Tags
Anima Mundi, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Gaia
I’m coming off my two week blogging binge so posts will be light to nonexistent until I start up again in a few weeks. Studies have shown that inordinate time spent on the internet has harmful effects, both physiologically and psychologically; thus breaks from blogging and the morbid fascination with industrial civilization’s slow-motion train wreck are wise.
Occasionally I’ll scour YouTube for any interesting videos for this site and I found one.
Messing with global biospheric systems which have evolved over millions of years and expecting business-as-usual to continue is perhaps the greatest delusion of man. Civilization-ending runaway climate change could be right around the corner, and from just an intuitive level such a scenario seems all but inevitable. An abrupt change to our comfortable, normalcy-biased mode of living and thinking is very much in the cards – all the more reason for me to stop and smell the roses before there are no roses.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 
Reblogged this on Gaia will prevail.
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One of the few worthy things to come out of Victoria. I have had Holmgren’s book since the ’90s. Methinks that morons, or stupid folk, only survive where a city can provide them with a safe environment; that is, where they have minders. Hearing so-called scientists speak of’ feeding the World’s population when it gets to whatever large number, by plant genomics research & so forth, makes me ask: at what point is that no longer possible? Malthus’ conclusion is unavoidable: cannibalism, or slavery, whether actual, metaphorical or both, is the present reality. We do not need more morons, or fools, to consume & be consumed, rather, let us have far less of them, so that those who feed off them are unable to feed at all. This imbalance is the mark of all efforts in the present myriad; scavenging the industrial sludge pits of abandoned cities is not my ideal way ahead, but it is worth keeping in mind as an option. Yes, things will get better, if the pressures be removed. Have a good rest, xraymike 79, refresh yourself in the great outdoors.
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The 52-year-old had been a train driver for 30 years.
El Pais newspaper said he told the railway station by radio that the train entered the bend at 190km/h.
An official source said the speed limit on that stretch of twin track, laid in 2011, was 80km/h.
“We’re only human! We’re only human!” the driver told the station, the newspaper said, citing sources close to the investigation.
Our species, not just one train, needs to be slowed down.
Is there something pathological in “just wanting” more speed, as if that joy could be given him, while in direct denial of physical reality, as in direct denial of physics.
The driver seems to have been operating in some kind of bubble of the Matrix type, where he had lost awareness of the fact he was in the real mortal universe, not some image of himself on Facebook or in his own glorified, up-you-all state of mind.
This is the opposite of the “fight” stance in dealing with reality, rather he is displaying excessive “flight” in this case, of his mind, values and actions, all departed from Reality.
Our species is of course doing the same thing, denying physics while we try to get free rides, surf life, wrack up debts, live today and bollocks to the future.
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Sure enough.
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People living in industrial societies have been carefully trained to behave stupidly: therefore most of them do.
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Via America 2.0:
Your mental image of Siberia is probably a snowy, wind-whipped expanse, perhaps with a cluster of buildings to house those banished from Russian society. Not this week. This week, Norilsk, the northernmost large city in the world, the second largest city north of the Arctic Circle, and the site of one of those gulags, hit a balmy 32 degrees Celsius — about 90 Fahrenheit. It’s normally in the mid-60s. The online outlet The Siberian Times (“up-to-date information in English from across Siberia’s six time zones”) featured a photo of people sunbathing on the shores of Lake Baikal in its report on what may be a new record high.”
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2013/07/its-90-degrees-siberia-and-people-are-sunbathing/67663/
Do you think the authorities, i.e. our corporate state, will be able to handle this eco-apocalypse. Just a quick look back in time on a disaster (that pales in comparison) will give you the answer…
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Lily Tomlin:
“Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse.”
Some of my favorite questions:
How much carbon was burned today to support one’s lifestyle?
If a couple have a child,have each parent increased their carbon footprint by 50%,over time?
Do two children increase each parents carbon footprint by 100%? And on & on.
Will be looking forward to your future “blogging binge”.
