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No Methane 'Burp' Accelerating Climate Change

Thanks!

Because of this thread and some judicious google-fu, today I learned what a clathrate is.
 
BenBurch said:
As an aside, I'd rather we mined out subsea clathrates than continue mining and burning coal. Much less CO2 per Joule...
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I still have some trouble with the shelf stability. It will depend on that more than anything if those reserves get explored or not. So far it seems like they will be. I am, however, out of the loop on the more recent developments.
 
Let's see what is happening now - you know now.....in the field - with observations....

Nature Reports Climate Change
Published online: 5 March 2009 | doi:10.1038/climate.2009.24
A sleeping giant?
As the planet warms, vast stores of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — could be released from frozen deposits on land and under the ocean. Amanda Leigh Mascarelli reports on the race to understand a ticking time bomb.


Arctic permafrost known as yedoma is beginning to release its rich store of ice-age organic carbon as the ground thaws.

KATEY WALTER
In 2007, scientists scouting the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean began to notice some troubling signs. In about half of their seawater chemistry samples, the concentration of dissolved methane was two to ten times higher than in samples taken during previous years from the same locations. Then, last summer, they observed large rings of gas — sometimes as wide as 30 centimetres in diameter — trapped in ice, as well as methane plumes bubbling to the surface over hundreds of square kilometres of the shallow waters along the Siberian Shelf.

The team, from Russia and other nations, presented their results at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting in December, where scientists cautiously voiced their concerns that large quantities of methane are becoming destabilized as the planet — and the ocean — heat up
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http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0904/full/climate.2009.24.html

Clathrates in some areas are at risk.

•••

Ben

Clathrates are an odd choice against coal, cleaner in the long term BUT leaks = 25 x the GHG effect of CO2 for a short term......:boggled:

The technique I thought of interest was pumping liquid CO2 in a clathrate matrix - it releases the methane for use and reservoirs the CO2/

This is precisely what scientists at the Institute for Marine Research (GEOMAR) based in the northern German seaport of Kiel want to avert. They hope to be able to transform a potential curse into a blessing before it's too late. They envision a method whereby the flammable gas would be extracted from the sediment with the help of carbon dioxide.

"The carbon dioxide could be obtained from the exhaust gases of coal power plants, for instance," says Klaus Wallmann, the direct of a research project known as SUGAR, which was recently formed to study the issue. What he proposes sounds almost too good to be true: producing fuel while sequestering greenhouse gas deep beneath the ocean floor -- eliminating energy bottlenecks while simultaneously putting the brakes on global warming.

Wallmann and his colleagues base their theories on a reaction scientists noticed more than a decade ago. When a certain amount of pressure is applied to the cage-like crystal structure, carbon dioxide can penetrate the layer of ice, at which point it displaces the methane. Then a new cage of frozen water molecules forms around the carbon dioxide. "This behavior has already been demonstrated in laboratory experiments," says Wallmann.

He is also impressed by the ratio at which the gases are exchanged. For each dissolved molecule of methane, up to five molecules of carbon dioxide disappear into the ice cage.
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part of a larger article on risk rewards

https://richarddawkins.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=31257&p=564776
 
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Methane released under the ocean is shown not to be a cause of concern.

Frozen methane chunks not responsible for abrupt increases in atmospheric methane (Penn State)
Scientists Find Good News About Methane Bubbling Up From the Ocean Floor (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Study Rules Out Ancient ‘Bursts’ of Methane From Seafloor Deposits (Oregon State University)

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have discovered that only one percent of this dissolved methane escapes into the air –– good news for the Earth's atmosphere.
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fyi current CO2 levels are the highest in 2.5 million years. This suggests temperatures that go higher then global temperatures then what those studies cover. basically we are headed for uncharted territory where we can't use these past events as a guide, but we do know that at some point if the world keeps warming at least some these deposits will melt.
 
Poptech, Here, child, is a "strawman."

You have created a phantom problem (subsea methane clathrates boiling up and killing us all) that nobody here was actually worried about, and then you knock it down, and pretend that this addresses our quite real concerns about methane emissions from millennia-long accumulations of organics in the now-melting permafrost.

