Methane levels as high as 2845ppb

Methane levels as high as 2845ppb

2015 CH4 IASI levels mean methane MetOp peak

Unknown 4/26/2015 Add Comment

Methane levels as high as 2845 parts per billion (ppb) were recorded on April 25, 2015, as illustrated by the image below.

This is an extremely high peak. The average daily peak in 2015 until May 1 was 2371 ppb, while the highest daily mean ranged from 1807 ppb (January 10) to 1829 ppb (April 22). Daily peaks and daily highest mean levels in 2015 are shown on the image below.

These peaks are much higher than they were in previous years, as illustrated by the image below, from an earlier post and showing the average highest peak readings in 2013 and 2014 at selected altitudes..

Peak readings in above image are averages over April 2013 and April 2014. On specific days, peak readings could be much higher, e.g. on April 28, 2014, methane levels were recorded as high as 2551 ppb at 469 mb. As said, methane levels as high as 2845 ppb were recorded on April 25, 2015, while the average peak for the first four months of 2015 was 2371 ppb, and this average was calculated from peaks across altitudes.

The table below shows the altitude equivalents in mb (millibar) and feet.

56,925 ft	44,689 ft	36,850 ft	30,569 ft	25,543 ft	19,819 ft	14,383 ft	8,367 ft	1,916 ft
74 mb	147 mb	218 mb	293 mb	367 mb	469 mb	586 mb	742 mb	945 mb

Peak levels in April appear to be rising strongly each year, following higher peak readings during previous months, especially at higher altitudes, i.e. especially the Arctic Ocean. It appears that much of the additional methane originating from the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere has moved closer to the equator over the past few months, and is now accumulating at higher altitudes over the continents on the Northern Hemisphere, i.e. Asia, Europe, North America and north Africa.

Further analysis of the rise in global mean methane levels appears to confirm the above. The image below shows methane levels on April 22, over three years. While there appears to be little or no rise in mean methane levels at low altitudes, the rise is quite profound at higher altitudes.  

[ click on image to enlarge ]

Things look set to get worse. As shown by the image below, from an earlier post, global methane levels have risen sharply from a low of 723 ppb in 1755. Mean methane levels were as high as 1839 ppb in 2014. That's a rise of more than 254%.

As that post concluded a year ago, it appears that the rise of methane in the atmosphere is accelerating. What can we expect? As temperatures can be expected to continue to rise and as feedbacks start to kick in, this may well constitute a non-linear trend. The image below shows a polynomial trend that is contained in IPCC AR5 data from 1955 to 2011, pointing at methane reaching mean global levels higher than 3000 ppb by the year 2030. If methane starts to erupt in large quantities from clathrates underneath the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean, this may well be where we are heading. 

The situation is dire and calls for comprehensive and effective action, as discussed at the Climate Plan.

The 2845 ppb recorded on April 25, 2015, is an extremely high peak. The average daily peak in 2015 until now was 2372...
Posted by Sam Carana on Monday, April 27, 2015

Ocean Temperature Rise Continues

Ocean Temperature Rise Continues

Arctic CH4 clathrates continue feedbacks hydrates methane Natalia Shakhova ocean rise Steven Sherwood temperature

Unknown 11/20/2014 Add Comment

Ocean Temperature Rise

Of all the excess heat that results from people's emissions, 93.4% goes into oceans. Accordingly, the temperature of oceans has risen substantially.

NOAA analysis shows that the most recent 12-month period, November 2013–October 2014, broke the record (set just last month) for the all-time warmest 12-month period in the 135-year period of record. The global oceans were the warmest on record for October. For January–October, the average global sea surface temperature was also record high.

The danger is that ocean temperatures will continue to rise, especially in the North Atlantic, and that the Gulf Stream will keep carrying ever warmer water from the North Atlantic into the Arctic Ocean, threatening to unleash huge methane eruptions from the Arctic Ocean's seafloor, in turn causing even higher temperatures and more extreme weather events, wildfires, etc.


High Methane Levels

High methane levels were recorded over the Arctic Ocean in October, as discussed in this earlier post, and were sustained in November, as discussed in this post. Methane levels as high as 2717 ppb were recorded on November 16, 2014, p.m, by the MetOp-1 satellite at 469 mb (i.e. 19,820 ft or 6,041 m altitude), as the image below shows.

Methane levels as high as 2549 ppb were recorded on November 19, 2014, p.m, by the MetOp-2 satellite at 586 mb (i.e. 14,385 ft or 4,384 m altitude), as the image below shows.

