We’re ***’ed

It’s the weekend. Got plans? Hope they’re not long term ones… Have a look at this latest post from Climate Progress - one of the best, well referenced antidotes to the insane complacency, breathtaking stupidity and unjustified arrogance of the denialist disinformation websites and blogs.

The post is entitled:

NSIDC bombshell: Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100

Click on the title to read the original post. It’ll stop you worrying about your pension.

The title might sound dramatic but wait until you read the text. It’s also worth reading the comments too for the sense of resignation that previously hopeful people are starting to express. In there (at #82) you will find one from yours truly delineating the latest thoughts from Greg Craven (the author of “What’s the Worst that Could Happen?” – the book I assisted with that is linked to in this blog’s side bar). Greg recently did a speech, to the assembled multitudes of the American Geophysical Union, which was astonishingly powerful. Afterwards he talked to some members about their private thoughts. These are his own words (from the Manpollo.org site):

“Oh, and one last thing. You deserve the full story, but for now here’s the bottom line: we’re ****ed. AGU rattled me to the core because my worst-case fears were not just confirmed, but exceeded (I found four paleoclimatologists who admitted to making plans for survival retreats), and my last hope–for the scientific community to enter the public debate–was completely dashed.”

Paleoclimatologists are the guys who work out what happened to Earth’s climate tens of thousands to hundreds of millions of years ago. They know how the climate could turn (probably will now as this latest information suggests) because it has turned dangerously in the past under less of a kick than we are currently giving it. They know about prehistoric mass extinction events, due to this type of climatic kick, when large proportions of life on Earth died out and things didn’t settle down again for hundreds of thousands of years – millions in some cases.  When the Lindzen’s of this world preach to their faithful (I use the word advisedly) followers on Wattsupwiththat that climate sensitivity is lower than the IPCC best estimates and claim that any warming will be small and inconsequential, remember what is probably happening already and the knock on consequences.

Friedrich Schiller said: "Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens," which means "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."

Methane – it’s a gas

Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, although it stays active in the atmosphere for less time. Unlike carbon dioxide, which can remain in the atmosphere a century or more once released, methane persists in the air for about 10 years.  It will be a serious problem if the permafrost in the tundra and Alaska melts and the underground methane comes up and the previously frozen vegetation generates more. It would be even worse if the undersea methane clathrates bubbled up (a form of methane+water ice which stays down there because of the cool temperature and pressure). Large scale release of methane would be a very strong positive feedback to global warming and if it starts to happen, then we are *%$#*’ed.

Large scale release of methane from clathrates has been associated with very rapid temperature rises and mass extinctions of species in the pre-historic past  - Permian-Triassic extinction event and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

The story linked to below shows that it is not just “natural” releases that deserve attention because apparently there are large scale leaks from the global oil and gas processing infrastructure that have the same warming power of the emissions from over half of the coal plants in the United States. Because of methane’s lower residence time in the atmosphere, aggressively reining in emissions now would mean that far less of the gas would be warming the earth in a decade or so. Fixing the leaks would be a valuable “low hanging fruit” to get on with NOW!

click on this link to the New York Times story

This picture uses an Infra-red camera to show an “invisible” leak form a gas holder

In routine operations, great yet invisible plumes of gas enter the atmosphere when new wells are activated, old wells are invigorated to boost gas flows and wells are purged of fluids by letting out cough-like bursts of gas.