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That’s an important point on population growth and GHG emissions, especially in light of the latest news:
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So much for the assurances from the Eco-unconcerned that we have no problem in the future, as the population explosion went bust and our greatest problem is the economics of depleting population.
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X Man Mike, you deserve a bit of a break… I should be blogging but I am way to lazy, depressed, unfocused, ect… Thank you for all that you do! I should take your lead give the machine and the train wreck a bit of a break. Peace out now go smell them roses!
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First let me say that I do admire Robert Scribbler’s hard work, grasp of the subject and great command of language. What I was unable to accept was the blind faith in techno hopium, etc…. but he seems to be seeing the dooom that we on NBL have long foreseen
what if Wadhams and others like him are right? In such a case we could see a catastrophic warming of up to 5 degrees C by 2050..
But Wadhams isn’t telling worst case, is he. What if worst case is right, Robert ?
Look at what’s happened the last twenty years. The optimists have been consistently WRONG about EVERYTHING, and the trajectory we are on is worse than the worst case, and Wadhams is OPTIMISTIC.
For a start, stop using 20x Co2 for methane, and use 105 times.
We can likely get a 10 or 12 deg C increase over a decade
And then we get this gem:
These first methane burps are a warning for us to act now, before our capacity to act is seriously degraded and before events start to spiral beyond the point of rational control. We have had other warnings which we have, so far, mostly ignored. And though the responses by the Obama Administration and World Bank to de-fund new coal plants are encouraging, we should redouble our efforts now, lest we enter an age of bitter regret as the consequences of our carbon emission form a trap that is difficult or impossible to escape.
Whoa, there Robert, easy on the rhetoric. Warning to act now ? The warning to act now was thirty fucking years ago. Events have been spiralling beyond the point of rational control ever since…
Btw, what IS ‘rational control’ ????
What utter bullshit. What do you think is going to be done that will cut emissions that will make any difference ?
There’s a TIME LAG !
It takes thirty years before any cut in emissions makes any difference to global temperatures.
So, if you cut emissions NOW, you don’t see any effect until 2045
Emissions have been rising rapidly for the last thirty years and are rising now faster than ever.
How hot do you think the East Siberian Arctic Sea will be by 2045 ?
Do you seriously think anyone is GOING to cut emissions ?
The Chinese have no intention of cutting emissions until 2030, by which time they will be producing as much CO2 as everyone else on Earth combined.
You have not yet entered an age of bitter regret yet ? Robert, dear child, welcome to the threshold of reality, soon you will enter.
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HA, HA! You really do know “all the nasty stuff”. I added your ‘Deadly Serious 3’ to my RSS feeds.
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Eh ? Heck, I was trying to be kind and polite…. 😉
http://www.monsangelorum.net/?topic=waiting-for-good-weather&paged=3#post-7966
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I’ll add that one too. Also, I’ve added a couple icon links to the left of the screen that you may find of use:
‘Methane Tracker News’ from methanetracker.org and ‘Apocalypse 4 Real’.
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And do you recall this comment:
Techno-optimism springs eternal.
We’ll just sprinkle some fairy dust in the air and that’ll keep the lid on this beast.
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Yes, and …And though the responses by the Obama Administration and World Bank to de-fund new coal plants are encouraging, we should redouble our efforts now…
The Obama Admin can’t even get anything done in the USA to cut emissions, nobody in the rest of the world gives a toss about the USA, everybody knows they are totally hypocritical about everything and have no power or control over China, Russia, or the rest. American corporations will continue raping and pillaging the planet and destroying the environment for profit, and Obama and the US Gvt will do everything possible to help them.
China and India and Brazil and Russia and the rest will use whatever energy they can get their hands on, and develop whatever resources and industry they can, they don’t need Obama’s permission. If USA was going to lead on emissions the time was way back at Kyoto, USA should have set an example by abiding by international law, instead of flouting it, it’s all much too late now, with the world in economic recession and near financial collapse there’s no major economy or politician that does not want economic growth which means increasing emissions…
‘we should redouble our efforts’
Who IS this WE ? The people who read Robert’s blog ?