A "strawman" is one of the classical logical fallacies, and one that cannot be committed innocently; Its reason for existence is to deceive those who are not paying close attention.

Thanks for the lie, but we decline the honor.
 
Ancient Arctic Ice Could Tell Us About Future Of Permafrost (University of Alberta)

"Previously it had been thought that permafrost completely melted out of the interior of Yukon and Alaska about 120,000 years ago, when climate was warmer than today," said Duane Froese, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science and lead author of the study.

"What we found is that even within the discontinuous permafrost zone-the area where permafrost is warm and within a few degrees of 0C and shallow, only a few to tens of metres thick-it has survived at some locations for more than 700,000 years."

"Based on the incredible antiquity of the ice wedges we documented, we think that permafrost that is more than several metres below the surface is more resilient to climate warming that previously thought," said Froese.
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Interesting.
 
Poptech said:
Ancient Arctic Ice Could Tell Us About Future Of Permafrost (University of Alberta)


Interesting.
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Indeed:

However, Froese and his colleagues emphasize that their study is not an invitation to ignore the potentially serious impacts of climate warming, particularly in the North.
"Permafrost is like the glue that holds the Arctic together," said University of Alberta graduate student Alberto Reyes. "Widespread deep thaw would be bad news for northern infrastructure and economic development, and may have dramatic effects on ecosystems that are adapted to the presence of shallow permafrost."
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Try harder.
 
It appears that how susceptible permafrost is to melting is not fully understood.
 
Poptech said:
It appears that how susceptible permafrost is to melting is not fully understood.
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Well then, clearly there will be no adverse effects from widespread melting. I'm glad you've cleared that up for us. Here is the contact info for the Yukon environment minister. Please contact her and give her the good news. Her constituents have nothing to worry about!

Hon. Elaine Taylor - Deputy Premier
Yukon Legislative Assembly
Box 2703
Whitehorse, Yukon
Y1A 2C6
Phone: 867 667-8641
Fax: 867 393-6252
E-mail: elaine.taylor@gov.yk.ca
 
Yes of course I read over half a gig of PDF files but for fun I looked through them and saw nothing significant relating to methane and permafrost.
 
Poptech said:
Press releases that are reporting on the research (studies) done by those institutions. You are getting desperate.
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No, you are new to the JREF and now engaging in some sort of political spin.

In neither case did you cite the actual research. That means you did not quote teh institutes that you stated. You quoted journal articles giving the journalists impression of the research.

Apparently you are so paranoid and het up with the majesty of your cause that you have forgotten how to read. I did not dispute your argument there, I said that you had made a small mis-statement. If you are that sensitive, you should not post here.

Small correction and point of order anyone?

As stated before dude, take a chill, roam around the forum. Learn the culture and chill out.

You are the one who looks desperate, I make a small clarification on your exact statements. You are the one acting desperate, so just get off your horse and join the fun! If you can't understand that people are going to disagree with you here, then you should post someplace else. That is why most people post here. To have their ideas challenged and critiques presented. You seem (and I could be wrong) to really have a hard time with that.

So seriously, read around ,partcipate in some other threads and learn to debate and discuss.
 
Dancing David said:
Yes, that is ture of almost anything. :)
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IMO it’s worth repeating that by definition, nothing in science is ever fully understood. The difference between a skeptic and a denier is that, for the denier, no amount of understanding is ever sufficient. They will always resort to rejecting the prevailing science “because it’s not fully understood”.

This gives rise to the rather odd situation, where most of the proponents of woo are, at least in their own minds, skeptics. The problem is that they are skeptical of the wrong things, they are skeptical about the published science but are more then willing to believe blogs, newsletters, etc. This is why many of us see parallels between anti-AGW people and ID’ers or 9/11 truthers.

This isn’t to say published science is beyond reproach, but if there is a flaw in it that flaw needs to make it’s way into the published science. In particular ID’ers and climate deniers both make lots of noise to their base about how they are doing science and how the science “really does” support what they are saying but neither really does much in the way of working towards actual publication.
 
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