Permafrost ‘bubbles’ are leaking methane 200 times above the norm | Hacker News Reader

Permafrost ‘bubbles’ are leaking methane 200 times above the norm

siberiantimes.com

116 pointsFuNe86 comments

Aside from the shock value of this, this underlines that there are feedback systems that we have kicked in. I think the science is not clear, we are still learning about the effects. Climate sceptics are right in a perverse way, we have no idea really what we have done.

Here's more on that - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change

James Lovelock (the inventor of the Gaia hypothesis and the discoverer of CFC's in the atmosphere) seems to think only the northern parts of the planet will remain habitable, sustaining a population of a few hundred million - we'll see.

If this is true, Should I move my family to Northern Europe (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland) for the sake of my descendants? I've been thinking about this for a long time.

It's too late to stop the feedback loop. I fear the current migration crisis is nothing compared to what will come.

Many parts of that area are still rebounding from the mass of the ice sheets and are rising faster than sea level. For those of us in the USA, the Great Lakes region would likely be the best bet.

Nope, I don't think there's any scientific consensus that the effects are going to be that extreme (1).

(1) it might be very bad for say a poor farmer, but the typical HN reader will be able to survive it.

...by living off their fat reserves when the farms stop sending food?

We can just eat code, right?

I think he means it won't happen quickly. If you have resources you'll be able to respond to the changing world.

Sidenote: how do you know I'm male?

I don't of course, sorry. HN has always subconsciously had a masculine tone in my mind. I'm projecting

I haven't researched climate change effects; but my guess is subsistence farmers will be affected a lot. Even if climate change had equal effects to all income groups, that would affect poor people more (for a poor person losing 1$ has more effect compare to a billionare).

Farms would not stop sending food. People (HN readers are at least in the top income half (1) globally) would pay more money to buy food. Food is an essential commodity and I don't think an apocalypse is going to occur due to climate change.

tl;dr food is going to cost more and HN readers can afford that while poor people might not be able to afford it

(1) I think it's more like top 10%.

Food will cost more overall, since global arable land will reduce. But in some northern areas the growing season could actually lengthen.

I hope that the timescales are such that drastic effects won't happen this century and give humans more time to adjust/come up with technology to mitigate the effects.

2c warming by end of the century would be terrible, 10c disastrous

"Me first" stuff like this won't get you real far IMO.

I went as far as Tromsø, Norway late last year and was shocked that most of their produce comes from the kind of place you might try flee from. Most of the fruit and vegetables I purchased had been shipped from places like Spain and South America. Basically if it becomes so bad these countries start to starve it won't be a priority to send food to the Arctic leaving people in the North vulnerable and, there are a lot of people up there already. You're not just going to move to some little village in Sweden and escape this pending disaster.

These large Northern populations heavily rely on produce and clothing coming from down South.

I did stay with people in Sweden who are kind of self sufficient, but if one looked closely, it was easy to see they still need solar panels, medicine, hunting equipment, cars, fertilizer etc, this is not stuff produced locally.

Best thing one can do for the next generation is change our ways immediately, consume less meat and fish, divest from fossil fuels, demand action from our politicians and stop having so many kids. It's pretty clear a population of 9 billion is going not going to work with current technology and attitudes.

It's easy to see isn't a problem anyone of us can run from, we're all going to have to pay the toll for what some call "endless growth".

If you look at a plot of human population in the last century, it's similar to log-phase bacterial growth. We've had uncontrolled proliferation based on non-renewable resources - especially the capacity of the biosphere to deal with waste CO2 - and we're about to run out. A lot of dieback is reasonable to assume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_growth

Growing tomatoes in Norway is going to become easy very soon.

Iceland could become colder and even less habitable with increased global warming.

Iceland is fairly nice. Maybe you are thinking of Greenland. Greenland is very cold.

I believe they are referring to the Gulf Stream current stopping, which would indeed make much of north-west Europe colder.

No no, I'm Icelandic. It's nice right now but that's thanks to the gulf stream. Global warming is slowing it down and it could end up diverting it, making temperatures plummet to Greenland levels.