It’s the same line that has come at the end of every alarming statement and press release for the last twenty years ‘…unless urgent action is taken’
Nobody ever says what the action should be or who should take it. Nothing ever happens. Emissions rise faster than ever.
What efforts do you want us to make, Robert ? Jump up and down more ? Scream more ?
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This is why I now look at the mainstream progressives with a jaundiced eye. They still believe in the system and that Obama is somehow different than any other stooge of Empire.
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‘What efforts do you want us to make, Robert ? Jump up and down more ? Scream more ?’
Well said.
Perhaps we are supposed to follow the advice of Bush II: America is under attack and the economy is faltering but Americans can all help by shopping more.
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Forbes, watering down the message so that the business leaders of the world do nothing about GW:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/07/28/who-cares-about-global-warming/
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Two major problems with Robert.
a).He does not think rationally: to suggest that minerals can be mined and processed without the use of fossil fuels defies all logic.
b). When someone points out his erroneous thinking, rather than accept the points made and do the necessary research, he lashes out.
U, I agree entirely that the time to act on emissions climate was more than 30 years ago. However, I must disagree on other points you have made.
1. We hear many different values for the high potency of methane to cause warming, ranging from 20 x CO2 to the 105 x CO2 you have just suggested.
In practice, no one can ascribe an accurate value. There is a huge difference between measuring absorption in a gas tube in a laboratory and the actual behaviour in the atmosphere.
For a start, methane does not remain as methane but gets oxidised to carbon dioxide. The quoted average residence time is not fixed like a radioactive decay curve, but will change depending on the conditions in the atmosphere.
The absorption-re-emission effect will depend on where the methane is. Methane, , will be released at sea level and will have greater effect immediately upon release than later because it is lighter than air and will drift to the upper atmosphere.
The overall effect over time will be an integral of the concentration x spectral effect x decay factor x location factory, which is literally impossible to calculate .
All we can say for certain is that we are headed into unknown territory and that it is going to be catastrophic. That should be enough to spur monumental efforts to curb emissions of CO2, which is triggering the methane bomb.
However, since we are governed by psychotic sociopaths, shills for corporations, money-lenders and opportunists, most of whom are scientifically illiterate and purely focused on the present, nothing will be done.
This business-as-usual-and-ignore-the facts approach to most of the major issues of the times has been followed since M. King Hubbert, in 1956, alerted the world to the prospect of civilisation collapsing as a consequence of Peak Oil.
2. You say:
‘It takes thirty years before any cut in emissions makes any difference to global temperatures.
So, if you cut emissions NOW, you don’t see any effect until 2045’
That is illogical and is not correct.
The rise in temperature over the next 30 years will be determined by the integral of gas concentration x effect over the time period (rather like distance covered = area under the speed-time graph for an accelerating body).
Cutting emissions now will reduce the temperature next year, the year after and so on.
I am not disputing there is a time lag. In fact, I frequently highlight the time lag to illustrate that emission cuts needed to have been made yesterday. The thermal effect of CO2 liberated decades ago has been largely unseen because it has occurred in ice sheets and in deep oceans.
Anyway, as discussed above, nobody in the current power system is going to advocate meaningful cuts in emissions. We saw how totally ineffective the Kyoto Protocol was: many signatory nations increased their emissions between 1997 and 2007, and the nations that reduced their emissions only did so because heavy industry had been shifted to Asia. ,
CO2 in the atmosphere will continue to rise faster than exponentially. (current figure is about 3ppm higher than end of July 2012).
Cuts to emissions now would not prevent the average temperature of the Earth rising inexorably but would reduce the rate of climb.
.
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Happy to defer to your superior expertise on the chemistry, kevin.
Yes, I should have worded the time lag thing with greater care.
Point is we are NOT cutting emissions, they are still going up, NO prospect that I see of anyone cutting emissions…
Thing is, I’m completely out of patience with all these people, everybody, from top to bottom. On neven’s blog ( he’s ok ) someone said they have a duty of care to the public to be sure that they cross the t’s and dot the i’s over all this science so as not to cause unnecessary panic whatever… this is RUBBISH, there should be a precautionary principle because we are talking about life on Earth, and a mass extinction event, who cares about the t’s and i’s, we still have not finished all the dotting for WW2 yet, but the time that the science is all totally dotted there won’t be anybody around left alive to care….
