Blog readers may recall my February 7, 2019, post "Arctic Methane Debate Rages On," and my October 28, 2017, post "'If we lose the Arctic, we lose the globe.' -- President Niinistö of Finland in Joint Press Conference with President Trump, August 28, 2017." In 2015 Bill Nye made a 3-minute video of this methane threat with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Nye's climate therapist. Regarding an update, there is good news, and bad news.
The good news is October 2, 2020, The Guardian writer Mark Hertsgaard, citing climate scientist Michael Mann, wrote "Using new, more elaborate computer models equipped with an interactive carbon cycle, 'what we now understand is that if you stop emitting carbon right now … the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly,' [ . . . ]. Such ocean storage of CO2 'mostly' offsets the warming effect of the CO2 that still remains in the atmosphere. Thus, the actual lag between halting CO2 emissions and halting temperature rise is not 25 to 30 years, he explains, but 'more like three to five years.'" This is important because, as I wrote before, "Duncan Clark's January 16, 2012 article in The Guardian noted 'Between 65% and 80% of CO2 released into the air dissolves into the ocean over a period of 20–200 years' while 'Methane, by contrast, is mostly removed from the atmosphere by chemical reaction, persisting for about 12 years.'" Therefore, the obvious threats are related to how much carbon and methane are released how fast, and how long major releases continue.
Bad news is in the next three paragraphs.
In the October 4, 2016, Siberian Times, according to Professor Igor Semiletov, of Tomsk Polytechnic University and University of Alaska Fairbanks, it was noted "the greenhouse effect of one molecule of methane is 20-30 times greater than one molecule of CO2." In my post "Arctic Methane Debate Rages On," Carolyn Ruppel, Ph.D, a Research Geophysicist at Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center, and leader of the USGS Gas Hydrates Project, said in a January 29, 2019 Yale Climate Connections video "Polar melting: 'Methane time bomb' isn't actually a 'bomb'," "People who may not be too aware of the thermodynamics of gas hydrates may believe that once you start triggering warming of those, and breakdown of those deposits, you can't stop it. And, in fact, the thermodynamics helps you a lot on that because of the nature of the reaction [ . . . .] this is a problem when we try to produce methane from hydrates. It keeps shutting itself down, right? So it's not a situation where we trigger breakdown, and [ . . . ] the whole deposit's going to release its methane all of a sudden. That [ . . .] is not a scientifically sound worry."
My concern is that even if it's not all released instantly, there may be enough released to cause major problems with heat, fires, droughts, water security, crop failures, etc. For example, Jonathan Watts wrote at The Guardian in an article "amended on 4 and 17 November 2020," "For the second year in a row, [Semiletov's] team have found crater-like pockmarks in the shallower parts of the Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea that are discharging bubble jets of methane, which is reaching the sea surface at levels tens to hundreds of times higher than normal."
Sue Natali and Brendan Rogers wrote in an 8/30/21 opinion piece in The Hill, "The major emitter that's missing from climate negotiations," is "permafrost, and its carbon footprint this century could be on par with unchecked emissions by the likes of Japan, India, the U.S., or even more than all these nations. Excluding such a player from international calculations and negotiations would be unthinkable. And yet, that is precisely what we’ve been doing with permafrost emissions." They noted "[In] the latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), [ . . . . ] permafrost thaw and its emissions are not accounted for in global carbon budgets that guide emissions reduction schedules aimed at limiting climate warming to thresholds such as those set out by the Paris Agreement. This is a disastrous mistake." Similarly, there is no accounting for climate tipping points, and none for feedback loops in the latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I recall Dahr Jamail said in a video I posted November 28, 2020, "Another person from within the IPCC, it was passed on to me, said you can basically take the IPCC's worst case predictions and double them."
Therefore, here are questions for political and corporate leaders at COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland regarding the title of this Trees, Fish, and Dreams Climateblog.
Trees: Will we have water? (Evergreens are turning rust red along I-5 between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle.)
Fish: Will we have rivers? (Since 2015 salmon have been trucked by Washington or California officials to or from the sea.)
Dreams: Please respond to Professor Stefan Rahmstorf's dream below. He is Head of Earth System Analysis at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, which partnered with the Noble Prize Summit -- OUR PLANET, OUR FUTURE April 26/27/28.
"Sometimes I have this dream.
"I’m going for a hike and discover a remote farm house on fire.
"Children are calling for help from the upper windows. So I call the fire brigade. But they don’t come, because some mad person keeps telling them that it is a false alarm.
"The situation is getting more and more desperate, but I can't convince the firemen to get going.
"I cannot wake up from this nightmare."
Stefan Rahmstorf
