers from North America, Europe and Australia all contributing to the work.
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ok, 0 temperature rise in last 17 years.. CH4 is 33x more powerful than CO2 … lets see … 33 x 0 = oh my god! We’re all gonna die!
1.8 ppm times 33 = 59 ppm equivalent to CO2
In the last 30 years, Methane has increased about 0.2 ppm or 6.6 ppm equivalent to CO2 or about 3 years worth of CO2 increase.
In relative terms, Methane has produced in 30 years, what CO2 is doing in 3 years.
And then Methane concentrations are flattening out. The peak at Barrow Alaska (the leading indicator for the world and right in the middle of where the permafrost is supposedly melting and very close to the oil and gas operations in Alaska), the peak at Barrow was almost exactly the same as last year, roughly 2 or 3 ppbillion increase.
This is spin:
1) We report trace gas concentrations (e.g. CO2 at 400 ppm) on a volume basis. By using mass CH4 (atomic mass of 16 or so) there will be a bigger effect compared to air (most N2, which is 28 or so). 33 x 16/28 = 18, closer to the 20X I’ve heard.
2) I think I understand what they’re implying with “century time scale” but I have nearly zero faith in any of the residence times I’ve heard of for CO2 and CH4.
There is some evidence that these researchers weren’t completely clueless. Did they make multiple trips to Siberia? No, they went several times to Sweden.
chris moffatt says:
April 8, 2014 at 4:30 am
” Clearly I am missing something.”
..
What you are missing is the MASS basis.
CO2 is 44 g/mol
CH4 is 16 g/mol
Recalculate on a mass basis
chris moffatt says:
April 8, 2014 at 4:30 am
“Clearly I am missing something.”
..
You are also missing the fact that specific heat and IR adsorption are two different things.
This is a very reassuring paper. It reports that ever increasing amounts of methane are being released into the atmosphere, while we know from temperature records that during this time (well at least 17 years) the temperature has been stable. The conclusion has to be that “greenhouse gasses” don’t make any difference to atmospheric temperature. Panic over.
Check ✔
I bet a nice chunk of that grant went to sampling aquavit.
Eliza says:
April 8, 2014 at 3:23 am
Why even give any attention to this drivel?? (from the NAS)
_______________________
Shine a light on ’em and cockroaches will scurry for cover.
This team of researchers at Florida State University forgot to read the memo that told them this was an old scare ploy, soundly refuted. The warmist scare mongers are obviously not well connected administratively.One “team” a few years ago claimed that 4.5 billion humans would be dead by 2012 because of all the released methane from the permafrost. Chicken Little, eat your heart out.
That’s another $400k flushed down the loo by grant-grubbing “researchers” in the name of Climatism. They could have just asked sea ice “expert” Peter Wadhams, who believes we could have an ice-free arctic in summer as early as next year (2015) about permafrost melt and methane.
Excerpt:
“The loss of sea ice leads to seabed warming, which leads to offshore permafrost melt , which leads to methane release, which leads to enhanced warming, which leads to even more rapid uncovering of seabed. If a large release has not occurred by 2016 the danger will be continuously increasing. It is thought that at 2-3C of global warming, which means 6-8C of Arctic warming, methane release from permafrost on land will be greatly increased.”
Even noted Alarmist Gavin Schmidt pooh-poohs the arctic methane scare, though. If only his skepticism wasn’t so selective.
Nah, only one tree in Yamal will be happy with the extra CO2, the rest will be sorta blase’ about it.
Is this Recursive Methane Fury?
I need a multi-million dollar research grant to prove that storm damage is increasing. And with increasing storm severity, the damage from those storms increase as well. I also need a grant to show that when storms hit populated areas as opposed to rural ones, damage also increases.
I eagerly await your check.
Could saved a lot of carbon footprints by getting those samples via FedEx from Sven. I guess working a shovel is a graduate-level skill set…..
Actually, Canadian arctic research shows that permafrost survived Eemian and there are great records of successive interglacial/glacial cycles, so the permafrost won’t disappear, it may melt to some extent near the surface and retreat in extent.
” Jeff Alberts says:
April 8, 2014 at 7:28 am
Nah, only one tree in Yamal will be happy with the extra CO2, the rest will be sorta blase’ about it.”
Jeff, the trick is that you should plant most of the seeds upsidedown.
I still await a quantitative, unbiased proof that permafrost loss is happening on any sort of grand scale. Anecdotes based on construction excavations, road cuts and other disturbances do not count. Of course the permafrost melts if you did a hole into it!
Check out this grant for ONE year! Who needs adjustments for inflation? He was well on a hockey stick trajectory.
[Reconstructing Tropical Pacific Climate Variability and Monsoon Systems, and Abrupt Changes from Ice Cores on Irian Jaya, Indonesia and Hualcan, Peru
Investigator(s):
Lonnie Thompson thompson (Principal Investigator)
Ellen Mosley-Thompson (Co-Principal Investigator)
$1,094,433.00 2008
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0823586&HistoricalAwards=false ]
Ooops! Wrong thread. :-O
Did -> dig.
My only question here is we know it was warmer in the Minoan, Roman and Medieval (at least as warm) warm periods, so shouldn’t these layers that we are seeing melt now have already melted at least once during those periods? This would mean that any methane locked up in those melted layers have already vented to the atmosphere a millennia or ten ago and would have relatively little left for current thermageddon imaginings. As those warmer warm periods would have melted deeper than current weak warm period, we will not have even melted down to the point of adjacent layers being “virgin” permafrost laden with loads of this “deadly trap”.
Of course all of this will just wind up as food for the tree line as it moves north (south for our southern hemisphere).
chris moffatt says:
April 8, 2014 at 5:13 am
Given equal atmospheric masses of CO2 and CH4 it seems to me that the heat capacity of the CH4 would be ~2.7 times that of the CO2. Whence the figure of 33?
Given that the actual concentration of CH4 is so low – about 1/200 of CO2 it also seems to me that as an atmospheric warming agent it is negligible. What am I missing here?
That the heat capacity isn’t the key parameter, the absorbance of IR is. The methane is still at a low enough concentration that it doesn’t exhibit a log dependence.
Pave the permafrost! Save the planet!