What feedback system would that be? Wouldn't methane accelerate warming? From my limited knowledge of English semantics feedback - like in feedback loop - would mean some controlling function?

I'm fairly sure that harwoodleon is referring to positive feedback.

Negative feedback acts to oppose a change (think heating system temperature control). Positive feedback acts to amplify a change, and can result in runaway changes [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback#Examples_and...

Thanks!

Accelerate warming -> more methane released -> accelerate warming -> even more methane released -> ...

I remember the intro to earth geology class I took 15 years ago at my university, taught by a climate scientist; the professor would take off a week every time there was a shuttle launch because he'd fly down to Florida and be part of the panel of scientists who would give the astronauts lists of things they were interested having photographed from space. I remember him talking about runaway feedback loops. He would explain them and would explain some historical examples of them we can see in geological data. He seemed really concerned about them, not so much because he thought it probable that the ones we know about are going to run away and make the climate uninhabitable for humans, but rather because he thought that there were lots of feedback loops out there hiding in plain sight that we wouldn't learn about until we started observing them actively happening. He basically seemed to think there was no real way to know with any certainty the upper bounds of how bad we can screw up the climate but that we were effectively running a giant experiment with the entire atmosphere and would within a few generations find out, and he thought that was a pretty big deal.

Just further clarification of how little we understand the damage we're doing at an ever increasing rate.

We've achieved a little awareness along with some limited recycling and energy saving, but still use an order of magnitude more than even as recently as the 80s. Oil companies see melting ice caps and think "great! new places to exploit"

I don't see much hope of change until something seriously dramatic happens. Dramatic enough to convince the most dogmatic politician currently thinkng growth is the only thing that matters.

Only then we'll try and fix it. Probably by having to adopt something like a war economy, globally, with all the restrictions and ramifications that would bring.

It's a shame that the whole matter of global warming has been politicized and muddied so much by special interests that average person simply doesn't care anymore. That's why it's especially weird to see something like this published in Daily Mail. The positive feedback loop is definitely happening though, but the magnitude and extents of it could still vary.

To be honest, I don't believe we can stop this, not with the current population size and the current economic model.

Not to mention the often overlooked effect of the decreasing planetary albedo, thanks to melting ice caps.

> It's a shame that the whole matter of global warming has been politicized and muddied so much by special interests that average person simply doesn't care anymore. That's why it's especially weird to see something like this published in Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail profits from sensationalism, it's not really like Fox News in the sense that it only pushes one ideological position. So you'll get it reporting sensationalist articles for and against action on climate change (although historically it has been mostly anti, because it makes a better story for the purposes of invoking outrage).

This article is sensationalist by overplaying what is happening - the 200 figure actually refers to the concentration of methane in the leaks relative to the atmosphere (it doesn't refer to the actual scale of the leaks in any sense).

As an aside, I'm not sure these sensationalist stories about extreme climate change actually help, they're still basically pandering to readers by offering a way to be outraged without having to do anything. The narrative shifts directly from 'this is not a problem, we don't need to do anything' to 'this is the apocalypse, someone should have done something about it, but now it's too late for me to make any difference'. Then perhaps a few years later, when the apocalypse hasn't happened, it can go back to 'we're still okay, the problem was overblown, we don't need to do anything'. And the boring work of actually working out a solution falls by the wayside.

The best thing for Earth and possibly the thing for homo sapiens is a nuclear winter. Hillary will just continue the drone war and statist business as usual. Trump on the other hand, total wild-card, and possibly unwitting instigator of nuclear war. The long term ecological choice is Trump.

I think you dropped this ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ'/s'

You need to read Scott Adams' blog, it really is an eye-opener on Trump. (Scott Adams being the creator of the Dilbert cartoon). Start here: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/149983115751/why-trump-doesnt-s...

Scott Adams speaking through Ratbert is a sage, Scott Adams speaking with his own voice, not so much.

Is it a little presumptuous for you to decide, individually and on humanity's behalf, that widespread death and destruction is the best thing for everyone?

I don't have enough money for my opinions to be decisions. I only have one measly vote.

