Climate Changers, I really want to urge you to get to grips with the implications of what this news item means :-
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1994071,00.html
"Surge in carbon levels raises fears of runaway warming : Figures show higher than expected rise in CO2 : Scientists warn earth may be absorbing less gas : David Adam : Environment correspondent : Friday January 19, 2007 : The Guardian
Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere much faster than scientists expected, raising fears that humankind may have less time to tackle climate change than previously thought. New figures from dozens of measuring stations across the world reveal that concentrations of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, rose at record levels during 2006 - the fourth year in the last five to show a sharp increase.
Experts are puzzled because the spike, which follows decades of more modest annual rises, does not appear to match the pattern of steady increases in human emissions. At its most far reaching, the finding could indicate that global temperatures are making forests, soils and oceans less able to absorb carbon dioxide - a shift that would make it harder to tackle global warming. Such a shift would worsen even the gloomy predictions of the Stern Review which warned that we had little over a decade to tackle rising emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
David Hofmann of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), which published the figures, said: "Over this last decade the growth rates in carbon dioxide have been higher. I don't think we can plausibly say what's causing it. It's something we're going to look at." Peter Cox, a climate change expert at Exeter University, said: " The concern is that climate change itself will affect the ability of the land to absorb our emissions."
At the moment around half of human carbon emissions are reabsorbed by nature but the fear among scientists is that increasing temperatures will work to reduce this effect. Professor Cox added: "It means our emissions would have a progressively bigger impact on climate change because more of them will remain in the air. It accelerates the rate of change, so we get it sooner and we get it harder."
Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million (ppm). From 1970 to 2000 that concentration rose by about 1.5ppm each year, as human activities sent more of the gas into the atmosphere. But according to the latest figures, last year saw a rise of 2.6ppm. And 2006 was not alone. A series of similar jumps in recent years means the carbon dioxide level has risen by an average 2.2ppm each year since 2001."
NOAA Carbon Dioxide data :-
http://www.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends
People who make summaries are saying we have somewhere between 5 and 10 years to get in control of Carbon Energy.
Despite all our published commitments to targets, reductions, efficiency, renewables, our national Carbon Dioxide Emissions have risen, our Electricity consumption has risen, our Retail consumption has risen.
People, this is serious. We have to get Carbon Control, or nothing we do will have any future !
Whatever it is : Carbon Rationing, Carbon Taxation, Carbon Trading, Carbon Offsets, whatever will have a definite impact on capping and reducing Carbon, do it !
Don't wait for anyone else to issue a report, make a policy proposal, or conduct some research. We need to take our own steps immediately, in our homes, in our work places, in our public buildings, in our transport systems. And we need to influence the people around us to follow our lead.
Wherever you are, Energy is being used, and Carbon is being emitted. Ask the questions. Flick the switches.
Above average Indonesian peat fires contribute
Hi Jo, I was waiting by the Guardian website too. The peat and forest fires of Indonesia would have been a significant contributor to the spike, which saw a rise of 2.6 ppmv. Local commentators were saying that last year's intense period may have been the worst for the smoke from the fires since 1998, when the record rise of 2.9 ppmv was blamed particularly on those fires.
The increasing drainage of the peatlands to accommodate the spread of oil palms from the more choice mineral soil sites will contribute to the upward underlying trend, which are increasingly being planted to fulfil biofuel incentives in the EU and elsewhere. http://www.wetlands.org/publication.aspx?ID=51a80e5f-4479-4200-9be0-66f1...
...siberian permafrost has been a-bubblin' for a while too
Methane bubbles climate trouble - BBC News
Thawing Siberian bogs are releasing more of the greenhouse gas methane than previously believed, according to new scientific research.
It's hard to credit how the scientists constantly fail to see the big picture. The fact that the precious IPCC report took no consideration of climate impact to climate sinks is beyond belief.
Without the rainforests and more importantly plankton, we will be in deep doo-doo, since the lifespan of atmospheric CO2 without these important sinks stretches to infinity. Since both of these sinks are being degraded as we speak, it seems more and more likely that 5 to 10 years is on the optimistic side...
