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Release of methane gas from the seafloor in the Southern Hemisphere
- chrisweekly 6y agoYikes. "Gas hydrate is an ice-like substance formed by water and methane at depths of several hundred metres at the bottom of our oceans at high pressure and low temperatures. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, roughly 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and it is estimated that methane frozen in these sediments constitute the largest organic carbon reservoir on Earth. The fact that methane gas has now started leaking out through gas hydrate dissociation is not good news for the climate."
- mattmanser 6y agoYikes like the clathrate gun that turned out to be nonsense, or yikes as in it's actually a threat? Not saying climate change isn't something to be worried about, but this article doesn't say if it'll release like 10% of yearly methane, or like 0.00001% and Ketzer's just trying to pump his publication count. What I would really love to see is an indepedant website ranking all the threats. How bad is global shipping vs leaving your lights on? Or the clathrate gun vs burning oil fields? Or recycling your plastic vs throwing your plastic shit in the river in 3rd world countries? Like there's was a dip in CO2 emiisions during covid, but only like a 15%. Who's producing the rest? 'cause it's now obviously not most of the population of the world who get lectured about recycling, it's obviously a small number of companies, which I think most of us would suspect probably has a high intersection with the small number of people hoarding wealth in the world.
- renewiltord 6y agoThe Clathrate Gun Hypothesis was falsified? I did not realize. Do you happen to remember where you read that?
- bananabreakfast 6y agoIt wasn't. They're being hyperbolic with the intention to mislead.
- titzer 6y agoAre you referring to a specific clathrate gun or the concept in general? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis summarizes a lot of research on this subject and doesn't give me the impression that it's nonsense or "debunked". Personally, I find it worrisome.
- anonuser123456 6y agoIt isn't debunked, but not well modelled and thus very large error bars (from a friend that works in atmospheric chemistry)
- regularfry 6y agoThe problem with that criticism is that the payoff function is absurdly nonlinear. Think of it in terms of expected values: because the outcome at one end of those error bars is so severe, it's rational to treat the "gun" part as true until it's shown not to be.
- anonuser123456 6y agoI'm not criticizing the hypothesis, simply pointing out it's not well understood. But it is not true that the precautionary principle applies here regardless of the risk. There is a cost to avoiding the behaviors that raise the possibility of run away methane release; carbon based energy was absolutely necessary to get out science/industry to the point we can look for alternatives. If we muddled around in the pre-industrial age in perpetuity, eventually we'd get wiped out by some large event (astroid, super volcano, ice age etc). So the risk is worth it to a point since the cost of the alternative is equally high.
- regularfry 6y agoWe're not in that situation, because we've already made the choice not to muddle about pre-industrially. But even so, that argument is flawed: we're still at risk of getting wiped out by all the same extreme natural phenomena as we were 500 years ago, only we've added some new ones of our own: nuclear holocaust, clathrate guns, runaway warming of some other cause immediately spring to mind. Probabilistically we're worse off now than we were then, just because of the additional ways things can go wrong. We don't have the choice to stay pre-industrial. That's off the table. We do hopefully still have the choice to avoid a scenario that drops us irrecoverably back to pre-agricultural.
- baron_harkonnen 6y ago> Like there's was a dip in CO2 emiisions during covid, but only like a 15%. Who's producing the rest? While I agree very much about the absurd logic of trying to put the solutions to climate change on individuals, I am honestly perplexed that you don't seem to understand how all of your daily consumption contributes to climate change. CO2 emissions doesn't just come from driving your car. If you ordered anything delivered from amazon that created CO2, if you live in a developing city your environment creates CO2, if you consume food that is grown non-locally or that uses fertilizer that also create CO2. It's not just a "small number of companies" it's every company and every part of our modern life. Look around you and I can assure you that most of the things you see where shipped around the globe using ships powered by bunker fuel, they were made with materials gathered using a non-trivial amount of non-renewable energy. Again, I agree that we can't expect that individually we'll all radically alter our lives and live like it's 1800, but it is essential to realize who much of your current way of live contributes to the enormous production of CO2. The fact that things slowed down and we decreased emissions by some notable percentage but we suffered incredible economic consequences for this show just how unsustainable our entire way of life is.
- mattmanser 6y agoAre you an idiot? Or do you really order from amazon like 10 times a day? It doesn't add up mate, there's a lot of misdirection going on.
- bamboozled 6y agoWhat about just simplifying it and saying that, the majority of the reason for climate change is burning coal and oil ? I don’t think we need to regress back to living in mud clay huts and blocking Amazon orders. We did need to stop burning coal for generating power 100 years ago.
- vertis 6y agoIt's nowhere near that simple though. CO2 is one big contributor, but not the only one. Methane is also a big contributor[1], and things like beef production are a big part of increased Methane emissions (by no means the only source). [1]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/methane/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warmin...
- aaron695 6y ago> it's obviously a small number of companies, which I think most of us would suspect probably has a high intersection with the small number of people hoarding wealth in the world. Do you think the rich just buy coal mines and set them on fire? Or do you mean all the citizens of Europeans and North American, in which case yes. We 1% with all the wealth are the ones emitting CO2 while we wait for the worlds poor to catch up, who get to have a small footprint by letting kids die of diarrhoea and stuff. You stared well, of course the Clathrate gun is made up like almost everything else in the global warming lore, but then you started your own fan fiction.