IF they discover that all that ESAS methane IS going to start coming out, and the dotting shows that it IS, then WHAT ?
Do we get permission to panic THEN ? I mean this is an insane situation. They have just completely screwed up over predicting loss of the summer sea ice. THAT should have been a cause for panic. Now that’s all forgotten, and ‘normal’, and we’re back to dotting again… ffs…
Re the methane, my source is Peter Carter. Do you agree with his understanding ?
As I understand it, the breakdown will be different over the Arctic and Antarctic because of the OH and temp, also depth of water it travels through, etc.
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Thanks U, that was one of the best explanations I have seen, Yet even that one fails to give the factor of the instantaneous warming effect of methane compared to carbon dioxide, which I guess is of the order of 1,000. And even the lifespan of gases is not clearly defined. Presumably the 12 years is the half-life, i.e. half the molecules of a given sample will have been oxidised, and 12 years later the concentration will be down to 1/4.
Other points of possible discussion:
1. The effect of methane release vary hugely from location to location. Slow releases of methane in the tropics are not going to have much impact, but rapid releases in the Arctic are going to have a huge local impact which will be self-reinforcing.
2. The inclination of the Earth’s axis complicates matters immensely but I think we can safely assume formation of methane hydrates will be a lot less than releases, especially since Arctic water temperatures are trending upwards.
3. It is the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere that is primarily responsible for the warming that is triggering the release of methane.
4. Historic ice cores help us understand what happened in the past but they have little predictive value because the Earth is now substantially chemically different from when those ice samples were formed: hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon that were sequestered at the time they were formed are now in the atmosphere and the oceans.
5. As oceans warm they absorb less CO2, and if they warm sufficiently they become net sources of CO2, as well as sources of CH4.
As discussed on innumerable occasions, nobody in power is going to do anything to slow down the CO2-CH4 time bomb.
And, as previously mentioned, October would be a good time to revisit the Arctic meltdown topic.
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Thanks xray, thanks kevin,
Re Mr. Scribbler, he’s obviously doing his best to address the matter in the way he sees it. But this happens repeatedly. When you show people that their cherished ‘solutions’ will not work, they are hurt and disappointed and get angry and throw insults and generally hate you. Can’t be helped. I used to think it was me handling it badly, but it’s rather like telling a mother who has given birth that her newborn is, sadly, a beetle, there’s just no way to make it sound like good news and break it to her gently…
Scribbler belongs to the ‘there must be a techno fix somewhere, and if you don’t believe that, you’re a bad person’ school. Which is not much different to the ‘If we all smile more and love one another, that’ll fix things’ school.
He also subscribes to the ‘arrested development’ school, like a child looking up, that sees politicians as a sort of parental figure that can ‘make things allright’.
I used to think, as kevin did, that explaining the info re the physics, chemistry and biology, and the time frame, etc, would be an effective strategy, but it turned out to be totally useless. Even smart green people would agree with me and then forget all about it.
I used to think that the very smart people with the PhDs who were seriously obsessed with the science would be way ahead and waving the red flags. But mostly they seem incompetent and useless. There’s only a few that are worth listening to.
I used to think, as some do, that there were some super-elite group scheming and controlling, hidden in the shadows. Well, maybe there are a few incredibly smart James Goldsmith type Bond super villains with their bunkers, that nobody knows about, but all the evidence I know, there’s just incredibly arrogant and ignorant morons, like the one’s who run the NSA and the CIA and the FBI and all the rest of the power organisations around the world, like Tepco and the IMF and the World Bank and the CFR, they’re all living in their bubbles of insanity, their reality-tunnels, and they’ll all die, just the same as everyone else, when the phytoplankton die.