Realclimate briefing on subject
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=134: "A better shorthand for public discussion might be that CO2 sticks around for hundreds of years, plus 25% that sticks around forever." 3/4 will dissolve in the sea (raising sea acidity) but that will take a few hundred years and cause some deep-sea extinctions.
However, the diminishing dimming effect of aerosols from falling emissions will kick in as we cut greenhouse gases. This will strengthen the case for a deliberate dimming programme such as trailing sulphur dioxide in the upper atmosphere, if that could work, to top up the dimming effect for a few hundred years. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/06/geo-engineering-in...
More on methane and Siberian/offshore clathrates
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,547976,00.html
April 17, 2008
MELTING METHANE
A Storehouse of Greenhouse Gases Is Opening in Siberia
By Volker Mrasek
Researchers have found alarming evidence that the frozen Arctic floor has started to thaw and release long-stored methane gas. The results could be a catastrophic warming of the earth, since methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But can the methane also be used as fuel?
[Picture: AP The Lena River flowing through Russian Siberia and empties into the Arctic Ocean. This satellite image shows the river delta, where methane concentrations are unexpectedly high.]
It's always been a disturbing what-if scenario for climate researchers: Gas hydrates stored in the Arctic ocean floor -- hard clumps of ice and methane, conserved by freezing temperatures and high pressure -- could grow unstable and release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, more worrisome than carbon dioxide, the result would be a drastic acceleration of global warming. Until now this idea was mostly academic; scientists had warned that such a thing could happen. Now it seems more likely that it will.
Russian polar scientists have strong evidence that the first stages of melting are underway. They've studied largest shelf sea in the world, off the coast of Siberia, where the Asian continental shelf stretches across an underwater area six times the size of Germany, before falling off gently into the Arctic Ocean. The scientists are presenting their data from this remote, thinly-investigated region at the annual conference of the European Geosciences Union this week in Vienna.
In the permafrost bottom of the 200-meter-deep sea, enormous stores of gas hydrates lie dormant in mighty frozen layers of sediment. The carbon content of the ice-and-methane mixture here is estimated at 540 billion tons. "This submarine hydrate was considered stable until now," says the Russian biogeochemist Natalia Shakhova, currently a guest scientist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who is also a member of the Pacific Institute of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok.
The permafrost has grown porous, says Shakhova, and already the shelf sea has become "a source of methane passing into the atmosphere." The Russian scientists have estimated what might happen when this Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely and all the stored gas escapes. They believe the methane content of the planet's atmosphere would increase twelvefold. "The result would be catastrophic global warming," say the scientists. The greenhouse-gas potential of methane is 20 times that of carbon dioxide, as measured by the effects of a single molecule.
RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS
Heating Homes With Manure: In Germany, Villages Begin Producing own Power (05/31/2007)
Last Major Field Goes On Line: How Long Will Siberia's Gas Last? (12/18/2007)
Global Warming Fears: Norway's Moose Population in Trouble for Belching (08/21/2007)
Blame Bovine Belching: Changing Cows' Diet Could Cut Emissions (07/10/2007)
From the Archive: Researchers Explore Siberia's Role in Climate Change (07/09/2007)
SPIEGEL Interview with BASF CEO Jürgen Hambrecht: 'I Have a Problem with the Term Climate Change' (06/27/2007)Shakhova and her colleagues gathered evidence for the loss of rigor in the frozen sea floor in a measuring campaign during the Siberian summer. The seawater proved to be "highly oversaturated with solute methane," reports Shakhova. In the air over the sea, greenhouse-gas content was measured in some places at five times normal values. "In helicopter flights over the delta of the Lena River, higher methane concentrations have been measured at altitudes as high as 1,800 meters," she says.
The methane climate bomb is also ticking on land: A few years ago researchers noticed higher concentrations of methane in northern Siberia. The Siberian permafrost is known as one of the tipping points for the earth's climate, since the potent greenhouse gas develops wherever microorganisms decompose the huge masses of organic material from warmer eras that has been frozen here for thousands of years.