- adrianN 6y agoThis website is not exactly what you're asking for, but similar: https://www.drawdown.org/ https://www.drawdown.org/
- morsch 6y agoTemporary reduction in daily global CO2 emissions during the COVID-19 forced confinement https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0797-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0797-x
- perl4ever 6y ago>it's obviously a small number of companies, which I think most of us would suspect probably has a high intersection with the small number of people hoarding wealth in the world. Assuming that you're right about a small number of companies producing most of the pollution, and a small proportion of people "hoarding wealth" what does the one have to do with another? If all the oil and coal companies had stock that was distributed perfectly evenly, I don't see how it would necessarily change pollution.
- thdrdt 6y agoSome people in my country are very negative about immigrants. 'They should stay in their own country'. But I really believe the world is going to be different in 10 years from now. And it is very likely a lot of people must migrate to other places because conditions become unlivable. You might become a foreigner yourself one day.
- uCantCauseUCant 6y agoI will just move into a dome until this all blows over..
- foobar1962 6y agoWhere will people migrate to? The entire earth climate is changing. We may find the earth only supports medieval population levels.
- cynusx 6y agoTime to release the moratorium on ocean fertilization?
- henearkr 6y agoIf the clathrates are really massively destabilized with raising temperatures, no existing microorganisms could possibly stop the huge mega-bubbles of methane that would raise bursting to the ocean surface. Microorganisms could very well be useful, but only if the process stays slow. But in this case, maybe there are already enough of them naturally.
- haram_masala 6y agoAs a biologist, I would advise against underestimating what microorganisms are capable of.
- azernik 6y agoAnd indeed, in this case it's already being broken down by microorganisms before it reaches the atmosphere. Still being broken down into CO2, but still not as bad as being released directly into the atmosphere as CH4.
- henearkr 6y agoYes. I must apologize, my poor English grammar made my comment unclear: I was wondering, in case of releases of methane orders of magnitude larger and quicker than they are now, how microorganisms could possibly stop large bubbles on their way. It is clearly not the case right now.
- hcknwscommenter 6y agoNot the original commenter, but I think the point of the comment is different from your interpretation. Typically "ocean fertilization" refers to the concept of seeding the ocean with iron and other nutrients to encourage blooming of oxygen generating (CO2 consuming) photosynthetic microorganisms. The idea is not to literally consume the rising bubble as it boils off the ocean floor, but to slow down/reverse global warming in general by reducing atmospheric CO2.
- epicureanideal 6y agoWell at least the SpaceX Raptor engines won't be running out of fuel anytime soon.
- henearkr 6y ago(disclaimer: I know you're joking, sorry to answer so seriously ^^) The fact it is released does not mean that it is captured (by humans). Actually, any project to capture all of methane clathrate (because capturing all of it is the only way to preventing it melting and leaking) would be so titanic, really impossible, or very very difficult. Yes we agree, Musk will never run out of methane. But the Earth will quickly run out of capacity to process it when it's released, accelerating the greenhouse effect, that's the real limiting factor.
- usrusr 6y agoAn impossibly titanic project, sure. But as long as we are burning hydrocarbons that would have happily stayed in the ground ever after, switching all that combustion to hydrocarbons that would escape one way or the other anyways would be a major win.
- henearkr 6y agoOf course, but even better would be to manage to reverse the global warming and have these clathrates remain frozen...
- tda 6y agoI wonder if there is potential for enough methane hydrate turning gaseous that it drives a top to bottom current, bringing warm surface water to greater depths and thus creating a runaway effect where the ocean would seem to be boiling violently from all the methane being released. I had a nightmare about this the other day after seeing the tundra pits, no idea if this is remotely feasible
- jacobush 6y agoThat is nightmare fuel. If they made a movie about this, it wouldn't even be enjoyable to watch because it would be too sad and scary. Like The Day After Tomorrow but without the comforting thought reminding you that couldn't actually happen.
- zaarn 6y agoI think such a runaway effect might be more likely than people think. Such places could also still be deceptively quiet on the surface if it's only exchanging water-dissolved methane. It could turn boiling fast and sink ships due to lack of surface tension and rapid decrease in average water density. The Swarm by Schätzing depicted a scenario like this, concluding in the runaway being fast enough to eventually cause the clathrate to detonate, causing a large scale tsunami in the north sea of Europe.
- waiseristy 6y agoDo we have historic evidence of runaway methane induced warming? It seems crazy that we are seeing these effects, but have nothing(?) in the geological records of these cataclysmic events
- titzer 6y agoSeafloor sediments have been implicated in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jbay808 6y agoSee for example http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/impactfromthedeep.pdf http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/impactfromthedeep.pd...
