[we received two articles on the same subject today from guest authors. each has its own merits-cr]
Guest Essay by Kip Hansen – 10 Feb 2022
I don’t want to alarm readers but the news is so shocking that I must. The concentration of atmospheric methane, a carbon-based molecule, is soaring; it is spiking; it is accelerating. Methane is a Greenhouse Gas! Well-mixed methane concentrations in the atmosphere have jumped from 1640 ppb to over 1900 ppb since the early 1980s.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) publishes the frightening graphic:
Luckily for us:
Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane
Our ever benevolent and protective scientist class has come to our rescue by raising the alarm – if they didn’t, we might not be adequately alarmed by this dangerous situation.
Seriously, the Nature punchline is, as you may have already guessed: “some researchers fear that global warming itself is behind the rapid rise.”
Yes, that’s right. Global Warming (itself!) may be behind the rapid rise.
The author of the Nature article, Jeff Tollefson, calls this a “grim milestone” (however, no reason for this being either grim or a milestone is given).
Those interested in this trivial issue should read the Nature article. There are some interesting points in it concerning suspected and hypothesized sources of the methane and the reason for the rather odd pattern of rise and fall seen in multi-year data.
However, here is:
The Bottom Line
1. Always look at the units attached to any numerical data.
1900 ppb (parts per billion) is 1.9 ppm (parts per million)
Or, in percentage of the atmosphere:
0.000 19 Percent [%]
2. What that means in the Real World™ is that the amount of methane in the atmosphere is so small — there is more neon and helium in the atmosphere than methane — that if you searched for a molecule of methane, and individually sorted through a BILLION MILLION molecules, you might find one or two. You might find none in your first billion million, but if you sorted enough billions millions, your find would average out at just under 2 per billion million. (Good Luck!) (thanks to many sharp-eyed readers for pointing out my getting the b’s and m’s mixed up — kh)
3. As the Earth continues to warm and green as it comes out of the Little Ice Age, we see more life which means more methane. More life is a Good Thing.
4. Atmospheric Methane has spiked! — to almost zero.
# # # # #h
Author’s Comment:
Almost Zero is an important issue. Many of the most popular dangers and harms touted in the popular press are about the crisis of “things” being discovered at levels which are best described as “Almost Zero”. This is the nutty misapplication of the precautionary principle, where the mere existence — the mere detection — of a thing is automatically equated with harm.
The more advanced technology becomes in detection, the more potentially harmful things are found and the more alarms are raised.
Give examples in the comments if you wish.
# # # # #
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My favorite was the one about a chemical produced when you bake bread, it gave cancer to mice, forget the name
We are all going to die.
Then we found out the dose required to cause the cancer would require a person eating 70,000 loaves of bread a day.
It’s late so I’m to tired to try and find a story
Also I recall one about a compound used in toothpaste to promote foaminess, it was then discovered you needed to ingest 10s of thousand of tubes to get the cancer.
The moral is most things in excess ki!!s
Drink too much water, die.
What about the 1970s scare about saccharin where you would have to drink 800 cans of diet soda a day to equal the dosage given to rats to produce a carcinogenic effect?
See the book ‘But Is It True’ by Aaron Wildavsky for plenty of other examples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison
What about the other “anes”, Ethane, Butane etc more carbon more danger? (despite being unmeasurable)
Ben ==> I don;t know — I use them as bottled fuels.
And, try not to be ‘ane’ al.
It is all about the next scare in order to control the “sheep”. The only question we need to ask is which is the next one ?
Rudi ==> The Masters of Fear are open to suggestions. Submit yours to any science journal as a paper and they will be happy to publish it if it is scary enough.
Good points!
Also interesting is the start of the timeline at 1983. Could it be that the atmospheric record is again being manipulated?
We’ve now had perhaps as much as 80 years of disposal of waste in landfills. What happens when those materials break down without an impermeable covering?
Many waste dumps have gas recovery operations and equipment in place. Of course those only capture a small amount of methane.
We could repeat the same developmental timeline for waste water treatment.
It hardly matters, as the far and away greatest sources of methane are still natural seeps, shallow depth oceans and lakes, and marshes, bogs, and bayous. Animal (including human), plant, bacteria life trail far behind.