"A Wake-Up Call for Science"
Data from offshore drilling in the region, studied by experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), also suggest that the situation has grown critical. AWI's results show that permafrost in the flat shelf is perilously close to thawing. Three to 12 kilometers from the coast, the temperature of sea sediment was -1 to -1.5 degrees Celsius, just below freezing. Permafrost on land, though, was as cold as -12.4 degrees Celsius. "That's a drastic difference and the best proof of a critical thermal status of the submarine permafrost," said Shakhova.
Paul Overduin, a geophysicist at AWI, agreed. "She's right," he said. "Changes are far more likely to occur on the sea shelf than on land."
Climate change could give an additional push to these trends. "If the Arctic Sea ice continues to recede and the shelf becomes ice-free for extended periods, then the water in these flat areas will get much warmer," said Overduin. That could lead to a situation in which the temperature of the sea sediment rises above freezing, which would thaw the permafrost.
"We don't have any data on that -- those are just suspicions," the Canadian scientist said. Natalia Shakhova also passed on the question of whether to expect a gradual gas emission or an abrupt burst of large quantities of methane. "No one can say right now whether that will take years, decades or hundreds of years," she said. But one cannot rule out sudden methane emissions. They could happen at "any time."
One thing is clear, though: The thawing of the Arctic sea floor will create "new potential sources for methane ... which no one had reckoned with until now," said Laurence Smith, a professor for geography at the University of California in Los Angeles. Smith is researching North Pole frost zones and expects that a thawing of the permafrost will "supply fuel for methane engines."
The first methane rocket thruster was tested by the US's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2007, and methane from manure has been collected as "biogas" to heat and power homes (more...) in experimental German towns.
In any case, the team taking part in the Siberian study installed a number of probes in the Laptev Sea, a central part of the broad Siberian shelf sea. These probes are measuring the temperature on the upper edge of the submarine permafrost. Overduin wants to pull up the probes in August. Then, for the first time, scientists will have access to a full year's worth of data on the conditions of the sea floor.
For her part, Shakhova thinks researchers should be doing a lot more. She says too little is known about the fragile shelf sediment and the methane it stores, which could be explosive for the environment. "Actually," she says, "this is a wake-up call for science."
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This could be playing a major role in the apparent upsurge in atmospheric methane:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7364679.stm
Those mysterious carbon sinks
A few weeks ago I calculated carbon sink absorption rates based on 2000-2005 CO2 increases in the atmosphere and on the most recent fossil fuel emission figures which were presented by scientists to the Nairobi Climate Conference (a very simple calculation, just use a carbon conversion table). Over this period, 56-60% of our emissions were probably being absorbed and there was no sign of the carbon sinks taking up any less than over the 1990-2000 period. Using the same emisson figures, the carbon sinks absorbed just 44-49.2 % of total emissions - ie less than half of what we put into the atmosphere. If those figures had been for 2007, it wouldn't have been quite as scary. The latter part of an El Nino always sees higher rises of CO2 and higher temperature. But this was 2006, and it was 'only' the sixth warmest. Expect this year to be worse.
So yes, looks like the carbon sinks are now in decline, doesn't it? By the way, this has nothing to do with methane belching out of permafrost. Methane levels in the atmosphere are still stable (well, you never know what tomorrow's headline might be, of course).
Decline of the carbon sinks is what should terrify us. If the carbon sinks decline to zero, then it's over (well we can always speed it up further, of course).
But something else that deeply worries me is this mysterious debate about 'carbon sinks' as if we're dealing with some abstract, hard to understand earth systems and just have to hope that some climate scientist will work out for us what they are doing and what they might do in future. And because people don't understand something so vague, abstract and unpredictable as carbon sinks, they feel even less empowered to think of solutions.
One of the world's leading research institute looking at carbon sinks is the Woods Hole Research Centre (http://www.whrc.org/) . They define carbon sinks quite neatly as "the oceans, and the vegetation and soils of the earth's terrestial ecosystems". Just when many of us had decided that all those other threats to ecosystems were secondary to the terrible impact of global warming, caused mainly by fossil fuel burning, we're now find that those ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes, ratcheting up the pace of climate change. Large-scale collapse of ecosystems is the very essence of 'runaway' (or out of control) global warming.
