The big worry about Climate Change is not some issue of gradual heating, it's how near we are to various tipping points. ![[Methane molecule]](/files/pd-100px-methane-3d-space-filling_svg1278664582.gif)
There has been concern brewing that carbon dioxide is just the tip of the Climate Change iceberg. Methane may turn out to be a more explosive problem, not literally but in terms of its profound effects as a greenhouse gas.
According to the EPA's Methane home page, “Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.” (That's a conservative estimate.)
On Quantitative and Qualitative Change, and Tipping Points
Given what seems to me an overly modest response to the escalating threat of climate change, I have to believe that lots of people, when they think of global temperatures rising, think in terms of what they'll wear or how they'll stay cool. They're used to winter yielding regularly to summer, and they figure since they survive that rhythm, a shift in global temperature will work likewise.
To understand the serious nature of the problem, one must look past such matters. One must think in terms of larger systems and processes and in terms of the qualitative changes that can happen happen to them. By qualitative shift, I mean a shift that is not just a matter of degree, but of something more tangible, more structural. For example, it matters a little when temperatures go up or down a degree, but at some point what really matters is that you need to put on a jacket or coat, or take one off.
As another example, consider that if you're standing on a frozen lake, having the temperature go from 0°F to 20°F may not affect your ability to go skating much at all, but going from 25°F to 35°F may make a big difference, since you're crossing the melting point of ice. Any given shift of a few degrees is a quantitative shift, the shift from ice to water is a qualitative shift. The qualitative shifts are the things to watch.
Of course, some qualitative shifts are undoable. Winter comes and we all put on our coats. Summer comes and we lose the coats and start looking for swim suits. But sometimes a shift is very hard or impossible to undo. Such dramatic qualitative shifts are referred to as tipping points. They are not only something to watch for, but something to actively avoid.
The Tundra
For example, if there is a place in the world where things are typically frozen all year and the temperature goes up just enough that it's no longer typically frozen, that matters. It matters especially in the arctic tundra.
Hundreds of gigatons of methane are locked in the frozen arctic tundra, laboriously stockpiled over millions of years by various biological processes. If the permafrost melts, which may happen faster due to rapid melting of arctic sea ice, and that methane is released, later re-freezing won't recapture the methane. Worse still, the methane released may contribute to feedback effects that raise temperatures even faster.
The BP Oil Spill and the Methane Problem
Recently, reports have circulated suggesting the possibility of a super-tsunami caused by the sudden release of a giant methane bubble from the BP oil spill. I haven't been able to track down any credible sources that are backing that particular theory, so, at least for now, I'm not stressing about that.
However, that doesn't mean there is no methane risk, though. Levels of methane in the ocean have been measured that are 100,000 or even in some cases a million times higher than normal, according to measurements made by Texas A&M and reported by Reuters. A great deal of this methane remains dissolved in the water, but these rising levels risk creating dead zones where undersea life cannot survive.
And lack of trust in the gulf as a source of seafood is likely to drive up seafood prices elsewhere. That's unfortunate, since among other effects, it probably means people will eat more beef. And cattle are already a key source of methane. We should be eating less of it, not more.
It's Time to Care
The world is heavily very interconnected. We sometimes indulge the luxury of assuming these issues are separate, but they are not. The climate, environmental degradation, the food chain—it's all interconnected. We need to start caring more. The BP oil spill should be a wake-up call both directly because of its effects on the food supply and methane emission, but symbolically because it shows how rapidly things can go downhill for lack of caring to our precious world. We point to the sea turtles and the polar bears, and it's very sad, but what's often lost is that we could be next. These are the canaries in our global coal mine and they're sounding the alarm.
For all the economy and health care have been important, they are just a warmup for the real problem the world is facing. Like the financial collapse, ecological collapse could come suddenly as they did in the gulf. We need to be preparing better.
If you got value from this post, please "rate" it.
A small number of degrees of change in the world's temperature could be a disaster. See the movie Six Degrees Could Change the World if you need help visualizing that. The next airing is July 22, 2010, but they re-run it periodically.
For more by Kent Pitman on Climate Change, see:
• The Coming Tsunami of Heat Waves
• Drawing a Line in the Ice against Climate Change
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Many scientists say that we have about ten years before the effects of global warming begin to kick in big time, and some scientists have estimated that under conditions of full climate change the earth will be able to support about 5% of the peak population for the planet, which is anticipated in about 20 years.
I suppose when that happens, then perhaps the climate deniers and oil companies might admit that there's something to this global warming stuff.
Money. All seems tied to money. Who will grease my palm well enough to keep me in office? What is their price? Oh, I can do that. Have them sign the check. Morals? Ethics? Of course I have them. Had them. Once. When I was young and before I wanted to run for office. To help my fellow citizens.