Above image further confirms earlier indications that these high methane levels do indeed result from large methane eruptions from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean.

Greenhouse gas levels in general are very high over the Arctic, as earlier discussed in a recent post and as illustrated by the image below, showing carbon dioxide levels as high as 420 ppm at high latitudes, while the global mean was 403 ppm, on November 19, 2014, p.m., at 945 mb (i.e. 1,916 ft or 584 m altitude).

As said, sustained instances of large abrupt methane eruptions from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean threaten to strongly accelerate warming in the Arctic even further, in turn resulting in ever more methane being released, as illustrated in the image below, from an earlier post.

Self-reinforcing Feedback Loops

Such methane eruptions are part of a number of self-reinforcing feedback loops that can strongly accelerate warming in the Arctic. Above image, from an earlier post, illustrates two such feedbacks, i.e. albedo changes due to snow and ice demise, and methane releases. Further feedbacks are described in this post and this post, and in the image below.

For a discussion of these and further feedbacks, see this page at the Climate Plan blog 

The threat is that such rapid temperature rises will appear at first in hotspots over the Arctic and eventually around the globe, while also resulting in huge temperature swings that could result in depletion of supply of food and fresh water, as further illustrated by the above image, from an earlier post, and the image below, from another earlier post.

[ click on image at original post to enlarge ]

IPCC warnings not strong enough



In above paragraph, the IPCC warns about the risk of methane eruptions from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean further accelerating global warming. While the IPCC does model for a temperature rise that could exceed 12 degrees Celsius in a 'business as usual' scenario (i.e. without action taken), the IPCC does not anticipate that such a rise could occur before the year 2250, as illustrated by the image below.

The situation could be much worse than foreseen by the IPCC, due to a number of reasons, including:

1. The non-linear way feedbacks can hugely increase temperature rises.
2.  The IPCC's underestimation of the amount of methane contained in sediments under the Arctic Ocean and prone to be released as temperatures rise. Shakhova et al. estimate the accumulated methane potential for the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) alone as follows:
   - organic carbon in permafrost of about 500 Gt;
   - about 1000 Gt in hydrate deposits; and
   - about 700 Gt in free gas beneath the gas hydrate stability zone.
   Back in 2008, Shakhova et al. considered release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage as highly possible for abrupt release at any time.
   Furthermore, mantel methane could add to our predicament, as discussed in an earlier post.
3. Back in 2002, Malcolm Light already warned that seismic events could trigger destabilization of methane hydrates. Furthermore, huge temperature swings can combine with pressure swings and storms, and with swings between expansion and contraction of soil and ice, resulting in severe shocks to ecosystems, as described in an earlier post. 
4. The IPCC's ignoring of large methane eruptions from the seafloor of the Arctic Oceans and the resulting growth of mean global methane levels at higher altitudes, as discussed in an earlier post.

Steven Sherwood et al. wrote back in 2010 that peak heat stress, quantified by wet bulb temperature, across diverse climates today never exceeds 31 degrees Celsius (see also this update). Some may believe that this doesn't apply to the Arctic and the higher altitudes in mountain regions. However, at the June Solstice the amount of solar radiation received in the Arctic is higher than anywhere else on Earth, An increased occurence and intensity of heatwaves could expose large areas of the Arctic and mountain regions to sustained heatwaves exceeding peak heat stress temperatures. In addition, ocean acidification and oxygen depletion in the Arctic Ocean would make it hard for fish, seals, polar bears and further wildlife to survive. Furthermore, the short growth season combined with a long, cold winter limits vegetation in the Arctic, while ecosystems are also becoming increasingly exposed to wild weather swings and wildfires.


Risk Assessment

When taking above points into acount, an absence of action seems to guarantee human extinction by the year 2050. Little action will be ‘too little, too late’ and will merely delay human extinction by a few years, as illustrated by the graph below.

The graph identifies the years 2030 and 2040 as critical. Beyond the year 2030, the risk that humans will go extrinct grows larger than 1% in the absence of action. By the year 2040, the risk of human extinction will have increased substantially, especially if no action will have been taken, but also if too little action will have been taken up to 2040, while even with the best possible programs put in place by the year 2015, there will be a 2% risk of human extinction by 2040, e.g. due to war over what action to take, or due to political opposition or errors making such programs ineffective or even counter-productive.

