Earth More Sensitive to Small Changes; Frozen Methane Energy

Discussion on preserving Nature: preventing the pollution, destruction and disbalancing of the finely-tuned natural ecosystems on our planet.

Moderator: Moderators

Post Reply
Vesko
Posts: 1086
Joined: Wed Apr 07, 2004 5:13 pm

Earth More Sensitive to Small Changes; Frozen Methane Energy

Post: # 3441Post Vesko »

Here are quotes from 3 related articles. Reading the entire articles is recommended. The emphasis in bold and colour is mine.

From "Playing with Frozen Fire" (March 17, 2005), http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0, ... 25,00.html:
More energy is trapped under the sea as frozen natural gas than is stored in all the world's oil reserves -- and researchers this week took a step toward tapping it.

Vast reserves of methane hydrates -- a form of natural gas -- could power the world for decades to come. But mining the deep, frozen deposits presents an enormous technical challenge.

An estimated 200,000 trillion cubic feet of methane hydrates exists under the sea, and the [US] Department of Energy has a major research program under way that could result in commercial production starting by 2015.

This week, researchers announced completion of a table-top research apparatus that re-creates the high-pressure, low-temperature conditions on the sea floor, allowing scientists to study ways of bringing the volatile frozen gas to the surface.
By providing much-needed basic science about the nature of methane hydrates, Boswell hopes answers will emerge to questions about their safety, energy production and environmental role, which has been enormous.

For example, about 55 million years ago [See the article quote below this one] oceans burped -- releasing enormous quantities of methane, according to Jim Kennett, a marine geologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and the ocean's methane burp is thought to be the result of warmer ocean temperatures caused by abrupt global warming. "It'd be like the average temperature increasing seven degrees in your lifetime," Kennett said.

It isn't known why the oceans warmed enough to release methane from its frozen mud sarcophagus. Some theories suggest it was a period of intense volcanic activity. But once the process started, a positive feedback loop kept the oceans warming and releasing more methane.

While massive destabilization of methane hydrates is extremely unlikely, the rapidly warming Arctic region is a potential hot spot, said Kennett. The Arctic Ocean and the permafrost regions contain smaller quantities of methane hydrate, where very cold temperatures, rather than high pressure, keep them frozen.
Notice below the mentioning of a chain reaction of unknown feedbacks.

From "Earth Reveals Its Sensitive Side" (October 29, 2004), http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0, ... 18,00.html, article referred from the abovequoted article:
A new look at climate conditions 55 million years ago shows that the Earth is more sensitive to small changes than previously believed.

This finding suggests that the Earth's response to current atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, higher than they have been in 430,000 years and rising, will be more like a high-strung poodle than a laid-back hound dog.

"We need to know how much our climate will change as carbon dioxide levels continue to rise," said Richard Alley, professor of geosciences at Penn State and co-author of the study, published Thursday in Science.
...
To get some insight into how the Earth's climate might respond to such elevated levels of CO2, Alley and his colleague Daniel Schrag at Harvard University looked back to an earlier period of rapid global warming: the Eocene era, when palm trees grew in Wyoming and crocodiles roamed the Arctic. Unfortunately, there is no way to know exactly what the CO2 levels were then. However, using the fossil record of plant and animal life, scientists have been able to develop a good estimate of climatic conditions at that time.

But when that information is plugged into state-of-the-art computer climate models, the temperature changes during the Eocene could not be explained by even the most extreme increases in greenhouse gases alone. "It looks like other factors were at play or that the current climate models underestimate the effects of CO2," Alley said.

At the beginning of the Eocene, the warming was dramatic. The Antarctic Ocean warmed 18 degrees F in less than 10,000 years. The leading theory is that this warming was caused when somehow the enormous amount of methane that had been locked up in mud at the bottom of the oceans was released into the atmosphere. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, albeit a short-lived one.

This period of extreme warming lasted 50,000 to 200,000 years -- too long to be explained solely by methane, the researchers say. The initial warming could have set off a chain reaction of other, still unknown feedbacks, said Alley. But it's also likely that "the Earth's ancient climate is telling us that our climate is more sensitive to rises in CO2 than we thought."

According to the 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would produce a global temperature rise ranging from 2 to 8 degrees F. This is too wide a range to be helpful in projecting what climatic changes are coming, however, so scientists have worked to refine this range. As recently published in Nature, they are beginning to settle on a likely rise of about 5 to 6 degrees F.

That 5- to 6-degree change corresponds with what Alley said is a global climate system that reacts to small changes. "The ancient climate history is saying (the rise of temperature is) unlikely to be better than that, but (it) could also be much worse."

Keeping CO2 levels from going even higher will take a major effort, but it's doable, he said.


In a related paper in the same issue of Science, Eileen Claussen of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change outlines how the United States can drastically cut its emissions of CO2 by 2050. However, current national policy will result in emissions climbing 30 percent higher by 2010 than they were in 1990. "These increases will make future mitigation efforts more difficult and more costly," Claussen writes.

Substantial reductions in emissions can come from improvements in fuel efficiency of cars and trucks, policies that require energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy, and long-term investments in new technologies like hydrogen fuels and biofuels.

"This is an enormous challenge," Claussen said in an interview. It will take an explicit and comprehensive commitment at the federal level, she said, well beyond what's been done to date.

Urgent and immediate action is needed now, Claussen said. "We only have to look to Alaska [See the article quote below this one], to see the damage global warming is already causing to the state's infrastructure.

