From Washington State University and “the EPA and ecos now have another new tool to prevent new reservoirs in California” department:
VANCOUVER, Wash. – Washington State University researchers say the world’s reservoirs are an underappreciated source of greenhouse gases, producing the equivalent of roughly 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide a year, or 1.3 percent of all greenhouse gases produced by humans.
That’s more greenhouse gas production than all of Canada.
Writing [this] week’s journal BioScience, the WSU researchers say reservoirs are a particularly important source of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the course of a century. Reservoir methane production is comparable to rice paddies or biomass burning, both of which are included in emission estimates of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading international authority on the subject.
John Harrison, co-author and associate professor in the WSU Vancouver School of the Environment, last month attended a meeting in Minsk, Belarus, to discuss including reservoir emissions in a planned 2019 IPCC update of how countries report their greenhouse gas inventories.
Methane accounts for 80 percent
“We had a sense that methane might be pretty important but we were surprised that it was as important as it was,” said Bridget Deemer, WSU research associate and lead author. “It’s contributing right around 80 percent of the total global warming impact of all those gases from reservoirs. It’s a pretty important piece of the budget.”
The BioScience analysis, which drew on scores of other studies, is the largest and most comprehensive look to date at the link between reservoirs and greenhouse gases, Harrison said.
“Not only does it incorporate the largest number of studies,” he said. “It also looks at more types of greenhouse gases than past studies.”
Acre per acre, reservoirs emit 25 percent more methane than previously thought, he said.
The researchers acknowledge that reservoirs provide important services like electrical power, flood control, navigation and water. But reservoirs have also altered the dynamics of river ecosystems, impacting fish and other life forms. Only lately have researchers started to look at reservoirs’ impact on greenhouse gases.
“While reservoirs are often thought of as ‘green’ or carbon neutral sources of energy, a growing body of work has documented their role as greenhouse gas sources,” Deemer, Harrison and their colleagues write.
Gases from decomposing organic matter
Unlike natural water bodies, reservoirs tend to have flooded large amounts of organic matter that produce carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide as they decompose. Reservoirs also receive a lot of organic matter and “nutrients” like nitrogen and phosphorous from upstream rivers, which can further stimulate greenhouse gas production
In 2000, BioScience published one of the first papers to assert that reservoir greenhouse gases contribute substantially to global warming. Since then, there has been a nine-fold increase in studies of reservoirs and greenhouse gases. Where earlier studies tended to be confined to reservoirs behind power stations, the newer studies also looked at reservoirs used for flood control, water storage, navigation and irrigation.
The WSU researchers are the first to consider methane bubbling in models of reservoir greenhouse gas emissions. Also, while previous papers have found that young, tropical reservoirs emit more methane than older, more northern systems, this study finds that the total global warming effect of a reservoir is best predicted by how biologically productive it is, with more algae and nutrient rich systems producing more methane.
The authors also report higher per-area rates of methane emission from reservoirs than have been reported previously. This means that acre-for-acre the net effect of new reservoirs on atmospheric greenhouse gases will be greater than previously thought. Reservoir construction around the globe is expected to proceed rapidly in coming decades.
Largest study of reservoir greenhouse gas emissions
“There’s been a growing sense in the literature that methane bubbles are a really important component of the total emissions from lake and reservoir ecosystems,” said Deemer. “This study revisited the literature to try and synthesize what we know about the magnitude and control on methane emissions and other greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.”
The result is that, in addition to being the largest study of reservoir greenhouse gas emissions to date, it is the first to comprehensively look at the flow of all three major greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide—from reservoirs to the atmosphere.
The work is in keeping with WSU’s Grand Challenges, a suite of research initiatives aimed at large societal issues. It is particularly relevant to the challenge of sustainable resources and its themes of supplying food, energy and water for future generations.
Funding sources include the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Climate Preparedness and Resilience Programs, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. None of the funders had a role in the design of the research or the interpretation of its results.
All well and good, but I wonder, what would these researchers find if they performed the same study on natural lakes? It seems to me that natural lakes exhibit all of the same processes, but over longer time scales. They say in the PR
Unlike natural water bodies, reservoirs tend to have flooded large amounts of organic matter that produce carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide as they decompose. Reservoirs also receive a lot of organic matter and “nutrients” like nitrogen and phosphorous from upstream rivers, which can further stimulate greenhouse gas production.