- sci_prog 6y agoYes we do, but it's only a hypothesis. This was part of my PhD dissertation and one of my committee members is the world's expert on this topic. His name is Gerald (Jerry) Dickens. We believe this happened approximately 55 million years ago during an event called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), an extreme global warming event. I've published a couple papers on this topic. The way this works is, we run a computer model and try to come up with a scenario which matches the observations from that time period the best. And seems like the extreme warning that happened during the PETM was likely due to methane hydrate dissociation. I can link a few scientific papers if anyone is interested.
- lmilcin 6y agoI have seen models (and there was an article recently) how relatively small increase in temperature can reduce clod cover, reducing albedo and introducing another source of positive feedback and one that acts very fast.
- sulam 6y agoThis mechanism and permafrost melt are two of the main feedback loops associated with non-anthropogenic warming. Whether they're properly accounted for in climate models is a key question.
- Daishiman 6y agoThey're not. The IPCC reports account for a lot of things but for political reasons have been conservative in many of their estimates because certain countries are not fond of the implications of our sustainable lifestyle.
- sergeykish 6y ago> our sustainable lifestyle It is hard to imagine where you live [1], somewhere in Africa? And these "certain countries" evangelize consumerism? Or is it a typo in "our unsustainable lifestyle"? Can't understand it either. Negative change in CO₂ emissions is a rare event [2]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2 [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/absolute-change-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/absolute-change-co2
- sergeykish 6y agoCould you please explain downvotes? Even entire world 0 tonnes per capita emissions today will result in 1.5°C warming [1]. How about 2°C [2]? Maybe with 0.1 tonnes per capita, 0.78 Gtonne worldwide. That's [3] Democratic Republic of Congo 0.02 t Somalia 0.05 t Burundi 0.05 t Central African Republic 0.06 t Chad 0.07 t Malawi 0.08 t Rwanda 0.09 t Niger 0.10 t Current policies produce in 3°C warming [4]. No change is 4–5°C. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-15c https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-15c [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-2c https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-2c [3] https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2 [4] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions#current-climate-policies-will-reduce-emissions-but-not-quickly-enough-to-reach-international-targets https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
- henearkr 6y agoSome point that is not very clear if we read the article shallowly: the methane is not yet leaked to the ocean's surface, for now it is just melted, then dissolved into the water, and microorganisms are converting it to CO2, which adds a huge new source of CO2 for our already overloaded system. I wonder how far away in the future is the point where the methane would actually raise quicker than bacteria are able to process it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dev_throw 6y agoWe already have a known source of methane emissions that is ever increasing: cattle. Cows and swine account for several metric tons of emissions every year, factory farming accounting for most of it. Reducing this is in most people's control.
- hwillis 6y agoIt may be within your control, but it's essentially irrelevant. All livestock and manure cause <4% of the average American's emissions (bottom chart): http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet The emissions from grains etc add up to roughly as much overall- you don't eat the entire plant and it either rots or gets fed to cows. Obviously reducing emissions in our food industry is a huge win- eliminating red meat would be awesome. It's nowhere near good enough. Fossil fuels are 30x more important, easily.
- BurningFrog 6y agoOK, so there are some positive feedback loops for global warming. As temperature rises, that causes other effects that in turn warms the climate even more. But I can't see any fundamental reason that such side effects should add to the warming. It seems just as likely that they would counteract it. It's not like there is any plan behind it. In Physics, whatever happens happens. So... I wonder if there is also a set of counteracting global warming side effects that don't get reported much, since that isn't scary? Or is there some fundamental reinforcement mechanism here that I'm not seeing?
- azernik 6y agoIt's not fundamental, but it makes the whole situation less predictable and extreme scenarios (both good and bad) far more likely.
- walleeee 6y agoThere's no reason that feedbacks must be positive in principle. Regardless, though, as the earth system wanders farther from its most recent stable state (the Holocene equilibrium), its behavior is likely to continue to become more chaotic and difficult to predict. That's not good for humans no matter whether it involves warming or cooling. To my knowledge the reinforcement mechanisms we are aware of do tend to be positive, though, hence the focus on warming.
- hcknwscommenter 6y agoThe biggest negative feedback loop I am aware of is clouds. Higher temp, more moisture in the air, more clouds, greater reflection of incoming light (and greater retention of heat, so not a clear negative loop in all scenarios). However, as far as I can tell, clouds are a lot easier to model than the positive feed back loops we know/suspect, albedo decrease, clathrate guns, peat breakdown, etc. Thus, we are in a situation, where negative feedback loops seem well accounted for and there are a few potentially catastrophic, but perfectly plausible, positive feedback loops that are too difficult to properly assess. It is scary.
- tempestn 6y ago
- millstone 6y agoAtmospheric methane removal seems doable, maybe a prototype for CO2 removal. It's easier because it doesn't have to be buried: it could just be burned to convert to CO2 with a much smaller warming impact.
- ArkVark 6y agoExcess atmospheric CO2 still causes major problems with human cognition and building ventilation. At about 800ppm there are measurable falls in human cognitive performance. Might not happen outside for a while, but the increase to the outdoor level makes ventilation much more difficult.
- mleonhard 6y agoI used to believe that excess CO2 causes mood/cognitive problems. I changed my mind while participating in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157422
- DumbUser123 6y agoScrewed, we are.
- nateburke 6y agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17289-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17289-z