In conclusion, it is highly likely that the risk of human extinction already now is intolerably high and rising with every moment passing with little no action taken to reduce the risk. This calls for comprehensive and effective action, as further discussed at the Climate Plan blog.


References

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) WGI Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), Final Draft (7 June 2013), page 168.
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5_WGI-12Doc2b_FinalDraft_Chapter02.pdf

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) WGI Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), Final Draft (7 June 2013), Figure 12.5.
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5_WGI-12Doc2b_FinalDraft_Chapter12.pdf

- An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress - by Steven C. Sherwood & Matthew Huber
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/04/26/0913352107.full.pdf

- Ocean Temperature Rise - by Sam Carana
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/10/ocean-temperature-rise.html

- Methane release from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf and the Potential for Abrupt Climate Change - by Natalia Shakhova & Igor Semiletov
http://symposium2010.serdp-estcp.org/content/download/8914/107496/version/3/file/1A_Shakhova_Final.pdf

- Anomalies of methane in the atmosphere over the East Siberian shelf: Is there any sign of methane leakage from shallow shelf hydrates? - by Shakhova, Semiletov, Salyuk & Kosmach  http://www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGU2008/01526/EGU2008-A-01526.pdf

- Mantle Methane - by Malcolm Light
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/02/mantle-methane.html

- Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes - by Jennifer A. Francis and S.J. Vavrus, in: Geophysical Research Letters 39 (6):. doi:10.1029/2012GL051000
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL051000/abstract

- Near-Term Human Extinction - by Sam Carana
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/04/near-term-human-extinction.html

- Warm waters threaten to trigger huge methane eruptions from Arctic Ocean seafloor - by Sam Carana
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/08/warm-waters-threaten-to-trigger-huge-methane-releases-from-arctic-ocean-seafloor.html

- How many deaths could result from failure to act on climate change? - by sam Carana
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/05/how-many-deaths-could-result-from-failure-to-act-on-climate-change.html

- Methane linked to Seismic Activity in the Arctic - by Malcolm P. Light & Sam Carana
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/seismic-activity.html

- Wild Weather Swings - by Sam Carana
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/10/wild-weather-swings.html

- Four Hiroshima bombs a second: how we imagine climate change - by Sam Carana
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/08/four-hiroshima-bombs-second-how-we-imagine-climate-change.html

- Polar jet stream appears hugely deformed
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/12/polar-jet-stream-appears-hugely-deformed.html

- Near-Term Human Extinction
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/04/near-term-human-extinction.html

Post by Sam Carana.

350,000 Marchers = 50 Parts Per Million

350,000 Marchers = 50 Parts Per Million

1250 carbon CH4 Cindy Snodgrass CO2 methane Nathan Currier Peoples Climate March

Unknown 9/22/2014 Add Comment

People's Climate March, New York, September 21, 2014, photo by Cindy Snodgrass

by Nathan Currier

How big a deal was the march in Manhattan yesterday? One of the organizers was 350.org, a group started by Bill McKibben based on a paper by climate scientist James Hansen which stated that we should aim for about 350 parts per million (ppm) CO2. We are currently at about 400ppm, so we need to move "only" about 50ppm in the opposite direction from our rapid growth, which hit a frightening 3ppm clip last year.

It will take a huge effort, and few alive today will live to see it (short of large-scale engineering), but it is interesting to ponder the minute change this represents in the air -- a shift of just 5 one-thousandths of one percent (.005 percent) of the atmosphere! That is one of the fascinating things in climate science, how such a minute change in our atmosphere could potentially have such an impact on the energy balance of our whole planet.

Keep this in mind if you are trying to contemplate how big a deal it is that some 350,000 people came out into the streets of Manhattan, the capital of capitalism, the cultural heart of the nation where manufactured denial has most stymied action. That's because this happens to be exactly the same proportion of the 7 billion members of humanity, 5 one-thousandths of one percent, as that 50ppm is a shift in the composition of the air. Further, some have estimated the real number of marchers as 400,000, and if the global estimates swell equally, then globally about the same proportion were marching as the CO2 growth since industrialization is a shift in atmospheric composition. In a way, all those marching were just a trace, and as soon as we dissipated into streets and subways afterwards, quickly outnumbered by people going about their everyday lives, that seemed obvious, but in another way, how monumental the right little trace can become!

