Tag: methane

Smokestack lightning

cotwo.jpeg Nature’s The Great Beyond blog draws my attention to the news that global carbon dioxide emissions are increasing at “an alarming rate” – hitting nearly 10 billion tonnes in 2007. The Global Carbon Project’s new report concludes:

Anthropogenic CO2 emissions have been growing about four times faster since 2000 than during the previous decade, and despite efforts to curb emissions in a number of countries which are signatories of the Kyoto Protocol. Emissions from the combustion of fossil fuel and land use change reached the mark of 10 billion tones of carbon in 2007. Natural CO2 sinks are growing, but more slowly than atmospheric CO2, which has been growing at 2 ppm per year since 2000. This is 33% faster than during the previous 20 years. All of these changes characterize a carbon cycle that is generating stronger climate forcing and sooner than expected.

Emissions are now running above even the most fossil fuel intensive of the IPCC’s scenarios (A1F1), driven by strong growth in China and India. Here’s the press release from the Oak Ridge lab, and there’s good analysis at Climate Progress. A PDF of the full presentation is available here[1.5MB].

More methane news: the Telegraph (UK) reports that a British survey vessel, the James Clark Ross, observed around 250 methane plumes in deep water over a 30 sq mile area west of Svalbard. It’s apparently thought that this system has been active since the end of the last ice age. The Independent also picks up the story, but doesn’t add much more information.

[Update 27/9: Nature provides a round up, apparently intent on debunking “alarmist predictions” of imminent hydrate release (grab it before it disappears behind a paywall), but the interesting bit comes at the end:

Globally, atmospheric methane concentrations increased by 7.5 parts per billion to nearly 1,800 parts per billion during 2007 after almost zero growth since 1999. The upward trend is likely to continue this year, says Ed Dlugokencky, who oversees the methane database run by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado. “Our data suggest increased emissions in the Arctic and the tropics,” he says. “Both regions were apparently warmer and wetter than average.”

Not much comfort there… [update: this link to the text may not expire]]

[Title reference]

From Russia, with love

group_with-bennett.jpg The work of the Swedish and Russian team on the Yakov Smirnitsky has finally found its way into the mainstream media, with Steve Connor at the Independent in London reporting the final post at the ISSS-08 blog I’ve been linking to for the last month or two. It’s not good news – they’ve found dramatic evidence of “methane chimneys” – bubbles of methane emerging form the sea floor and reaching the surface (instead of dissolving), and recorded atmospheric concentrations 100 times the normal background level. Connor reports on an email exchange with the Swedish team:

“We had a hectic finishing of the sampling programme yesterday and this past night,” said Dr Gustafsson. “An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These ‘methane chimneys’ were documented on echo sounder and with seismic [instruments].”

At some locations, methane concentrations reached 100 times background levels. These anomalies have been seen in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres, amounting to millions of tons of methane, said Dr Gustafsson. “This may be of the same magnitude as presently estimated from the global ocean,” he said. “Nobody knows how many more such areas exist on the extensive East Siberian continental shelves.

In his piece, Connor uses the “standard” global warming potential for methane of 20 times CO2 (actually 25 is the official IPCC number), and correctly notes the short atmospheric lifetime of the gas. However, over that short lifetime (around 12 years), CH4’s GWP is more like 70 times CO2. Current global methane level is about 1750 ppb (1.75 ppm), so using a GWP of 25 it has the same warming effect as 43.75 ppm CO2. On the shorter 10 year time scale, that’s more like 122 ppm CO2. But Semiletov and his team on the Yakov Smirnitsky have measured concentrations 100 times greater than “normal”, which implies a local warming effect equivalent to 12,200 ppm CO2.

Luckily, it’s getting dark up there, but methane release on that scale might slow down the winter cooling in the region of the chimneys. Methane seeps in lakes can keep holes open in winter ice, so if persistent holes start appearing in the satellite maps of sea ice over the Siberian seas, we’ll know there’s a big issue (the holes would have to be huge to be seen in the data). We urgently need more info on the extent of the problem. There’s a lot of methane under the Siberian seas – we can only hope it stays there.

The NZ Herald reprints the Independent story, and the Guardian puts its own spin on it (a note of caution). This is a story that needs wider coverage, more informed scientific debate, and great deal more study. I hope Connor’s piece doesn’t get dismissed as hype, or “alarmism”. You don’t need to be an alarmist to find this stuff alarming…

I’m (possibly/probably) a loser

200809NSIDCmin.pngThe National Snow & Ice Data Centre in the USA has declared that this year’s minimum Arctic sea ice extent has been reached – 4.52 million square kilometres on September 12th, only 390,000 km2 more than the record 2007 minimum (and 2.24 m km2 below the 1979-2000 average minimum). It looks as though their line may bump along the bottom of the graph for a while, so there may be some potential for that number to reduce a little. Their figure for Sept 12 is 9.4 percent above the 2007 minimum, so unless there’s some unprecedented melt over the next couple of weeks, I am prepared to accept that I have lost my bet with Malcolm (see comments here and at Poneke! here), which was based on NSIDC numbers. My cheque book is at the ready.

Continue reading “I’m (possibly/probably) a loser”

Dragging the river

arcticmethane.jpgIn an update to my last post on Arctic methane, I linked to a Swedish team blogging their research on the Yakov Smirnitsky, a Russian vessel currently cruising the seas to the north of Siberia. The most recent post there is fascinating, but the Google translation rather difficult to follow, so I asked Magnus Westerstrand, who first drew my attention to the blog at Eli’s place, if he could tidy up the translation. And he did, overnight. Thanks Magnus, have a schnapps on me. Here are some extracts [full text at Magnus’ blog]:

At around 110 degrees easterly longitude, when we where wrestling with drift ice in western Laptev Sea, we discovered two new areas where methane concentrations in both the water and in the air above clearly exceeded the normal methane concentration in Arctic.

The blogger, Örjan Gustafsson, then goes on to describe how the methane deposits were formed, and how the gas might now be escaping.

Continue reading “Dragging the river”

You ain’t seen nothing yet

arctic_AMSRE_29808.png This year’s Arctic sea ice minimum is now officially the second lowest in the record according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center in the US. On August 26, the ice extent stood at 5.26m km2, dropping below 2005’s 5.32m km2. The melt season still has several weeks left to run, and there are now suggestions that this year’s final minimum could be close to – perhaps even beat – last year’s record.

The NSIDC announcement has attracted a flurry of attention, and the media has been out trawling the usual suspects for quotes. The BBC reports:

Researchers say the Arctic is now at a climatic “tipping point”. “We could very well be in that quick slide downwards in terms of passing a tipping point,” said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the Colorado-based NSIDC. “It’s tipping now. We’re seeing it happen now,” he told the Associated Press news agency.

Adding to the interest, the European Space Agency released some interesting Envisat images of the state of the sea ice, and warned:

Following last summer’s record minimum ice cover in the Arctic, current observations from ESA’s Envisat satellite suggest that the extent of polar sea-ice may again shrink to a level very close to that of last year.

Meanwhile, Scientific American notes that the northwest passage is now open, and the Environment News Service does an admirable job of pulling all the info together – including recent work on possible rapid climate change around the Arctic. Earlier this month I was prepared to accept that I was going to lose my two bets on a new record minimum this year, so what’s been going on up north to change the outlook so dramatically?

Continue reading “You ain’t seen nothing yet”