I freely admit, although I don’t quite boast about it, hahaha, that I do not have ANY qualifications, so there’s no reason for anybody to listen to me, or to take anything I say seriously, and as far as I can tell there’s only a few eccentrics who do listen to me, but the way I see it, you have to do a rigorous analysis of the whole system and understand what the root of the problem is.
The analogy would be illness in the human body. Get the diagnosis right, before attempting any curative action.
Anybody who proposes prolonging the present destructive activities, that is, the mining, the emissions, the pollution, etc, keeping the show on the road, propping up the Machine, by whatever means possible, has not understood the disease. You don’t cure the patient by making them sicker.
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All interesting but check out from 30:00
http://live.unimelb.edu.au/episode/climate-change-critical-decade
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Must Watch…
It only takes the release of 1% of the world’s largest hydrocarbon stock(methane hydrates in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf) to say goodbye to life as we know it, or to life…Period!
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One of the better climate change articles I have read in a while [excerpt below].
I think this article makes clear the fact that the only thing strong enough to stop the greed, hubris, and Alice-in-Wonderland dystopia of the status quo is the dire reality of abrupt climate change, specifically a massive methane pulse.
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OK, now I think I understand this anathema towards what Robert Scribbler calls “doomers”. Here’s the key quote from his latest post:
Those who talk about the reality of corporate-controlled, money-driven government are, in the mind of Scribbler, mentally and morally bankrupt.
Those who talk of the energy density of fossil fuels and their pervasiveness in the carbon-based civilization humans have constructed are, in the mind of Scribbler, mentally and morally bankrupt.
Those who speak about realpolitiks and the inherent flaws of capitalism are, in the mind of scribbler, mentally and morally bankrupt.
Those who speak of the history of Empire and its destructive role in the world are, in the mind of scribbler, mentally and morally bankrupt.
Thus when one excludes the ‘real world’ factors stated above, one can believe in fairy tales like global cooperation on GHG emissions and the transition to a “kind economy” after the good people of the world stand up and wrest power from the hands of the elite and their well-armed police state.
So-called “doomers” have plenty of solutions to the eco-crisis. The problem is that no one in power is listening nor do they care.
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And don’t miss this comment left by the author of Survival Acres:
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The Japanese response to the bubbling of methane from sea beds would be to construct huge inverted funnels to capture the gas so they could compress it and transport it back to Japan to burn.
Superficially, this may appear marginally better in the short term than allowing the methane to reach the surface and oxidise naturally to carbon dioxide.
On the other hand, the resources used in constricting the collection and transport systems and emissions incurred as a consequence of the manufacturing and transporting it all would ADD to the overall CO2 problem.
P.S. Don’t tell Robert. Such facts challenge his philosophy of ‘better living through denial’,
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kevin, imo, very very humble of course, that Archer study of methane on RC is total crap, it says no need to worry about the clathrates they are all down on the very deep very cold ocean floor and so by the time the oceans warm, it’ll be thousands of years to release the methane…
Except that the largest reserve is at ESAS under 50 m of water and 50 m of silt and it’s seismically active area, and now the ice has gone, storms can churn up the sea and mix warm water down to the frozen sea bed to thaw the silt, and the warm fresh water running in from the huge rivers will thaw the silt even more…
And THIS, please confirm or correct, max density of water, is actually 4 deg C, so under the arctic freezing conditions, the warm water actually sinks to the sea bed ?
Is that right, or nonsense ????
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U.
Correct. Water is most dense at 4oC, so the temperature at the sea bed could be higher than at the surface.
One ‘saviour’ for the moment is that salty water is denser than fresh water, so the warm water that is flowing down Siberian rivers tends to remain on the surface.
An interesting aspect rarely considered is that the Earth contains a large quantity of radioactive substances which release heat as they progress down decay series. If the water above the clathrates is warmer it would tend to reduce the rate of heat transfer upwards, so the temperature in the sediments would tend to rise slightly. I suspect the effect is very small, but we have a truckload of small positive feedbacks and apparently no negative feedbacks.
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Thank you, kevin.