And speaking of powerful little traces, methane is even far less concentrated in the air than CO2, about 220 times less so, but there was really some methane floating around the Manhattan air yesterday! No, I don't mean all those leaky pipes in the city that have led local tests to sometimes register incredibly high ambient readings of the greenhouse gas. I mean that among the marchers anti-fracking signs often seemed to outnumber all other "sub-theme" signs. This is a fascinating phenomenon, as some of us have felt that, since we all ultimately must live in the here and now, and since one cannot impact the climate we have here and now very effectively through CO2 mitigation, yet one can only gain practical political traction by dealing with that here and now, so one of the best ways to gauge seriousness in getting movement going on climate would be to watch for meaningful action on methane. In a sense, if you want people to start climbing up a very steep ladder, you need to give them a nice low first step, and that first climate step would be methane. As Robert Watson, the previous Chair of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it succinctly, rapidly cutting methane, "would demonstrate to the world that we can do something to quickly slow climate change. We need to get moving to cool the planet's temperature. Methane is the most effective place for us to start."

The Manhattan climate march also provided a fitting example of how getting the big slow march of change rolling can be frustrating: for those in the back it took two hours to start any movement at all, and then another two hours to reach Columbus Circle, its ostensible starting point. Similarly inevitable drags on climate mitigation are making rapid methane action all the more important. And uncertainties in near-term climate change, with a rising potential for high-impact lower-probability events to cause abrupt heating (like non-human methane emissions in the arctic taking off more quickly than models predict), means that ignoring the near-term climate for too long could ultimately prove fatal to all our best intentions. So it's fascinating to see an interest in methane growing from the grass roots, even if it is still largely (and erroneously) confined to the fracking issue at this point. Let's hope that the interest in this merest little trace gas of our air -- since industrialization it has risen by about 1.1 ppm, a shift of about 1.1 ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the atmosphere! -- sparks soon. The group 1250 was initially intended to provide a kind of autonomous offshoot to McKibben's 350, in order to help generate that spark, but McKibben himself soon said that he "had his hands full with CO2" and did not at the time send along to his followers the group's initial petition drive, which then quickly languished. But if methane interest does reach that critical concentration, and that spark is provided, you know what happens next: that's when climate action goes boom.

Above text was earlier posted by Nathan Currier at the HuffingtonPost 

Below follow further photos by Cindy Snowgrass of the People's Climate March.

Post by Sam Carana.

Methane rising through fractures

Methane rising through fractures

Arctic Ocean CH4 clathrates Harold Hensel hydrates Malcolm Light mantle methane methane permafrost ppb

Unknown 7/21/2014 Add Comment

by Harold Hensel

Methane is colorless and odorless and it is right above us in the atmosphere.

In addition to other sources, methane has traveled from the Arctic and has blanketed most of the Northern Hemisphere.

The well-known sources are methane hydrates from the Arctic Ocean floor and methane coming from thawing permafrost.

There is also another less well-known source. During the geologic history of the Arctic area, tectonic plates have spread, crashed into each other and subducted under one another. Geologists call the Arctic a tectonic plate junkyard. There are numerous fractures in the earth's crust there.

A quote from earth scientist Malcolm Light: ‘Mantle methane formed from the reduction of oceanic carbonates by water in the presence of iron (II) oxides buried to depths of 100 km to 300 km in the Asthenosphere and at temperatures above 1200°C.’ This is a nonorganic source of methane formed near the earth's mantel. Katey Walter Anthony from the University of Alaska calls it geologic methane.

Vast reservoirs of methane have been created by chemical reactions and stored near the mantle under a lot of pressure for millennia.

The methane has had a route to the surface through the fractures in the earth's crust, but the fractures have been sealed over by ice. Now for the first time in human history, the ice sealing the fractures is thawing. Methane is rising through the fractures and into the atmo­sphere. This methane has migrated to the United States and is over us.

Harold Hensel, 

Cedar Rapids.

Earlier published as 
Letter to the Editor 
Cedar Rapids Gazette 
(without images)


Related

- Study: Geologic methane seeping from thawing cryosphere - by Marmian Grimes
http://uafcornerstone.net/study-geologic-methane-seeping-from-thawing-cryosphere

- Focus on Methane - by Malcolm Light
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/07/focus-on-methane.html

- Arctic Atmospheric Methane Global Warming Veil - by Malcolm Light, Harold Hensel and Sam Carana

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/06/arctic-atmospheric-methane-global-warming-veil.html

- Mantle Methane - by Malcolm Light

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/02/mantle-methane.html

Post by Sam Carana.