Siberia's Methane Release Larger Than Previously Thought

An anonymous reader writes "New research suggests that the amount of methane being released from Siberian permafrost is much larger than previously thought. From the article: 'Thawing permafrost gets a lot of attention as a positive feedback that could amplify global warming by releasing carbon dioxide and methane, both of which are greenhouse gases. Because of this, a lot of effort goes into studying Arctic permafrost. An international group of researchers led by Natalia Shakhova at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has been plying the remote waters of the Siberian Shelf for about a decade to find out how much methane was coming up from the thawing permafrost. They didn't expect to find it bubbling.'"

Siberian traps all over again?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There must be something in Siberia that makes people and nature go genocidal. First the Permian extinctions, then the gulags, now the methane. Go figure!

ANSWER = Stalinoid liberals

[For a Free Internet]

You have swallowed the bourgeoisie's "death of communism" propaganda. You are a pathetic prop for decaying capitalism. What's "outdated" is ANSWER's popular-frontist liberal pacifism.

Re:Hmpffff

[c0lo]

Studying doesn't reduce it. Looks like a runaway process to me. Mars-like surface to come at the end - thanx a lot. Probably not the only idiotic failure in the universe.

However, studies show an interesting fact: it is not (yet) a runaway process. TFA (at the end):

Finally, this is not the first time this region has experienced warmer temperatures. During some of the warm periods between past ice ages, it has been as warm as, or warmer than, it is today. No sudden spike in atmospheric methane shows up in climate records from those times, however. That tells us that, fortunately, it takes a pretty strong kick to awaken a methane giant.

(mind you, I'm not saying that we are out of Siberian marshes yet: the previous ace ages didn't have an industrious population of hominides willing and capable to burn fossile fuel at a massive scale. We are still in the race for that "idiotic failure" prize that you mention).

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[Artifakt]

Adam Smith himself defined his perfect "Free Market" as including everyone knowing how much the productive process cost, and broke this down into such costs as labor, raw materials, and financial charges in his examples. Even by a very strict pro-capitalist model, that sounds like the government would be legitimately supporting capitalism by providing a lot more information than just weights and measures. Consumer safety information for one example, or average salaries for a given area, or an acurately derived inflationary index for others. (Of course, modern capital theory claims there would be no inflation in a pure capitalism, but even so, the government would need to accurately index inflation in a mixed economy trying to move towards that pure state - not reporting it would be retarding the motion). I'd point out too, that all of these could also fit your clause about preventing deception to a greater or lesser extent. But, that still means a medium-large role for governments, although yes, it's theoretically much less in some areas than what we see currently.
          Such things as a business holding trade secrets while continuing to seek the protection of patents or copyrights are not really part of theoretical Capitalism, by Smith's original work. Most modern business and all publicly traded corporations would not want anything like this level of "money being left alone" This is another reason why we aren't moving towards what you call "truely capitalisitic society" - the people crying out the loudest for more capitalism actually oppose many of the most basic elements of it, and fear the very possibility.

Re:The only solution is workers revolution

[starworks5]

Did you even bother to read the definition of capitalism:

a way of organizing an economy so that the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) are owned by individual people and companies rather than by the government

You don't even address the main point, that capitalism inherently produces market failures, for instance what we call externalities. If you think that the failures of socialism is bad, nearly every ecological indicator that we see seems to indicate failure, most of which are borne from a market failure of capitalism.

Furthermore what people refer to as "the third way" or otherwise known as a hybrid of socialism / capitalism IS actually the most stable, as it provides checks and balances to prevent excessive corruption from either the public or private sectors, they are two halves of the same coin the introverted and extroverted locus of economic growth.