I’ve been trying to figure this out all afternoon. Obviously, what works on a computer or a pad of paper is probably nothing like what happens up there in the East Siberian Sea, but it would be nice to have the beginnings of a picture in my mind’s eye, if the future of life on Earth is hinging on these facts.
It seems that the surface of the frozen sea bed silt layer, 50 m thick, that is sealing the methane clathrates and has kept them from escaping for the last X thousands of years, is about +1 deg C, and there used to be ice cover for most of the year on the sea surface.
I cannot figure out what happens when, say, 4 deg C fresh water enters, because the salinity complicates the situation more than my brain can cope with. East Siberian Sea has very low salinity.
If the warming lets the clathrates in and below the silt melt, they expand 150x I think, so they are almost like explosives, they’ll break big cracks through the silt layer, like fracking.
All I’m really wondering is about the factors that impinge upon the silt layer that release the methane. Without ice cover, storms will stir up the water, so that will be one. Much warmer fresh water from the rivers must be another. The rivers are big, especially the Lena, one of the world’s biggest, and with the new hot weather events, with temps as in Alaska of 90F for a month, happening also in Siberia…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Siberian_Sea
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=7970
Most on neven’s blog seem to dismiss or downplay the probability of a massive methane release. I think they are lacking imagination or information.
It is already coming out as shown by methane tracker, and if it comes out fast enough to saturate the oxidation an exceed it, then build up, it produces local heating effects, I think, adding to the other Arctic warming….
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You see, it’s quite hard to get one’s head around this…
Fifty meters is not very much at all, imagine yourself walking down a street with some tallish buildings.
Once that layer starts to fracture, it lets the warm sea water go downward, where it will meet the clathrates.
This is the largest continental shelf on Earth. Maybe a 1000 gigatonnes of methane clathrates.
People need to get this.
Just one percent doubles all the CO2 in the atmosphere, as of now…
10 % ? 20 %
What stops this from happening ?
I’ve read all the comments from the people who pay attention. Not one single reason there that I find the least bit convincing.
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2013/07/arctic-time-bombs.html
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It’s not simply a question of temperature, of course. It takes energy to break the bonds of the clathrates ….hydrogen bonding between water molecules……pulling hydrogen atoms away from the oxygen atoms they love get close to; not the same as breaking covalent bonds, by the way: that leads to OH- or OH radicals that oxidise methane.
Is this why I studied spectral chemistry and structural chemistry all those years ago?
The critical factor is how quickly energy might be delivered to the silt/clathrate layers. No amount of analysis on a computer is likely to give us the answer to that one.
Presumably the peak of solar heating has passed for this year, and the Sun will be at a lower angle every until December. The big factor is how much of the heat will go towards melting surface ice.
The area is tracking somewhat more than this time last year. But many observers think the ice is thinner and more susceptible to breakup than this time last year.
We just have to be patient.
The BBC did an excellent documentary-drama on all this stuff several years ago.
Like everything else, it was largely ignored.
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I think that if you want to get a clear indication as to whether we, and the rest of the biosphere, will survive, you should read what the business journals have to say about global warming: WSJ, Forbes, The Economist, the Telegraph, Barron’s, and the like. They do all they can to dilute the message of the world’s scientists, cherry picking, taking out of context, misinterpreting, and focusing in on the few highly unethical “scientists” aligned with the Heartland Institute and related foundations and think tanks.
The reason this will give the clearest picture of where we are headed is because the owners and readers and sponsors and boards of directors of these media outlets are the people who rule the world. They are who controls our banking system, the IMF, the World Bank, the gigantic global corporations, the heads of state of almost all countries, our mainstream media, our food distribution systems, our political leaders at all levels, and on and on…
The masses of people and their needs and wants have little effect, long term, on the direction we are going. We see this with war and militarization. Even if the people of the masses could have more power, they will be fundamentally brainwashed by the corporate media to do and think as the financial and corporate elites desire.
I just can’t see fighting them and winning. Oh, maybe a small battle here and there, but that is just when the big boys aren’t really looking. They won’t lose the big battles, or the war.
