Nice to know what's going on in the world

[Suff]

An update on the Arctic methane survey being done by the Oden.

[Workingman]

"results of preliminary analyses of seawater samples pointed towards levels of dissolved methane 10-50 times higher than background levels."

This is serious climate science falling into the propaganda trap of the deniers. Levels at 10-50 times background sound scary, and they might well be, but it all depends on the what the background level is. Is it 1ppm or 10,000ppm? It makes a lot of difference.

"Methane in the air."

I can go to the local landfill in Middleton and it is quite a sight in the dark as the methane is flared off. If it wasn't flared it would be "Methan in the air." Is the speaker telling us that the air is going to explode?

Another thing is that I just know the deniers will claim that it is only recently that these kinds of measurements have been taken; and that methane will have been being released into the atmosphere for aeons, except that nobody was there to measure it.

And another is that in the short term there is nothing we can do to stop it.

We can, however, do something about cows and food. Beef cattle need 28 times more land and 11 times more irrigation water than pork, poultry, eggs or dairy. As ruminants, they can survive on a wide variety of plants but they have a very low energy conversion efficiency from what they eat. They pump out greenhouse gas emissions and not just from the production of their feed. but from their digestion and manure - cattle release five times more greenhouse gas and consume six times more nitrogen than eggs or poultry. Take all the ruminants used for food and you have the methane equivalent of two billion tons of CO2 per year, and that is just their burps and farts. Their upkeep and production of their food almost doubles that.

DEFRA reckons that the UK herd is equivalent to 4.5%-6% of all of the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. One cow produces almost twice the greenhouse gas emissions of an average car!

[Suff]

Cows. Sounds good from the denialists point of view doesn't it... Until we work out there are around 26 million cars in the UK and 1.76 million cows. That also doesn't include trucks, busses, trains and coastal ships...

methane clathrates... constitute some 35,000 Billion Tonnes of CO2 (equivalent), locked up in the sea bed. The two figures have no comparison. Whilst cows and methane from tips are human created situations over the last 5,000 years, methane clathrates are geological formations which have been building for millions of years. Ever since the ice ages started in fact.

Human global warming is happening so fast that it is causing localised warming and impacts many times the normal effect of that warming. When you warm up 1.5C in 200 years instead of 15,000 years, then some parts of the system get overheated. A bit like firing up a blowtorch in a room and playing it on a sheet of metal. The overall impact, after, say, an hour, is that the entire room will be 1c or so warmer. The sheet of metal, on the other hand, is white hot or melted.

This is what the scientists are looking at.

Granted we won't see 35 gigatonnes of CO2e (co2 equivalent), of methane unlocked in a year or a decade or a century. The point is we don't need to. The impact of methane, locally, is 75 times that of CO2 in the first 5 years. One massive methane event in the Arctic is enough to empty the arctic of ice for a decade.


Whilst I accept that the clathrate gun hypothesis is unlikely in it's pure form, the reason the Oden is out there now is to see if the beginnings of the hypothesis have any factual basis.

It's looking like there is factual basis. The clathrates in the Arctic are only part of the picture. Bog methane from frozen bogs is already bubbling out from the tundra at ever increasing rates. Scientists have done tests, boring a hole in the ice over a bog pond then lighting the methane. There's got to be something eerie about a hole in the ice over water creating a yellow flame.

Just like climate change itself, these surveys are just the very first beginnings of human exploration into the changes happening under the ice cap and on the sea bed in the methane clathrate balance. I'm sure it will be far, far too late when we finally have the analyses which prove beyond an unreasonable doubt that it is all happening.

[Aggers]

It certainly should be giving people warning that something should be done,
but you can be sure that nothing, yes nothing, will be done until it's too late.

What percentage of the population would be be prepared now to take the
necessary action to 'stop the rot'? I would guess about one per cent, if that.

"Eat, drink and be merry" springs to mind.

[Workingman]

I am not denying anything you say Suff, it is just that some kinds of reporting bug me no end, and I see it all the time. Why gift your opponents the opportunity to have a go and divert the message?

Recently I saw, on the BBC(!), the headline something like: Men who eat bacon three or more times a week have the chance of a 20% increase in colon cancer. It was clear from the comments that most readers thought it meant that 1/5 of bacon eaters, three times or more per week, would get colon cancer. It took an NHS consultant to point out that the rate was 1:1,000 and that the increase would be 6:5,000 instead of 5:5,000.

A will-o'-the-wisp or a jack-o'-lantern is nothing new, especially over bogs, swamps or marshes. They have been known about for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. I have no wish to diminish the findings, but unless we do something about our own greenhouse emissions of today, and that includes cows as well as cars (transport), we are in deep do-do. And rather than focussing in one one thing after another we need to look at the whole picture.

I have now got to the point of trying to explain to people in terms they can understand rather than trying to blind them with science, science which has no meaning to them. Your analogy of the blowtorch and the room is the sort of thing I am talking about. People, children especially, can understand that, perfectly, and even do similar in their own kitchens with the stove and a pan of water. It is our children we should be concentrating on, after all, they are the ones who will have to sort out "our" mess.

[Suff]

Understood WM. I do, often, try to get the whole picture over. However I also believe that, from time to time, we need a short sharp shock to the system to counteract all the denialist BS which talks about such long timeframes and the fact that it "never happened" because it didn't happen in the last 3 years. Like the frog in a pan of cold water, brought up to the boil, we're being conditioned by constantly re-baselined stats which are used to make us believe that nothing is really changing. Or year on year stats which show little change or the odd relapse. When the reality is that things are changing decade by decade and very quickly indeed. Given that climate changes are normally on geological timescales. Thousands of years for small changes.

Another one for the "Simple to try" experiment is to put a pan of cold water on the hob and fill the top of it with ice cubes. Turn the heat on very low and take the temperature of the water every 5 minutes until the ice melts. Then take the temperature of the water every 5 minutes after. Stop when the water boils....

In terms of communicating I was taken to task the other day for not understanding what Denialist are all about. In fact I was told they are useful. Yep thought I, useful for lining graves....

However the position was very interesting. The point made was that we have already so altered our atmospheric balance that we cannot escape the consequences of the climate changes we have wrought. Especially given that we are running with 30 years of sequestered heat in the Oceans. Meaning that the heat coming out of the oceans today went in during the 1980's. God help us when the 2010's heat sequestered with significantly more CO2, starts coming out in the 2040's.

So his point was this. We're in a planetary version of the Titanic. There is nowhere to go and there aren't enough lifeboats. So the role of the denialists is to keep the masses ignorant until the lifeboats leave. Then they can do what they do best. Die.

Now there's an evocative thought isn't there!!!!