That may be true, but many natural lakes have formed in the same way, rivers and streams do get blocked by natural events to produce natural lakes. Plus, there is a time limit, most reservoirs have been built in the last 100 years, and once the flooded biomass decays, the peaks they may observe disappear. And, there are scores of reports of natural lake producing methane seeps, such as this one documented by NASA in the Arctic. https://earthdata.nasa.gov/user-resources/sensing-our-planet/leaking-lakes
And there are others. Mono Lake in California, a large, shallow saline soda lake in Mono County, California, formed at least 760,000 years ago as a terminal lake in an endorheic basin was shown in 1987 to have significant methane seeps:
Click to access Mono.NatlGas.GCA.pdf
In a 2009 study of methane seeps in Qalluuraq Lake by the University of Alaska, where the lake produces so much methane that they considered harnessing it to power the village of Atqasuk, they note:
Recent work revealed that seeps may contribute as much as 50-70 million tones of atmospheric CH4 per year, or ~10% of global sources.
http://ine.uaf.edu/werc/werc-projects/methane-gas-seeps/
Now, I’m not sure who’s right. University of Alaska says by the above statement that total global sources of methane would be about 500-700 million tonnes, yet in this new WSU study fingering reservoirs, they says “…roughly 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide a year”.
Hmmm, somebody’s assessment is off.
For reference, here is a March 2016 graph of methane emissions:
And finally, I think these researchers are making some assumptions about how reservoirs are built that might not be true about the amount of flooded biomass. For example, note the treeline at Lake Oroville in California in this photo – they removed the trees prior to filling:
Oh well, it makes great AGW theater:
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Facepallm:
To quote the Greenie Watch:
“But in the atmosphere, water vapour absorbs the same solar wavelengths. And water vapour is many time more frequent than CH4. So there is little or nothing left for CH4 to absorb after water vapour has done its work. In real life its presence or absence in the air has virtually no effect at all”
Should we drain all our lakes? You know, to save the planet?
Don’t forget the oceans! All that rotting biomass- we’re totally screwed….
Wetlands are worse so start there. If world temperatures drop then you know it’s working.
” Underappreciated “. Balderdash; we appreciate all of the sources of atmospheric CO2 that we can get !
G
And don’t forget the beaver dams. Like this one, over 1/2 mile long. http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2010/05/04/enormous-beaver-dam-visible-space.html Obviously the beavers should be paying a carbon tax for their environmental insensitivity. No doubt further research will reveal that N. American beavers were responsible for the MWP, and that the Hudson Bay Company triggered the LIA by turning millions of those little outlaws into beaver skin hats for export to Europe.
We should probably check the validity of this climate claim first before we do that… How are we going to save the planet by killing all the species living in the lakes? That’s a complete double negative.
We should probably check the validity of this climate claim first… How are we going to save the planet if we’re just going to drain and kill all the species living in the lakes? Honestly, that’s a complete double negative.
Have these greenie scientists ever found anything humans do that doesn’t make global warming worse?
Nope:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
I believe that the EPA’s methane emissions from natural gas production were based projections from questionable studies on leakage from gas wells and production sites. Accepting the EPS’s premise of substantial leakage runs counter to logic. If you are producing natural gas for sale, why would you allow a significant amount of your profits to leak away into the atmosphere?
If you’re producing versus exploring. For example, when drilling for oil, if you don’t have a permit for gas, you’d let it escape into the atmosphere. Not so much regarding the permit, but rather you’d likely not have the right equipment to capture, much less transport. How the EPA would/could account for this though, is beyond me.
That methane is usually flared, not just released.
Or used to generate local power:
http://www.oilandgasproductnews.com/article/19299/natural-gas-generators-used-to-power-oilfield-equipment-deliver-benefits-to-operators-and-the-environment
Whether it is flared our used for power generation, it is burned into CO2 and H2O and ceases to be methane.
The conventional theory (Callendar Revelle Hansen Lacis) frames the AGW problem in terms of “extraneous carbon” external to the surface-atmosphere carbon cycle and climate system brought up by man from deep under the ground where such carbon had been sequestered from the surface-atmosphere system for millions of years. The essence of this theory is that the injection of “extraneous carbon” into the delicately balanced surface-atmosphere system in the large quantities involved is not natural but an unnatural and dangerous perturbation of nature that will upset the surface-atmosphere climate system with potentially catastrophic results.
emissions of carbon from surface sources such as forest fires, the use of wood fuel, the use of dried cow dung as fuel (in india) and the carbon exhaled from any aperture by animals and by man represent the conversion of surface carbon from one form into another and therefore does not constitute the injection of extraneous previously sequestered carbon into the surface-atmosphere system. This is why, for example, the use of wood pellets as fuel in power plants is “green”. The carbon in wood pellets is surface carbon not extraneous carbon.
Therefore:
1. carbon emissions in the form of methane due to enteric fermentation and rice cultivation are surface phenomena and therefore green.