And so, Robert and the rest can dream all they want to about the world as it really should be and the way I long to see it, a world in which science tells us how to work this out and we do it, but it cannot, positively cannot happen, as long as these financial and corporate elites rule.
And so, we will continue to use, and increase our use of, fossil fuels and bake the planet.
There is no other reasonable, possible future.
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Here is a vivid example of how bad it is:
The NZ Local Government Act of 2002 stated that ‘the purpose of local government was to promote (amongst other things) the social and environmental well-being of the community in the present and the future’.
In 2012 central government amended the legislation and removed all the well-being aspects and replaced them with ‘construction of infrastructure’
In other words, one of the prime purposes of local government is to promote the conversion of fossil fuels and limestone into carbon dioxide.
The local newspaper is forever going on about how wonderful it is that oil and gas are being extracted from the region and how much economic growth activities relating to extraction is generating. If it’s not that, it’s tourism or the totally unsustainable dairy industry.
We are totally screwed. (Well, not ‘us’ but those who follow us.).
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If you look at the rough calculations that his guy made last year here
The world is currently on the climate path defined by the IPCC scenarios A1FI and RPC 8.5 – the most extreme scenarios contemplated by the UN. Despite the fact that they are already extreme, the potential effects of carbon feedbacks from melting permafrost and methane hydrates have not been included. These effects are now looking more likely, so it would be a good idea to get a feel for how they might affect temperatures in the future.
Here is my initial attempt at quantifying them. Because I’m not a climate modeler I’ve used some fairly “basic” approaches.
NOTE. The numbers and calculations bandies about in the MSM often or always do NOT include anything from the methane and the permafrost ( which from memory methane accounts for about 20% of past warming ? )
This is of course a disgrace and reflects the casual and dishonest attitude that has been the case for years.
So, when THEY won’t do their jobs and don’t care about their planet and their kids amateurs have to try and do it for them.
The total amount of carbon locked away in permafrost and hydrates is a bit of a guess right now, so I used the midrange of the estimates from Wikipedia, and came up with a combined value of 3,000 gigatonnes. I treat all the carbon as CO2, and ignore the fact that methane has a much greater global warming potential than CO2. That makes my numbers somewhat more conservative.
Next there’s the question of how fast the carbon might be released as the temperature rises. I treat both the permafrost and hydrates as a single pool of sequestered carbon. The graph shows two possibilities based on different percentages of the carbon melting out. The first has 0.04% of the carbon being released per year per degree of temperature rise. That means that with a one degree rise 0.04% of the the total carbon store is released per year, and at 2 degrees 0.08% is released. The second estimate is twice that – a one degree rise releases 0.08% per year.
I assumed that the impact of the extra carbon on the temperature would be proportional to the amount of additional carbon released. Thus 25% extra carbon over the A1FI scenario would cause a 25% increase in the temperature anomaly as given by RCP 8.5.
All these assumptions are open to question, but I’m happy using them for illustration purposes.
So here is the graph:
He goes on to illustrate what he see and draw conclusions that you can see at the website. And the conclusions are dire.
BUT, the situation is actually far more dire. Because he should not treat the methane as equivalent to CO2.
What could happen is that we get a big pulse of methane from the ESAS. That overwhelms the ability of the atmosphere to break it down to CO2. That means that it exerts it’s maximum heating potential.
According to Dr Shakhova, just 1% of the methane from ESAS doubles the carbon in the atmosphere. There seems no reason why only 1% gets released into the atmosphere.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112731412#post1
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And another thought, the cuckoos on another bog, are talking about ‘harvesting’ the methane, without anyone mentioning that, with that stuff bubbling up unpredictably all over the place, in that shallow water, someone will have to actually go there and do it.
And they have not thought… it is highly explosive. It burns. It can be ignited by a spark, by lightning…
Even if they could cover the whole of that vast area with plastic sheets or steel funnels or whatever ingenious contraptions they come up with in their fantasies, it’s dark half the year, and there will be huge storms that sweep through and rip everything to pieces… not much fun, really.