Its seriously bad, and we still argue about electric cars and profitability of solar power: Methane is powerful enough to create rapid warming feedback loop that cannot be stopped by current means(unless the world economies are changed overnight), there is a model that shows +6C warming effects if methane reaches 1000ppm(2000 Gt release): http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00533.... Notice the predictions of methane release from 2013 are on track: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/a...

1000ppm methane would be a big problem. Meanwhile methane concentration (2015 figure) is 2.85 ppm. Please correct if you think this is way out.

Serious question: Is there any research in how far will nature be able to adapt? For example, if the permafrost melts, wouldn't that enable growth of CO2 absorbing plants in those areas?

I found this article that says the predicted CO2 levels will increase plant growth: http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/effects-of-...

We don't know what runaway climate change will look like. The system is chaotic with lots of feedback loops. Stuff will happen, some of it counter-intuitive. It may or may not be okay in the end.

I like Elon's take: yeah, it might not be that bad, but is it really smart to do an uncontrolled experiment on your own biosphere and "see what happens?"

I also like George Carlin's: "Stop talking about saving the Earth! The Earth is four billion years old. The Earth will be fine. We're fucked."

Carlin's comment is actually quite wise. Life will adapt, but adaptation is a painful evolutionary process that often involves a lot of death. Concern over things like climate change is entirely self-interested. We don't want to unleash a Darwinian "adaptive" process at the global scale upon ourselves.

Those photos really look like something out of a science movie, hard to believe we've let it get to this point.

oh. it's going to get a whole lot worse. you can count on it.

I think it's pretty much 100% that we will see geoengineering attempts within our lifetimes, maybe even within the next 20 years. Probably dust injected into the atmosphere.

Yale Climate Connections on the melting permafrost in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLCgybStZ4g - sad to see we have been moving so slowly in the three years since I watched it.

Somebody light a match! Seriously, why don't they burn it?

I guess it's not safe (probably explosive) and even if it was safe how could that be done when it springs up from random holes dispersed in a vast area (Siberia)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0hczFNDZI

Yep, that's the video I had in mind.

Borderline SF.

It's a valid question, oil refineries do burn it

Methane burns to produce carbon dioxide and water. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.

But to burn it you'd have to collect the methane and concentrate it first, otherwise at low concentrations it is unlikely to ignite. Given that the Siberian arctic is vast and remote, I don't think this is a practical proposition.

Methane has a greenhouse potential 25 times that of CO2.

You're probably right though, it's probably not too diffuse and generally impractical.

> Methane has a greenhouse potential 25 times that of CO2.

True, although it decays to CO2 and water after about twelve years [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential#Value...

First time I've heard that methane decays so fast. Doesn't this dramatically reduce the practical warming effect of methane?

It does, but according to the Wikipedia article the '25 times' figure seems to have taken that into account. Methane has a 25 times (or 34 times according to more recent estimates) larger effect than an equivalent mass of CO2 over 100 years. When measured over the first 20 years this rises to 70~80 times.

At least there's a ray of hope. The problem is that we don't know how much CH4 is locked away in pockets like this.

The factor of 25 is over a 100-year time period, and accounts for this decay.

> Methane has a greenhouse potential 25 times that of CO2.

Where does this number come from? Heat capacity is almost the same for CH4 and CO2 (and half of that of H2O).

Wikipedia has an explanation of the calculation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential#Calcu...

And where does this calculation come from? How was it determined that this is a valid approximation of a physical process? This "global warming potential" seems to assume that a wave of certain length can be reflected and absorbed at the same time, which idea is somewhat unexpected if you dig through optics handbooks.

Not to mention that the formulas are incomplete.

The calculation comes from the physicists who came up with it of course. Are you saying they were wrong? Do you have a link to a paper showing this?

> The calculation comes from the physicists who came up with it of course.

This is the part I'm not so sure about. Physicists tend to not bother with climatology.

What gave you that idea? Radiative transfer is physics. That doesn't change because we're talking about planet earth. I would guess that most scientists involved in climatology have a physics background.

Edit: for example, Radiative Forcing in the AR5 http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/climdyn2013/IPCC/IPCC_WGI1...

The main author is Drew Shindell, Professor of Climate Studies, PhD in Physics.

Since it is spread out over a region, it is harder and less economically viable to collect it and use it as fuel.

