63 comments on Update on US GOM: Methane Hydrates
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63 comments on Update on US GOM: Methane Hydrates
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Sadly, I couldn't agree more strongly. I've been following the permafrost issue pretty closely over on The Cost of Energy (which is where the links below all point), and the news isn't comforting.
There was a recent study that concluded that there's twice as much carbon in permafrost as previously estimated, a total of about 1.5 trillion tons. (See Permafrost = permafrost * 2)
As I posted just today (Methane checkpoint), the level of methane in the atmosphere continues to rise after having plateaued, approximately, for a few years. It's far too early to claim this is the permafrost bomb going off, but whatever the source I wish that extra methane would stop appearing in the numbers.
Defrosting permafrost (nolongerfrost?) is being cited as one possible explanation for the recent finding that only about half of the PETM warming 55 million years ago can be explained by atmospheric CO2 levels. (See Permafrost’s shadow)
Warning! Speculation follows: I think we're just now figuring out what an enormous influence the permafrost can have on climate. E.g. it grows thick with biomass in warm periods, lowering CO2 and therefore temperature, until it freezes year round. When something else jostle the system (orbital perturbations, whatever), then just a little warming (like our current 0.8C over preindustrial times) is enough to start defrosting it during summers, which quickly leads to a massive feedback and warming.
If it turns out we've triggered that kind of feedback, something we won't know for at least a few more years, then we're in more trouble than we can imagine.
Your "speculation" is actually pretty well supported by everything I've read on the subject. Peter Ward's "Under a Green Sky" is quite good on these paleoclimate issues.
Basically it turns out that direct AGW, bad as it's direct consequences are already, turns out to be a minor concern compared to the multiple feedbacks it has/is/will be setting off, multiplying it's effects many times.
Some monitoring stations in the far north are showing some of the most dramatic rises in non-C13 (=non-abiotic) methane, suggesting that tundra melt/clathrate release is now contributing significantly to atmospheric methane.
The significance of methyl clathrates (aka methane hydrates, fire ice, etc) for climate destabilization is not IMO about their banks' total scale so much as their propensity to collapse and release CH4 under minor changes.
This is because the planetary carbon sinks, whose intake has varied annually between about 1.4 and 3.2 GTC, may be swamped (offset) by a miniscule fraction of the global Hydrates stock, particularly given the >22-fold greater warming influence of CH4 than CO2.
For a round number baseline, the sinks' annual removal of 2.0 GTC would mean sequestering about : 2.0 x 11/3 = 7.33 GT CO2,
whose removed warming impact would be replaced by just : 7.33 / '22' = 0.33 GT CH4,
whose actual Carbon content would in turn be a mere :0.33 x 3/4 = 0.248 GTC.
Thus the Hydrates' release in one year of 0.248 GTC in the form of CH4 could definitively overwhelm the planet's carbon sinks, launching the catastrophic 'runaway' greenhouse, whereupon any and all cuts in anthro GHG output would no longer be effective.
Given estimates of 1,500 GTC in permafrost, and another 500 to 3,000 in the seabed Hydrates, 0.248 GTC release per year as CH4 is a tiny fraction to pose such an existential threat.
The Hydrate banks' actual volume is thus largely irrelavent : what matters is their instability at the margins of their most vulnerable areas.
And that includes vulnerability to disturbance by commercial exploitation.
Regards,
Backstop
It's much worse than that, actually. The 22xCO2eq number you cite is for 100 year time frame. But most of the methane remains in the atmosphere for a few years, this number is misleading. I've seen figures over 70 times CO2 for decade periods, and over 100 times for seven year periods (the point at which fifty percent of the methane remains in the atmosphere, as I recall).
So pick your figure. It's not going to take a huge portion of the clathrates to be disturbed or melted to overwhelm sinks. keep in mind that much of the clathrate that has been studied in the Arctic Ocean is in a state where a very small increase in temperature will turn it to gas, and much is in quite shallow waters only a few meters deep along the continental shelf.
Poking around in this stuff to get a short term profit/energy boost strikes me as colossal and suicidal idiocy, even by modern industrial capitalism's very low standards of idiocy.