Here's a bit of good news about climate change:
One climate doomsday scenario can be downgraded, new research suggests.
Decades of atmospheric measurements from a site in northern Alaska show that rapidly rising temperatures there have not significantly increased methane emissions from the neighboring permafrost-covered landscape, researchers reported December 15 at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting.
Some scientists feared that Arctic warming would unleash large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, worsening global warming. "The ticking time bomb of methane has clearly not manifested itself yet," said study coauthor Colm Sweeney, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Emissions of carbon dioxide — a less potent greenhouse gas — did increase over that period, the researchers found.
Some have been concerned about a sudden, runaway spike in greenhouse gases owing to thawing methane clathrates in the ocean (the "Clathrate gun hypothesis") and in the permafrost.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:23PM
So. New substantiated evidence comes out that forces you to adjust parameters to your theory, and you do, though seeking further substantiation is nice.
"Skepticism" as practiced by climate change "skeptics" would ask you to throw away every piece of an established theory because one element of it should be refined. If we don't see someone suggesting that this excuses dismissing what they're gonna call "alarmism", I'll be surprised.
My worldview prior to today included permafrost-methane acceleration as part of climate models, and my worldview after today won't(unless future evidence further complicates things).
That's (mostly) all it takes to not make science ideological, without getting into the nihilisitic trap of "you never know science has been wrong before" of pseudoskepticism.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday December 21 2016, @01:12AM
I must say that's a bit of a strawman.
On the alternative the believers have been changing theories of 'how' constantly for centuries, yet the 'what' remains unchanged. That 'what' being that mankind will cause catastrophic and irreversible cause to his environment. It's usually already happening and probably too late. It could be the result of saying the names of ancestors or not saying the names of ancestors enough in the old days and now our fears are more sophisticated but there's just about always been a doomsday cult of one form or another, and when one doom fails to materialize that's always explained away in some fashion or another, but the constantly shifting stories of the current group do really take it to a new level in minimizing cognitive dissonance.
So yesterday methane from melting permafrost was part of the picture, today it was not, but you're absolutely not going to change your mind that we're killing our climate, everything else is details. That's called confirmation bias, and it's one of the more common errors human make when they try to do science, but fail.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Touché) by ikanreed on Wednesday December 21 2016, @02:36AM
It's a long way to go to say that No One in call caps, is really holding the position I'm accusing them of.
To talk of strawmen, "Your scientifically informed position about the relative costs of externalities of fossil fuels and the moral implications thereof is identical to a doomsday cult" is probably more egregious example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @03:07AM
Your scientifically informed position about the relative costs of externalities of fossil fuels and the moral implications thereof is identical to a doomsday cult.
Thanks for retyping that. I skimmed past and missed it in the original, because of the weird font.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:17AM
"Your scientifically informed position about the relative costs of externalities of fossil fuels and the moral implications thereof is identical to a doomsday cult"
If merely asserting that one's position was "scientifically informed" was enough for it to actually be scientifically informed, then we wouldn't have to talk about things so much. Some parts of your arguments are so informed, other parts aren't.
My worldview prior to today included permafrost-methane acceleration as part of climate models, and my worldview after today won't(unless future evidence further complicates things).
Not much point to that, if your worldview doesn't actually change as a result of your supposed changing worldview. A key problem here is we're missing a significant positive feedback mechanism as a result. That's going to depress the long term temperature sensitivity of a doubling of CO2 since positive feedbacks like methane release from tundra account for half the current estimate. That in turn makes the need for mitigation of AGW less urgent.
(Score: 3, Touché) by https on Wednesday December 21 2016, @09:19PM
It's not a strawman. It's Standard Operating Procedure for climate change deniers to present gaps in the theories or puzzling observations as refutation.
Where have you been for the last decade?
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday December 22 2016, @12:25AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday December 21 2016, @05:01AM
My worldview prior to today included permafrost-methane acceleration as part of climate models,
One swallow does not a summer make. I'd wait for confirmation.
Still the possibility that the bogs are now busy making more coal than previously due to warmer temperatures may be comforting. IDK.
But what about sea floor methane releases from Methane Hydrates? [wikipedia.org] There has been much talk of this methane source becoming significant lately, but it could have gone unnoticed in prior decades.
Should it play a part in your/our worldview today? Did it ever?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @05:46AM
One swallow does not a summer make. I'd wait for confirmation.
"Swallow hard, swallow often, dig deep, run for cover, and never look back." That's the "advise" these days, frojack!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:29PM
Won't be responsible for increased methane emissions. Until the cows come home.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:39PM
In the anime Ergo Proxy, a string of explosions in the methane hydrate reserves wipes out 85% of human life on Earth
Then the 15% indulged their hubris by creating not one but three slave races of laborers to rebuild the Earth, while the original humans went rocketing off into the musky freedom of outer space. Is it any wonder their creations rebelled when the 15% returned to reclaim the Earth?
(Score: 2) by Uncle_Al on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:56PM
sniff, sniff..
does it smell like Musk out here?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:03PM
Musk has given up on space to become a mole-rat under the Earth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:46PM
If the climate were prone to runaway feedback like from methane, it would be evident in the historical record.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:41PM
Don't think we are using the same definition of runaway?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect [wikipedia.org]
A runaway greenhouse effect is a process in which a net positive feedback between surface temperature and atmospheric opacity increases the strength of the greenhouse effect on a planet until its oceans boil away. ...
