Pushing Back Against the Methane Tipping Point

A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

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Posted by Timeby  on  03/11  at  02:15 PM

An excellent post over at RealClimate "Arctic Methane on the Move?" (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/arctic-methane-on-the-move/#more-3100) puts the reported Siberian methane release into context. It seems that it is not yet time to panic!

Posted by Brad Arnold  on  03/12  at  03:45 AM

First, we can somewhat mitigate natural methane emissions by seeding (naturally occurring) microbes that "eat" methane, converting it into carbon dioxide. CH4 is 100 times more powerful than CO2 over the first ten years of emission.

Second, in the next twenty years mankind is predicted to increase carbon emissions over 50%, so regardless we will have to utilize the cheap and simple way of immediately cooling down the Earth: just dimming the sun a little by adding (more) sun dimming aerosol to the upper atmosphere.

Finally, currently climate models do not include natural methane emissions in warming world at all. This omission means virtually all current climate models are grossly underestimating the rate and severity of future warming.

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