Tag: methane

Summing up Copenhagen: what we know now

cop_logo_1_r_edited The synthesis report from the Copenhagen climate congress of scientists held in March has been released. It updates the 2007 IPCC report in the light of the latest developments in the science, and means that the UN Copenhagen conference in December will have an overview of the state of our current understanding of climate change.  

The report has six sections. The first deals with climatic trends and is blunt. Greenhouse gas emissions and many aspects of the climate are already changing near the upper boundary of the IPCC range of projections.  In the case of sea level rise the rate is even greater than indicated by the IPCC projections.  Continue reading “Summing up Copenhagen: what we know now”

Geoengineering on the table

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John Holdren, recently confirmed as President Obama’s science adviser, has said in an interview that discussions at the White House include looking at geoengineering options to reduce the effects of global warming. He stressed that it would be a last resort, but can’t be ruled out of discussion if the failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions continues. He is concerned that several tipping points could be fast approaching, with chances of “really intolerable consequences”, instancing the possible loss of Arctic summer sea ice within six years, the release of frozen methane from thawing permafrost in Siberia, and more and bigger wildfires worldwide. He would much prefer to see the problem solved by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, but global warming is happening so fast that geoengineering has to be looked at. “We don’t have the luxury … of ruling any approach off the table.”

Continue reading “Geoengineering on the table”

Let it blow

Couldn’t resist this on a Friday: more pictures of Katey Walter, the University of Fairbanks, Alaska ecologist who studies methane bubbling out of lakes in Alaska and Siberia. I think the clip’s from the BBC series Climate Wars, presented by Iain Stewart, but I couldn’t swear to it…

[Richard Thompson, with NZ lyric: warning, intimate kiwifruit/banana interface]

The inner mounting flame

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The rapid climate change underway in the Arctic has the potential to disrupt weather patterns around the planet, and brings with it the risk that methane bubbling out of the permafrost that rings the Arctic Ocean and from gas hydrates under the sea floor could make our attempts to restrain emissions and stabilise atmospheric greenhouse gases completely irrelevant. These concerns will not be news to Hot Topic regulars (try the methane and Arctic tags for earlier posts and background), but a thorough overview by Fred Pearce in last week’s New Scientist (Arctic meltdown is a threat to all humanity) pulls all the threads together and presents them in a compelling fashion. Pearce begins by looking at the experiences of Katey Walter:

“I am shocked, truly shocked,” says Katey Walter, an ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “I was in Siberia a few weeks ago, and I am now just back in from the field in Alaska. The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them.”

Back in 2006, in a paper in Nature, Walter warned that as the permafrost in Siberia melted, growing methane emissions could accelerate climate change. But even she was not expecting such a rapid change. “Lakes in Siberia are five times bigger than when I measured them in 2006. It’s unprecedented. This is a global event now, and the inertia for more permafrost melt is increasing.”

Not good news.

Continue reading “The inner mounting flame”

We can run, but we can’t hide…

earthhour.jpg This article appeared in the Perspectives section of The Press yesterday, as part of the paper’s build up up to Earth Hour this weekend. I haven’t seen the letters page today, but I expect the usual suspects will be out in force… 😉

The news isn’t good. Since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) advised two years ago that the evidence for global warming was unequivocal, the pace of change has speeded up. Summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has seen a dramatic decline, and in a worrying foretaste of what may be to come, methane — a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — has been found bubbling out of the ocean floor off Siberia. Down south, analysis of a core drilled into the seabed under the Ross Ice Shelf by a team including scientists from New Zealand (using Kiwi drilling expertise), demonstrates that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is unstable and likely to collapse if warming continues as we expect over the coming century. Experts are revising their projections of sea level rise upwards with each piece of bad news. A metre or more by the 2090s is now a real possibility.

Continue reading “We can run, but we can’t hide…”