2. carbon emissions in the form of methane and carbon dioxide from reservoirs derive from vegetation and other carbon life forms that were flooded when the reservoir was created. this carbon is also surface carbon and therefore green.
i could cite more examples but these two examples should suffice to point out that AGW theorists appear to have forgotten AGW theory and are now counting all carbon without regard to whether the “emission” is part of the surface system or whether it is a perturbation of the surface system by previously sequestered carbon brought up by man from deep under the ground in the form of fossil fuels.
sincerely
@chaamjamal
ssrn.com/author=2220942
Thank you, chaamjamal.
From the study: “Unlike natural water bodies, reservoirs tend to have flooded large amounts of organic matter that produce carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide as they decompose. Reservoirs also receive a lot of organic matter and “nutrients” like nitrogen and phosphorous from upstream rivers, which can further stimulate greenhouse gas production”
So per the study, “flooding the large amounts of organic matter” artificially creates decomposing organics that wouldn’t have decomposed without the flooding? Is it magical organical material?
And the fact the runoff, that is already laden with organic matter (that would decompose somewhere else) is then concentrated at the reservoir, and is assumed to stimulates greenhouse gas production???
WRT Co2, the worst case is that the reservoir area is removed from the cycle … allowing other areas to green faster.
WRT methane, I don’t know … but I would guess that the overall & long term methane production would be be reduced.
And apparently all those ‘natural’ lakes are sterile on the bottom and have no biomass that dies and becomes decomposed.
Thanks for giving us the proper perspective on the issue, chaamjamal.
I’ll ponder that while I’m fishing at Toledo bend , running my gas burning outboard. On second thought …. nope!!!
Or we all can ponder this. When one of my daughters was 4 years old she got really upset when we didn’t bring back a stringer of this colorful species
http://www.louisiana-destinations.com/images/photos-cities/toledo-bend/toledo-bend-reservoir-large-fish-exhibit-sm.jpg
Row, row, row your boat…wait, I bet they will say that rowing boats pollutes the air with CO2 due to the rower exhaling very strenuously.
No, no, the CO2 comes from the open beer(s) the rower(s) are consuming in order to maintain their moral.
Lakes and Reservoirs act as cooling bodies — lake & Reservoir breeze just like sea breeze. This helps transport of energy. It always counter act the warming. Also, the use of reservoir & Lake water keeps the dry areas under greenery for longer period of a year. Essentially they are cooling the rural environment to a large extent causing rural-cold-island effect to counter urban-heat-island effect.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
A reservoir is a big change in land use. For years Pielke Sr. has asserted that land use has a big effect on regional climate. link
That’s all well and good, cBob, but the Envirostalinists/profiteers are touting this stuff to claim that methane will cause global warming. Even adding all the tiny (relative to the globe, which is over 70% ocean) regional effects together doesn’t add up to GLOBAL warming (or “change” or whatever).
They want to limit our freedom for: nothing.
“From Washington State University and “the EPA and ecos now have another new tool to prevent new reservoirs in California” department…”
This is the absurd aspect Anthony is referencing.
Desalination is California’s future. Yet, eco loons like the tinfoil hats from the SurfRiders management inhibit logical progress. The irony, members of the SurfRiders aren’t aware of the foolishness. They just joined to get updates for great waves.
Desalination doesn’t require storage if engineered correctly – it simply needs to meet demand ; )
This comment is lost on deaf ears but may be of sme muse to one who now enjoys every sound.
I recently moved from SoCal to the Bay Area.
Before we left SoCal we enjoyed a trip to Catalina Island. Great food and great fun yet the island’s water supply is rain water. The damn island is surrounded water!
California was once known for insight? …are you?
Footnote: the “are you” means you not Anthony!
I presented details under ecological changes chapter in my book “Climate Change: Myths & Realities” online in 2008.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
In a majority of cases I agree yet some lakes sit on top of volcanoes.
There’s currently a statewide alert related to earthquakes in or near the Salton Sea in Southern California. The “sea” is actually a lake on top of a 15 mile wide magma chamber located on the San Andres fault.
Activity and exhaust from this Lake are normal for volcanic ares and the surrounding area is largely undeveloped.
So, all lakes and reservoirs are not cooling bodies.
All lakes and Reservoirs are cooling bodies. The natural disasters — earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal/cyclonic fury, etc — related issues are not part of this as they destroy the eco-system based on the intensity of the system.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Dr. Reddy – please post a link to your book. Looking forward to a good read!
I completely disagree with the notion “all lakes” are cooling bodies. You’re presenting additive logic without regard for subtractive.