"If we are starting to see the impacts now with the current temperature change (of just 1 degree F), I shudder to think of what the future will be like."
From the abovequoted link on Alaska global warming disasters, "Global Warming Is a Costly Reality in Alaska", http://www.global-warming.net/acostlyre ... alaska.htm, originally published in The New York Times. I quote the article here in its entirety, like it is on the http://www.global-warming.net site:
ANCHOR POINT, Alaska - To live in Alaska when the average temperature has risen about 7 degrees over 30 years means learning to cope with a landscape that can sink, catch fire or break apart in the turn of a season.

In Shishmaref, on the Chukchi Sea just south of the Arctic Circle, it means high water eating away so many houses and buildings that people will vote next month on whether to move the entire village inland.

In Barrow, the northernmost city in North America, it means coping with mosquitoes in a place where they once were nonexistent, and rescuing hunters trapped on breakaway ice at a time of year when such things once were unheard of.

In Fairbanks, where wildfires have been burning off and on since mid-May, it means living with hydraulic jacks to keep houses from slouching on foundations that used to be frozen all year. Permafrost, they say, no longer is permanent.

On the Kenai Peninsula, a recreation wonderland south of Anchorage, it means living in a 4 million-acre spruce forest that has been killed by beetles, the largest loss of trees to insects ever recorded in North America, federal officials say. Government scientists tied the event to rising temperatures, which allow the beetles to reproduce at twice their normal rate.

In Alaska, rising temperatures, whether caused by greenhouse-gas emissions or nature in a prolonged mood swing, are not a topic of debate or an abstraction. Mean temperatures have risen by 5 degrees in summer and 10 degrees in winter since the 1970s, federal officials say.

While President Bush was dismissive of a report the government recently released on how global warming will affect the nation, the leading Republican in this state, Sen. Ted Stevens, says that no place is experiencing more startling changes from rising temperatures than Alaska. Among the consequences, Stevens says, are sagging roads, crumbling villages, dead forests, catastrophic fires and possible disruption of marine wildlife. These problems will cost Alaska hundreds of millions of dollars.

"Alaska is harder hit by global climate change than any place in the world," Stevens said.

The social costs of higher temperatures have been mostly negative, people in the state say. The Bush administration report, drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), also found few positives to Alaska's thermal rise. But it said climate change would bring a longer growing season and open ice-free seas in the Arctic for shipping.

"There can no longer be any doubt that major changes in the climate have occurred in recent decades in the region, with visible and measurable consequences," the government reported to the United Nations last month.

On the Kenai Peninsula, a forest nearly twice the size of Yellowstone National Park is in the last phases of a graphic death. Century-old spruce trees stand silvered and cinnamon-colored as they bleed sap.

A sign at Anchor River Recreation Area near the town of Anchor Point poses a question many tourists have been asking, "What's up with all the dead spruce trees on the Kenai Peninsula?" The population of spruce bark beetles, which have long fed on these evergreen trees, exploded as temperatures rose, foresters now say.

Throughout the Kenai, people are clearing some of the 38 million dead trees, answering the call from officials to create a "defensible space" around houses for fire protection. Last year, two major fires occurred on this peninsula, and with temperatures in the 80s in mid-May this year, officials say fire is imminent.

"It's just a matter of time before we have a very large, possibly catastrophic forest fire," said Ed Holsten of the Forest Service.

Joe Perletti, who lives in Kasilof in the Kenai Peninsula, has rented a bulldozer to clear dead trees from the 10 acres where he lives.

"It's scary what's going on," Perletti said. "I never realized the extent of global warming, but we're living it now. I worry about how it will affect my children."

Perletti, an insurance agent, said some insurers no longer sold fire policies to Kenai Peninsula homeowners in some areas surrounded by dead spruce.

Another homeowner, Larry Rude, has cut a few trees, but has decided to take his chances at the house he owns near Anchor Point. Rude says he no longer recognizes Alaska weather.

"This year, we had a real quick melt of the snow, and it seemed like it was just one week between snowmobiling in the mountains and riding around in the boat in shirt-sleeve weather," Rude said.

Other forests, farther north, appear to be sinking or drowning as melting permafrost forces water up. Alaskans call the phenomenon "drunken trees."

For villages that hug the shores of the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas, melting ice is the enemy. Sea ice off the Alaska coast has retreated by 14 percent since 1978, and thinned by 40 percent since the mid-1960s, the federal report said. Climate models predict Alaska temperatures will continue to rise over this century, by up to 18 degrees.

North of Fairbanks, roads have buckled, telephone poles have started to tilt, and homeowners have learned to live in houses that are more than a few bubbles off plumb. Everyone, it seems, has a story.

"We've had so many strange events, things are so different than they used to be, that I think most Alaskans now believe something profound is going on," said Glenn Juday, an authority on climate change at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

"We're experiencing indisputable climate warming. The positive changes from this take a long time, but the negative changes are happening real fast."
Do you REALLY practice meditation? If your REALLY do, do you practice a GOOD method? Are you sure this is REALLY so?
Leo
Posts: 97
Joined: Sat Jun 19, 2004 10:01 am
Location: Cairns, Australia
Contact:

Post: # 3491Post Leo »

I just posted a URL on another topic which talks of these frozen methane hydrates pockets and the effects on Global warming and dimming

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/program ... rans.shtml

If something isn't done about global warming and dimming soon, the US won't need worry about mining it.
They have eyes, but they do not see - ears, but they do not hear...
Vesko
Posts: 1086
Joined: Wed Apr 07, 2004 5:13 pm

Post: # 3500Post Vesko »

Noticed that and was coming here to point it out -- thank you for doing that, too!
Do you REALLY practice meditation? If your REALLY do, do you practice a GOOD method? Are you sure this is REALLY so?
Post Reply