It seems obvious that this particular hysterical “news” is a run-up to another hysterical shot at fracking, since natural gas is the only practical answer for clean power generation: anything that good must be stopped, no matter how many it hurts. The coordination is interesting, though.
Thanks for another great article, Kip.
dk_ ==> I suspect the NOAA just started measuring and keeping a record then. We haven’t always been able to reliably measure such small concentrations.
Agree. I am sure that methane is a much less harmful substance than atmospheric pollutants caused by partial combustion of coal, partly- or un-refined petroleum, and refuse. I am also sure the current levels of methane release are an unintended consequence of the quite desirable reducion of the partial combustion of petrochemicals and trash incineration. But since we have no such historical measurement in front of us, my position isn’t science, and neither are the claims of a spike in methane emissions.
You must add the Linear No Threshold concept to the precautionary principle to get Almost Zero to be scary.
Retired ==> Absolutely Spot On !
Ah. a methane increase. The data presented in such a way it looks like Godzilla is rising.
Be aware meat eaters (that’s me) the blob is coming to stop you doing that, and methane is the molecule of their choice the bedwetters and alarmists will focus on methane and claim it will destroy the planet!
They will promote the need to reduce methane and the best way to do that (according to the none meat eaters) is to stop people eating meat. No ruminants, no methane, no problem, that will be their slogan.
Be aware, be very aware.
They have taken away your ICE ambitions, they have taken away your coal fires, they are coming for your animals next.
There have certainly been a lot of adverts of late pushing the vegetarian agenda – whether it’s supermarkets giving recipe options for “meat-free Monday” or MacDonalds proclaiming their beanburgers. Coincidence?
Beanburgers? I’ll stay with re-fried bean tostadas, thank you.
Also according to Happer and Wijngarten, the absorption bands of methane overlap with those of much more abundant water vapor of which the absorption is close to saturation. So methane will have no real effect as a GHG even if its concentration was much higher. A lot of people, even some scientists unfortunately consider each GHG separately and not as a mixture of gases whose absorption characteristics interfere with each other. Some don’t even bother to consider the relative concentrations or extinction coefficients of them. The half-life of methane isn’t discussed either. “The science” mostly isn’t science.
Yep, the search for the really frightening is on – I have seen claims that several honest politicians have just been detected. Happily, however, the level of these creatures is still in the Almost Zero category!
IanE ==> Good one!
Does it corolate to the increased popularity of craft beer?
Chris ==> the increasing popularity of (far too many) craft beers is a social mass hysteria event….
Now, there is the term I have been searching for to describe CAGW!
I put methane in the same category as ocean acidification. Both of them are “much ado about nothing”. They are non-issues. They don’t do what alarmists claim they do.
One commenter a few days ago said we should hold alarmist claims of CO2-caused catastrophic ocean acidification destroying coral reefs in contempt, since it will never happen.
I think we should also apply this contempt to claims that methane poses a danger to the Earth’s climate.
Water vapor makes methane a non-issue.
Tom ==> Non-issue for sure — except that the petroleum industry really does need to capture that escaping gas — it is too valuable to just waste!
Won’t the volcanoes flare it off if we stop throwing the virgins into them for the CO2? 97% of virgins agree and the other 3% want to be peer reviewed although the sample size has been diminishing rapidly.
From the Nature article – “… many researchers to worry that global warming is creating a feedback mechanism that will cause ever more methane to be released, making it even harder to rein in rising temperatures”.
There seems to be an awful lot of baggage being heaped onto this *Feedback Mechanism” thingy. Without it all the scary stories seem to go off the rails.
That article is actually definitive evidence that Nature (London) has gone off the rails.
Indeed they do, and they disregard that their feedback mechanism is a perpetual motion machine, disallowed by the first 2 laws of thermodynamics. My favorite simplified description of those 2 laws is that the first law says , “with energy, the best you can do is break even; the second Law says you can’t even do that.”
The version of the Laws of Thermodynamics I heard many years ago was, “You can never win, only break even”, “You can only break even at Absolute Zero”, and, “You can never get to Absolute Zero”.
You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game.
Why is the methane molecule in the header shown as flat rather than tetrahedral?
GtheCat ==> Cheap graphics .. this was a ten minute knock off piece.
No offence taken, it was just my inner organic chemist protesting!