I didn't read the article closely enough, but I'd be interested to see if this methane is released from a stored source or if it is from rotting vegetation.

Much of the permafrost area is a frozen swamp; when it thaws, the swamp plants rot.

In other words, this may be a one-time outgassing of a limited amount of vegetable material, at least in this case. We still have the clathrate gun to worry about.

Elsewhere in the arctic: Geophysical Letters 22 JUN 2016: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL069292/pdf reports "No signiﬁcant increase in long-term CH4 emissions on North Slope of Alaska despite signiﬁcant increase in air temperature"

Related interview with Natalia Shakhova from the International Arctic Research Center: https://youtu.be/kx1Jxk6kjbQ?t=9

Very ominous.

I have wondered if we couldn't engineer solutions to capture the methane. Locating the leaks should be straightforward with spectral satellite imaging

It's everywhere, dead leafs under the tree that used to be frozen now are being composted by bacteria producing methane, you would have to cover ground with plastic foil.

>> dead leafs under the tree that used to be frozen now are being composted by bacteria producing methane

This is THE thing people overlook. There used to be trees there! There used to be lots of vegetation, that's why there's so much carbon trapped in the permafrost in the first place. We're not releasing something bad, we're returning the earth to a better equilibrium. Imagine if the Siberian tundra were replaced with forests and farms. Imagine if we avoid the next glaciation - which is coming if we do as the climate alarmists want, yet there is evidence that we can't prevent it even if we try.

Imagine if the Siberian tundra were replaced with forests and farms, and current forests and farms were replaced with desert.

You can't just look at the potential upside, assume it will be huge, and also assume there aren't any negative effects that might outweigh it.

The argument that the Earth used to be warmer or cooler or whatever is completely nonsensical. We're not worried about Earth, we're worried about people, and more specifically civilization. The fact that the tundra used to be lush doesn't mean anything in that respect.

Civilization could "just" relocate. As for desertification, see this TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...

And remember, the alternative is still glaciation.

Yeah, and "just" relocating ain't exactly trivial or foolproof.

The alternative is glaciation? If we have enough control over the climate to make it a bunch warmer, surely we have enough control (should we choose to exercise it) to keep it in the middle.

Do you think we could use the blockchain to facilitate this?

The headline is incredibly misleading and looks like a misinterpretation by the Daily Mail (not known for their quality journalism in the first place).

The "200" figure refers to the concentration of methane in the released gas compared to the atmosphere, not the total amount released in the Arctic compared to usual.

Poor article.

EDIT: This HN post originally linked to a Daily Mail article with a bad headline. The Siberian Times headline is still misleading but not quite so egregiously wrong.

> The headline is incredibly misleading and looks like a misinterpretation by the Daily Mail

Daily Mail could be one of the top list of websites that can be banned from HN.

They always have really good pictures though, if someone made a plugin that overlaid the article with a good one while keeping the pictures it would be great.

Tabloids use more pictures per screen area over normal websites. I have no particular problems with the usage of pictures btw.

A lot of times they also use screen shots from a video (for example - Youtube) and write a text commentary to generate an article.

I saw the title and thought: "holy shit!". Then I saw that it's from the daily mail and knew it wouldn't be true.

Some times they are right, in the same way a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Original story is from the Siberian Times: http://siberiantimes.com/ecology/casestudy/news/n0681-now-th...

(the Daily Mail? Seriously?)

  > (the Daily Mail? Seriously?)

Reporting quality seems to be good with a lot of images. If the message is good, why criticize the messenger?

Because it's extremely rare for the reporting quality to be good with the Daily Mail.

I can agree with that assessment... they're typically fairly trashy. I've submitted content from them before when it was an AP article (so the text was identical on all sites that carried it) but they had additional relevant, higher resolution images accompanying the text. Got unnecessary flak for it of course.

The Signal-Noise Ratio of Daily Mail is six-sigma low.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Daily_Mail

> Reporting quality seems to be good

What makes you say that? Like much of the Daily Mail, it seems to be sensationalised in a way that makes understanding the (probably important) content rather difficult. The headline is incredibly misleading, to start with.