1. Climate Change: Myths & Realities, http://www.scribd.com/Google Books, 2008
2. Climate change and its impacts: Ground Realities, BSPublications, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, 276p [2016]
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
It’s wurst than we thought.
How lol ? : (
Wurst is German for sausage – it gives you gas ; )
woaa…
No wonder there are so many sour krauts.
Seriously? Was that “fart” appropriate? Where’s the Kim of Yesteryear?
Swamps create swamp gases. Lakes…not so much, hardly any, actually. None of this stopped any Ice Age from happening. Over and over again, Ice Ages happened and then suddenly ended. And it wasn’t due to any ‘gasses’ for either event.
Great point, emsnews. You hit this nonsense with a game winning body block. For YEARS, now, the Envirostalinists/true believers/”sustainability” cult members have been wailing about “killing off all the wetlands….. where are the frogs????”
(Source: http://www.ramsar.org/activity/world-wetlands-day-2016 )
They can’t have it both ways.
******************************
Also, related to a powerful point made above (and below, too, no doubt), METHANE IS JUST A tiny effect greenhouse gas (in the climate system called “earth”). WATER is the key (and reservoirs’ puny little water vapor contribution is spit compared to the OCEANS)
… 0.00017 percent … is { } the percentage of methane in Earth’s atmosphere. That’s a trivial amount, you say: 1.7 parts per million. There’s three times more helium and 230 times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. …
(Source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/13/methane-mendacity-and-madness/ )
(Source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/07/climate-change-is-dominated-by-the-water-cycle-not-carbon-dioxide/ )
“They can’t have it both ways.”
Sure they can, silly. Just ask ’em.
Janice, I guess Ducks Unlimited will be declared an Eco Terrorist group before not too long.
ecoloons won’t be happy until humans are extinct ….
And will not start with themselves!
Quoting this common propaganda style of claim,
“Writing [this] week’s journal BioScience, the WSU researchers say reservoirs are a particularly important source of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the course of a century.”
They go all over the map with claims of potency,which has ranged from 12 to 40 times,which is highly misleading as CH4 has a very small IR absorption range,far from the main terrestrial outflow bands. Plus its residence time in the atmosphere is waaaay less than 100 years anyway,which is really around 3 years?
They need to stop with this propaganda bullcrap!
Ban beavers?
That is going too far, dam it.
I own a considerable stand of forest in the New England mountains and cut wood periodically there. My forest is so very happy, it is growing like crazy and the wildlife living there is quite happy, too. But no ecologist is happy, if they came to my mountain they would be pissed off that I live there too, in my house.
You nailed it. Save the environment. Make people unhappy.
Perhaps we should ask: “Whose environment are you saving?”
A developer is someone who wants to build a house in the forest. An environmentalist is someone who owns a house in the forest.
+1000
But they feel guilty about it.
That’s Good! How true.
You got it. Droughts and floods are caused by man made carbon emissions. So, humans figure out that they can reduce the harm from floods and droughts by building dams and reservoirs. But, that is bad also because reservoirs release methane, which causes floods and droughts. The solution is to eliminate humans or, at a minimum, prosperous humans who live long. healthy lives.
Two points:
“…methane, a greenhouse gas that is 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the course of a century”
That is 9 higher than the last published bid of 25 times more potent. It is worse than we thought.
Trees emit about 4% of the CO2 they take in as methane due to the inefficiency of their converting it to wood. That means for every 96 CO2 molecules they convert, the emit 4 x 34 = 132 CO2-equivalent GHG gas molecules of methane. Clearly, we are going backwards by planting trees.
And that is ‘over the course of a century’ which just goes to show that the people who alarmed that it was for only 20 years, are wrong. It is 80 years more pollution than we thought!
The inevitable conclusion is that trees, and in fact all living biomass, are net-warming when they grow, and worse if you burn them. I sure hope there is some sort of self-governing feedback at play like cloud cover from excess humidity or we are doomed by the forest.
Next: If they drown all the biomass in the world in reservoirs and rot it to methane, it would make a heck of a lot less GHG gases than allowing those filthy trees and shrubs (shrubs, can you imagine? And flowers!!) to continue spewing methane into the atmosphere – the direct result of their inefficient, polluting solar energy conversion process. And after 100 years those trees would still be living on, continuing to pollute our pristine environment with that wretched methane gas.
There oughta be a law! Of course in California there very well might be.
There is such a law, but it exempts tana leaves. Jerry Brown will still be able to get his supply.
I can’t help but wonder what, if any, thought went into the EPA graph of March 2016 methane emissions. A rational approach to such a graph would be to put the sources in order of increasing total contributions, or alternatively, in order of increasing rate of contribution. They aren’t even in alphabetic order. It would seem that someone just randomly put the data on the graph. Does that instill much confidence that they gave much thought to the collection, validation, and analysis of the raw data?