How much should the methane tax be?
The good old Tundra has an endless supply of methane – amazing!!!!
At about 2 ppm, methane is meaningless. Even if greenhouse gases existed (a good argument can be made for not) and methane is supposed to be 20-times the greenhouse gas that CO2 supposedly is, and taking into account that methane is 1/200th of the concentration of CO2, then methane is only a 10th of the effect CO2 might have.
Since the temperature rise signal for CO2 is basically zero, because CO2 CANNOT trap heat in the atmosphere, then the signal from methane is 1/10th of zero, which is zero.
That is about how much CO2 increases each year in the atmosphere. Although, I think almost all of that is a result of a naturally warming Earth.
I recall some material scientist once remarking, “There’s a little bit of everything in something, and a little bit of something in everything.” It seems like every time the detection limit is move a decimal place to the right a new round of panic ensues.
Hawkins ==> Yep, sounds right to me.
“…scientist class…” Ike referred to them as the “Scientific-Technological Elites” in his Farewell Address, which is only known know for his creation of the term “Military Industrial Complex”…the S-T E’s are far more dangerous.
Like most graphs, the NOAA Global Monthly Mean graph is a purposeful visual lie. If we are reporting Parts Per Billion, then the vertical axis should be Zero to 1 Billion, not 1600 to 1950. That graph will visually show the truth about Methane.
we are also bombarded with the “fact” that Methane is 17, or 23 or 49 or a zillion times more “powerful greenhouse gas” than CO2. part of that is an accountancy trick which measures the effect based on mass rather than molality, and CH4 being quite a bit less massive than CO2 per molecule would be artificially enhanced in its “power”. of course 23 times a very small number is still a very small number
After “CO2 the SuperGas”
comes
“Methane, the SpiderGas”!
Kip, I recall a number of years ago an ‘alarming’ discovery that plastic bottles of water that had been stored for a year (IIRC) were found to contain some single digit ppt of antimony – that’s parts per trillion! The author went on about the toxicity of antimony (Sb).
He was totally unaware that antimony sulphate is administered by the spoonful for leishmaniasis from a parasite in Asia.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22091408/
The article also says:
“Interestingly, antimonials show strong immunostimulatory abilities as evident from the upregulation of transplantation antigens and enhanced T cell stimulating ability of normal antigen presenting cells”
Maybe it’s a therapy for Covid!
BTW to visualize ppt, the sun is 15trillion centimeters from earth. A dollar bill is 15cm, so 1 trillion Bill’s end to end would reach the sun! Handy for discussing GND budgets, etc.
Gary ==> Yeah, w. raised BT as a killer in small doses — my doctor gets rich off of administering BT to middle-aged ladies.
If Trump would recommend it, I’m sure that there would be a lot of people who would be anxious to try it. Then we would be stuck with the conundrum of whether to use HCQ, ivermectin, an antimonial, or mix all of them into a smoothie.
Worse than articles that talk about parts per billion are those that just say that a chemical is detected. But is it parts per million? Parts per billion? Or fractions of a part per billion, which I insist on calling parts per trillion? Any article that neglects to specify parts per what should be ignored.
1900 ppb=1.9ppm
”… if you searched for a molecule of methane, and individually sorted through a BILLION molecules you might find one or two. You might find none in your first billion but if you sorted through enough billions your find would average out at just under two per billion.”
Is this a typo or have I lost a few zeroes?
Kip has acknowledged the error in several comments so far. It all still pretty close to Almost Zero.
Peter F ==> Yes, should be….I love careful readers and don’t mind them pointing out when I make a silly goof like this …. in my defense, I spent all of 10-15 minutes on this piece and didn’t pass it through my usual editor (who is tough as nails and she’s a mean cook as well!)
Wouldn’t a warmer world always lead to a rise in methane emissions?
goldminor ==> Yes, that is exactly roight (and somehow what is worrying climate alarmists….).
Other than HOW the methane concentration is being measured, we should also ask WHERE is the methane concentration measured. The graph says GLOBAL monthly mean. This implies an average of several locations. WHERE are these locations? Are these locations constant? Do these locations together represent ‘earth’ well?
Peter ==> Two spots: https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/programs/esrl/methane/methane.html
Gas chromatography