Since we still have oceans there isn't going to be any record of this happening in Earth's past.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday December 21 2016, @01:33AM
every gas is a greenhouse gas, but some are more effective than others.
Even water vapor is a greenhouse gas but when it gets to be too abundant, it rains. It is therefor self-limiting.
Even the abundant argon in our atmosphere is a greenhouse gas, but a very poor one. Oxygen and nitrogen store more heat, but it is limited by the radiation into space during the night.
What determines the heat capacity of any gas is the number of rotational, vibrational and translational degrees of freedom the molecule has. Argon only has three translational degrees of freedom. Molecular nitrogen and oxygen can vibrate along the length of the molecule, and rotate about an axis that is perpendicular to the axis that joins the two atoms.
What happens is that you put in a unit amount of heat, then that unit is distributed by motion among each degree of freedom. If a molecule has more degrees of freedom, it's temperature increases less in proportion to the amount of heat energy added to the molecule.
Methane has lots of degrees of freedom, and there appear to be many natural and manmade sources of it. What would be really bad is if rising global temperatures led to a critical point at which thawing methane increases the temperature so much that it accellerate the thawing.
Now Gaia would fix that problem - it's known as the Gaia Hypothesis. But one way Gaia might fix the runaway temperatures is by killing off all the people.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Wednesday December 21 2016, @03:51AM
Umm, not quite. Heat capacity (specific heat) is an independent concept from greenhouse gases - in fact, (all else being equal) increasing the specific heat of the atmosphere would actually cool down the atmosphere, since the same amount of heat would be stored at a lower temperature.
What makes something a greenhouse gas is not how much heat it stores itself, but how much infrared radiation it reflects - basically it slows down how fast the planet can shed heat into space. Heat is arriving at a constant rate from the sun, so if we slow down the rate at which it leaves, excess heat will build up. Sort of like wrapping the whole planet in a mylar "space blanket".
Oxygen, nitrogen, and most other gasses in the atmosphere are basically transparent to infrared light, if they were the only gasses in the atmosphere then the heat radiated as infrared light from the ground would head straight out into space unimpeded, and the planet would be a frozen wasteland.
However, water vapor, CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gasses all have absorption/emission lines in the thermal infrared spectrum (a property of their quantum electron excitability energies, rather than the mechanical properties of their bonds), which means they will absorb infrared photons being radiated from the ground and then re-emit them in a random direction, roughly half of which are back towards the ground. The more greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the longer the photons will bounce around, and the better the chance that they'll end up coming back down to re-heat the ground rather than escaping into space.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by butthurt on Wednesday December 21 2016, @03:32AM
In the past few years, craters have been appearing in Siberia. Air sampled from the bottom of one in 2014 contained "up to 9.6%" methane (http://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-siberian-crater-attributed-to-methane-1.15649 [nature.com]).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @03:37AM
Because after all if his creations are doing it, so should He?
:)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @03:48PM
When the bible says God made the humans out of mud, then "mud" might just be an euphemism. ;-)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:55AM
In the past few years, craters have been appearing in Siberia.
How many? And is the rate of formation of these craters any different than say a thousand years ago?
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday December 21 2016, @06:28PM
The article to which I linked is about the first crater that was discovered. News reports about it appeared in 2014.
Since then, a few others have been discovered.
/article.pl?sid=15/02/28/165224 [soylentnews.org]
Five are directly on the Yamal peninsula, one in Yamal Autonomous district, and one is on the north of the Krasnoyarsk region, near the Taimyr peninsula.
'We have exact locations for only four of them. The other three were spotted by reindeer herders.
-- http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0127-dozens-of-mysterious-new-craters-suspected-in-northern-russia/ [siberiantimes.com]
Of course the craters could have been appearing (and disappearing, or moving around?) for thousands or even millions or billions of years, for all we know. But we do know that methane was detected in that one.
(Score: 3, Informative) by letssee on Wednesday December 21 2016, @11:32AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx1Jxk6kjbQ [youtube.com]
And she's not some nobody who doesn't know what she's talking about. She actually did research on the topic for a living.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @01:35PM
yeah.
this is the sort of thing where I can't do anything about it (except for things that I'm already doing), so it's just frightening.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:21PM
The info on the ocean cathlates is a bit ambiguous. It appears that SOME of them HAVE been releasing, but slowly. And when a deep ocean cathlate releases slowly then the bubbles get eaten by microbes on the way to the surface. So it shows up as carbon dioxide instead of methane.
OTOH, unstable (i.e., near release) ocean cathlates have been known to release suddenly in response to a shockwave. An earthquake should do. But deep ocean temperature is pretty stable, so a release seems unlikely.
That said, there are some cathlates in relatively shallow water that has been kept quite cold. And temperature plays a large part in how likely a cathlate is to release. The other factor is pressure. As the ocean rises the pressure increases, as the ocean warms the cathlates warm. I don't know how to figure the tradeoff...and in any case it's probably site specific.
So we can expect SOME of the ocean cathlates to become unstable, and release suddenly. Others will become unstable, but not be shocked, and release slowly. Others will remain stable. And I can't even guess how much falls into each category. But note that the ones that release slowly in shallow water WILL be adding methane to the atmosphere (because the microbes don't have a chance to eat the methane on its way up). However many tons of them I'm talking about.
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