“what, if any, thought went into the EPA graph of March 2016”
“Thought” and “EPA” in the same sentence – wow.
DoesnotcomputeDoesnotcomputeDoesnotcompute. . . .
On the contrary, mixing up data like that hides any conflicting information that data might contain. I expect a lot of thought went into how the data was arranged.
“The BioScience analysis, which drew on scores of other studies…” Another computer study perhaps? And how many of these “other studies” report measured methane emissions from water bodies, and, of course, the land areas surrounding them for comparison? How do water bodies in arid areas compare with those in treed areas.? And what was found and to what accuracy?
A few facts might help understanding.
Internally inconsistent. Says the equivalent of 1Gt CO2. Then says equivalent to rice paddy. Rice paddy is per EPA less than 0.5Gt. And both are rounding error compared to natural gas leaks and ruminant digestion. How to make a scary number–80% of water reservoir emissions. 80% of a small deminimus number is a smaller deminimus number.
How to solve methane based global warming: Eliminate rice from diet. Eliminate meat from diet. Eliminate reservoir water from diet. Eliminate flood control. Eliminate natural gas as a fossil fuel (no leaks, no combustion CO2, a twofer). After billions die in Asia, Australia, the western US, and elsewhere from floods and winter cold, methane mitigation will have made a real dent in global warming. Even more effective AGW mitigation than intermittent renewables.
ristvan,
You beat me to it.
80 percent of the
is one heck of a molehill to make a mountain out of.
so 1.3% of 6% (human contribution to C02) = a total waste of time and Money!
Almost Phil R:
80% of the ‘total global warming impact’
of all those gases from reservoir’s.
With her statement, Bridget Deemer, has contributed a terrific example of Climate Change baffle gab. String together important sounding words and hope no body in the audience is listening.
All of which comes from:
They developed their own freaking models!!
Then to make it sound ‘really’ dangerous, Ms. Deemer had to enclose the money statement in nearly unintelligible bad sentences.
Just how much more gases do reservoirs actually emit than did the previous stream/drainage and surrounding plant litter and small creatures?
But that is not what is ‘studied’.
Then they calculate their idea for total GHG impact of the gases emitted from modeled reservoirs.
And 80% of that is allegedly caused by methane.
Methane, a very short lived atmospheric gas. Somehow, I doubt that methane’s short life is accounted for.
ATheoK,
Thanks for the clarification. I tried, but got lost in the gobbledygook.
Apparently no offsetting credit will be added for all of the biomass that is grown with the water used for irrigation.
So what happens to the organic matter that falls into the rivers? Most of it likely moves with the water until it eventually settles out in stagnant water somewhere along the river or final delta at the mouth of the river. Once it accumulates, the aerobic bacteria will use up the oxygen (while releasing CO2) and the decay will proceed under anaerobic conditions and generate methane. So how much difference does a reservoir make?
So, no reservoirs, no transportation, no food production, no air-conditioning, can’t use heat, no pesticides, can’t have kids, dogs, livestock.
I’m noticing a trend here.
Frankly, if simply living here and surviving on the planet contributes to climate change, I say ‘so be it.’
No footprint means we might as well not be here at all.
Excerpted from above commentary:
It matters not a twit where that dead biomass (organic matter) is deposited, …… be it on the ground where it is subject to moisture, in creek channels, in river channels, in human constructed ponds, lakes or reservoirs, in tidal zones or in natural lakes, ….. microbial decomposition of said dead biomass will occur.
And ps, there is far, far, far, far, FAR more surface acreage of rivers and natural lakes than there could ever possibly be for human constructed water impoundment areas …… and thus it is asinine and utterly idiotic for the study authors to publish their silly conjecture…
Oh, the inanity!
On the bright side, using their own “logic”, this newfound and “surprising” source of warming would then take some of the heat off of fossil fuels. Own goal.
The stuff that collects in the reservoirs would else be washed out in the oceans, and who knows how much methane it produces there. Have they measured the amount of methane the oceans release?
By the way, most lakes have an inlet as well as an outlet, so they must produce like a dam.
I feel they put a magnifying glass to a limited area, and then cry the alarm for whatever they discover without setting it in context.
I fart in their general direction…
You’re giving them too much recognition and honor.
But…but…but these reservoirs were built to generate “green” energy! If we drain them how will we replace all that hydroelectric power. Burning coal, natural gas, and building nuclear plants comes immediately to mind.
Do these people ever read and think about what they are saying and the consequences of same?