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If they harvest it, somehow, and use it by burning as an energy source, the carbon will still be added to the atmosphere. That would be a huge increase in carbon and warming.
But the WSJ and Forbes will be hailing these ideas as groundbreaking, again showing the world how bright our future will be if we just let them do their jobs and stop all the regulating!
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The prospect of vast stores of methane hydrates (“an amount equal to, or greater than the total amount of all other fossil fuels on the planet”) to our carbon-based civilization, now starving for energy inputs, is likely too good of an opportunity to pass up, as author RP Siegel explains:
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Remember, though, they are not making these decisions because of what they think is good for society. Each is individually thinking about how the quest for more fossil fuels will affect themselves, and their family, with gigantic dollar signs and visions of immense success and wealth. These are the big boys, the ones that make the real world decisions, and hire other very talented people, the media and politicos and other less than ethical propagandists, to assure that the masses will love these ideas of more, more, more, and cheaper fossil fuels.
I don’t see it changing even a teensy bit.
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Well no, of course not. I don’t know of anyone who would volunteer to give up their wealth, either ill-gotten or honest-earned, in a society as individualistic as ours.
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This is just a reference for what I mentioned earlier
The global atmospheric methane burden has more than doubled since pre-industrial times, and this increase is responsible for about 20% of the estimated change in direct radiative forcing due to anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/publications/showpub.php?pubid=2709
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Atmospheric methane was rising rapidly, then levelled out in the early 2000s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane
There is no easy explanation for this (less leakage from drilling?} .
Over the same time period CO2 emissions and the concentration in the atmosphere continued to rise at an ever-faster pace.
CO2 remains the most deadly gas on Earth at this point of time.
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Present day adults living in industrial societies are the first group in all of human history to wittingly steal from their own progeny and destroy their own progeny’s future.
I still have great difficulty coming to terms with that reality,since all previous generations did their utmost to protect their progeny and provide them with ‘a better future’.
What is more, young adults living in industrial societies actively destroy their own futures. That nearly ‘explodes’ my brain.
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This is really the heart of the matter with everything we talk about on this blog, and it’s the definition of living sustainably – leaving a world that is better than when we came into it. By better, I mean a world with clean water, a stable climate, vibrant oceans, good soils, healthy woodlands and marshes, etc. We have failed miserably.
The plague of locusts are us.
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I’m sitting on a porch, at night, in Martha’s Vineyard, watching a whole group of teens and preteens playing and giggling and having fun, and I’m thinking that we adults, and millions of adults before us, have absolutely screwed these kids. Their lives will be a living and dying nightmare.
But not all adults knew that this impending crisis was coming.
But I did. And I do.
And so what can I do about it? I sit and wonder.
And for the life of me I can’t think of one thing I can do to ward off the horror that will face these wonderful kids. I can’t think of anything I can do for them to make their future even a tiny bit better.
All I can really do is watch it happen.
I don’t think I even want these kids to know what I know.
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But for now these days here in the mountains of Northern Arizona seem unusually beautiful with daily rainfall for the past month interrupting what is a multi-decadal drought in the Southwest. The big billowing clouds are striking. This place seems like paradise right now. I even have plants growing out of my front doormat. I cannot resolve the cognitive dissonance of enjoying my present surroundings yet knowing the Earth is horribly out of balance.
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Good point, Mike.
I’m surrounded by such natural beauty these days in Martha’s Vineyard. It all feels so right. Like it will go on forever, and has been going on forever, and I’m part of that foreverness.
And then it hits me. At some point all of this beauty will be trashed, and I am part of the trashing.
And who wants to be part of something that will soon, one day, be trashed and ugly and depressing?
And about then I force myself to forget about the beauty I see and move on with daily chores and the regular routine and they day to day worries and “busyness”.
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Dark Ecology thoughts. All we now can do is Sit and wait. Since the 50’s and earlier there have always been an Opposition against the destroying mechanism of capitalism. Since the collapse of the USSR everybody thinks wrecking our Environment with capitalism is okay, because there is no Alternative. Slaves of the System unite and go to the Peripherie of Society and try something new!
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