Cowtan & Way 2013 trend is inside HadCRUT4 err

[khayman80]

Cowtan and Way 2013 [wiley.com] compensated for missing HadCRUT4 surface temperature measurements in places like the Arctic and Africa by using the spatial pattern of satellite data to produce a hybrid satellite/surface dataset. Jane and Lonny ponder the differences between Cowtan and Way's hybrid dataset and HadCRUT4:

I keep asking: what's wrong with my basic premise: that if your measurements are shown to be off by 100%, there's something wrong with your science? That was my point. [Jane Q. Public] [slashdot.org]

... They are saying that it is not the 0.05 degrees C per decade that the AR5 report gives for the last 15 years, but that it is, instead, 0.12 degrees C. Which is actually a difference of not 100% but 140%, for the most recent 15 years. [Jane Q. Public] [slashdot.org]

@ScienceChannel @jimmygle PLEASE tell the Anthropogenic Global Warmists! Yet another report surfaced saying their "science" was off by 140% [Lonny Eachus] [twitter.com]

Jane and Lonny's basic premise wrongly ignores the large error bars on these noisy, short-term trends. The SkS trend calculator [skepticalscience.com] can calculate the trends and error bars from 1997 through (including) 2012 for both HadCrut4 and Cowtan and Way's hybrid dataset:

1997-2013 HadCRUT4 Trend: 0.049 0.126 C/decade
1997-2013 HadCRUT4 hybrid Trend: 0.119 0.150 C/decade

The hybrid dataset's central estimate is inside the error bars of the original HadCRUT4 estimate.

... they haven't been right yet... They admit that they have no explanation why their models, which projected continued if not increased warming, do not explain why it has dropped by more than half (0.12 to 0.05 deg. C / decade) over the last 15 years. Or, for that matter, why their margin of error (-0.05 to +0.15 deg. C) for the last decade and a half is 4 times the size of their actual estimated warming. Nope... it's pretty damned clear. Something is wrong with their science. [Jane Q. Public] [slashdot.org]

I calculated error bars on UAH trends [dumbscientist.com]. The black line on the second page shows the UAH trend ending in 2012, for different starting years. The error bars are shown in red; they're 95% confidence uncertainty bounds. Note that error bars on longer trends are smaller than the large error bars on shorter trends.

Anyone can reproduce my results by downloading the free "R" programming language [r-project.org] used by professional statisticians. Then save this code as "significance.r":

# run using R CMD BATCH significance.r
# outputs to Rplots.pdf and significance.r.Rout
# load custom functions

# for generalised least squares
library(nlme)

# options
xunits="year"
textsize=1.4
titlesize=1.8
colfit="red"
pch1=20#points

# read basin data
indata = read.table("greenland2013/GIS_climate.nasa.txt",header=T)
title="Greenland mass"
yunits="gigatons"
tlims=c(-350,-190)
alims=c(-60,0)
#indata = indata[which(indata$x>2002.0),]

# remove mean
indata$y = indata$y - mean(indata$y)

n = length(indata$x)
n

midpoint=(indata$x[n]-indata$x[1])/2.0+indata$x[1]

# fit model
fit=gls(y~x,data=indata,corr=corARMA(p=1,q=1))
#fit=gls(y~x+sin(2*pi*x)+cos(2*pi*x),data=indata,corr=corARMA(p=1,q=1))
#fit=gls

Re:methane ice underwater

[dpilot]

I've often heard the "methane is 17 times stronger than CO2 as a greenhouse gase", and that's repeated (without the specific number) in the referenced Wikipedia article. It's equally "well known" that CH4 has a much shorter lifetime than CO2 as a greenouse gas.

That begs the question, what happens to methane to limit its greenhouse lifetime? The carbon is still there, as is the hydrogen, so it must be either precipitated out of the atmosphere or chemically recombined. My bets would be on the latter, and that the methane ends up turming into CO2 and either water or plain old H2, with the reaction influenced by ultraviolet light. So it turns from a very potent greenhouse gas into a merely potent one?

I realize I'm asking a serious question on a funny thread, but this seems to be the most appropriate point.

Re:methane ice underwater

[khallow]

That begs the question, what happens to methane to limit its greenhouse lifetime?

It reacts with oxygen, and perhaps ozone and atmospheric oxides. The resulting CO2 doesn't plug up long wavelength infrared as well as methane does.

So it turns from a very potent greenhouse gas into a merely potent one?

Right.

And "begging the question" is a fallacy of assuming what you want to show.