Of course, global warming has the potential to wipe out most or all our ecosystems on land and in the ocean, and this process has already begun. Of course we need to cut fossil fuel emissions as fast and steeply as we can to give our forests, our marine life, our soils and grassland a fighting chance of survival. But anybody who has had a look the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment will see how we've also managed to degrade 60% of our natural ecosystems and are pushing more and more of them towards collapse. Even without global warming, we're on track to simply ploughing up or burning most of our carbon sinks.
So whilst the climate scientists are off to do their number crunching and run their carbon cycle models, here are some very unscientific thoughts of mine: Deforestation rates are up steeply since the 1990s, particularly in the tropics. Peat drainage rates will probably be, too, but nobody measures them globally. Indonesia's new biofuel programme will see 20 million hectares transformed into energy crop monocultures. That will (eventually) be 50 billion tonnes of carbon up in smoke - this year's fires might already have helped to cause the jump to 2.6 ppm (they were widely described as the worst since 1997/98). Brazil is beginning to aggressively promote soy biodiesel. Deforestation rates in the Amazon correlate with the market price of soy, and fires correlate with deforestation (ie they all happen close to logged areas). And that's in addition to the growing pressures from big agribusiness, livestock and timber companies. We all know that carbon dioxide can kill ocean life, but I give credit to our Environment Minister, Ben Bradshaw, for speculating whether it might not be a very bright idea just now to allow bottom-trawlers to now plough up most of the deep-sea ocean bed when that's where all the CO2 absorbed by plankton and pumped down is suppose to settle and eventually go into sediments (well, he didn't explain it quite like that, but he did make the general point). Of course, that could just be a whacky idea of his - I don't know if any scientist has ever considered it.
Ploughing up more of the world's ecosystems and land to grow energy crops will almost certainly be a key proposal, or at least its consequence, in the new IPCC report on climate change mitigation. It could help us burn less fossil fuels, and we all know we must burn less of those. If only it wasn't for those mysterious carbon sinks...
climate science - worst scenario?
Out of morbid interest, has anyone made projections on the potential temperature rise if all the sinks were defunct and we carried on emitting 'business as usual'?
Worst scenario?
When I spoke of carbon sinks declining to zero, I meant the point at which the biosphere no longer takes up any of the carbon we emit. That's the 'tipping point' beyond which the biosphere becomes a net emitter of carbon. And of course, there are also other vulnerable carbon stores, like methane in permafrost or clathrates.
If you've really got a morbid interest, read how some scientists have answered this question http://www.bananasinpyjamas.com/rn/scienceshow/stories/2006/1726869.htm
worst scenario 1% probability?
I suppose 'morbid interest' isn't quite correct because it makes it sound as if I am dissassociating myself from the problem when the reverse is more true.
Seems reasonable to have an idea of the worst case so we can try to avoid it...
Here's the dark bit from almuth's link:
Andrew Watson: (Professor of Environmental Science University of East Anglia Norwich UK)
Well, that I think is certainly right. The Earth has been, broadly speaking, cooling over the last 50 million years and we are going to push it back into a very much warmer state. Is it going to be stable? That's a very good question. I don't know the answer to that. The fact is that the last time we had high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 100 million years ago and the Sun was a little bit cooler at that time. Now if we push it up...this is not something that most climatologists will talk about but I think that there is a small chance, maybe a 1% chance, that if we really hit the planet too hard we may push it into a runaway system in which the temperature simply goes up and up until the oceans boil into the atmosphere, and that would extinguish all life on Earth.
The NOAA Have Retracted Their December Figures !
Hi Climate Changers,
The NOAA have retracted their December figures, however, the rest of the piece stands.
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1994071,00.html
UPDATE: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) has now told us that the story below is based on preliminary data for December, which it should not have published. It has withdrawn the data pending further analysis. As a result, the provisional annual growth rate for 2006 displayed on the Noaa website now does not include December, which means it is now lower than the 2.6ppm we reported. Pieter Tans, the scientist in charge of the data, said: "It doesn't affect the trend, there is definitely something there. CO2 growth in 2006 was still higher than average and four of the last five years have been higher than average."
Keep watching. Keep waiting. Keep cutting the Carbon.