Campaign Finance Reform? I have lost track. Has anything pretended to happen on this? Until it does, until politicians can stand on their own independent of bowing to the lobbyists who pay whatever it takes to silence criticism of their particular bailiwick, what will really change?
It is politically correct to care about the environment, but if true, honest caring means I need to leave my car at home or not turn on my electric whatever, what comes first - the environment or my pleasure? Are we really listening? People continue to be surprised by what is happening in the Gulf. They continue to be horrified as the catastrophe creeps closer to them. It began to creep close to all of us the day it began. There are no real surprises except that when faced with such enormous catastrophe, no one really knows what to do. Action can be taken. Band Aids can be taken from the boxes. Will any of us still be alive when things return to what we knew? Will things that have been tarnished by such incompetence and lack of care, regulation on everyone's part ever be what they once were and what we all so took for granted. Shareholders are the only people that matter. Profit margins must be maintained. On and on and on.
Methane. I don't know that I have read anything about this though I have seen reports about possible dead zones being created.
Part of me has thought that nature has her cycles and possibly we are in one right now. Well, possibly we are or would have been had we not managed to personally skew the rhythms of nature toward self destruction. I so hope I am exaggerating here. I so hope things are not as bad as I fear. No wonder I waited to read your piece today, Kent. Can you offer some light?
Regarding the methane connection. I had recently read a book " Six Degrees" which talked much about the methane connection with Global Warming both now, and in the distant past. The scenario was frightening. It also talked about methane hydrates under the seafloor. Which brings us back to the Tsunami scenario. I hope to read more on this subject!
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Thank you for this brave step.
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I am in full agreement with the other posters (and surely, those to come) that it is ENORMOUSLY depressing to have so much ambivalence toward this important topic (by tea partiers, republicans, whoever).
Still, thinking that this problem is due to stupid, irrational, or ignorant PEOPLE (as if people are not a product of their circumstances) will never get us to the heart of the matter.
Badmouthing people isn't going to do anything...LIVE BY EXAMPLE!!!!! (eat less meat...etc.)
Have a nice afternoon everyone...
-David
Lefty, see my article Climate Change Coming “Faster Than Expected” where I discuss why I think this is coming way sooner than people think. My arguments are not mathematically rigorous, but I explain at least why they are necessarily without such foundation and nevertheless not baseless. There are times when informed guessing is warranted, and I think this is such a time. The article is a little stale in some ways, has some superfluous bits, and needs to be dusted off and re-done. I'll try to get to that one of these days soon.
Naughty Boy, I didn't suggest how to control the methane. The first step of this major problem is a serious public discussion and some gap-filling in any data needed to convince everyone that this is real. There needs to be centralized debunking of any claims that this is not a real phenomenon in the same way that we would prosecute a war. And then we can work out the strategy forward. But a lot of this will not be easy and cannot be done by individuals just eating fewer cheeseburgers. The problem is both bigger than that and more important than that.
The methane in the permafrost is very very dangerous. From what little I can remember from studying the ice cores (not much) too much methane can be the tipping point that pushes the climate into one extreme or the other.
This much methane is very dangerous to the planet and the weather. I do remember the prof emphasizing the dangers of the permafrost melting. This could be the biggest and the fastest weather swing in recent history.
This oil disaster will affect us all. We all live in a circle here.
The minimum thing, as you rightly point out, is to get in a politician who doesn't care about special interests. Strangely, I think we did that. I honestly don't think Obama is manipulated hugely by special interests. I think he leans too heavily on certain people he thinks he's vetted and that sometimes special interests creep in there, but that's always a risk. I think his real problem is that he simply thinks this problem can wait somehow at bay while he deals with others, and that this problem ultimately requires modest solutions. At the heart of it, I think the problem is that what got him to office is that he's a middle-of-the-roader and so he hasn't got it in him to fight for this. I think the Democratic party should be fielding someone to challenge him, and they should be telling him not to fight it so that the party doesn't fragment. But they're not. And that's going to be very bad. Not worse than what the Republicans will offer, but what's hard to see is that it's clear the kind of deregulation the Republicans and Tea Partiers want is deadly. This problem will not resolve itself by a wait-and-see or hands-off approach. And yet there are many ways the Democrats can also offer a deadly approach. The Democrats are the most likely to change this.
Yes, maybe in some remote chance a methane bubble will wipe out Florida in a single supersonic burst. Maybe. I doubt it. Saying it just makes people shrug and think you're talking science fiction. It's either going to happen or it's not, people won't plan on that. But it doesn't have to be that bad for the entire planet to cook us (figuratively at least, maybe literally). It can involve a much more plausible scenario of a smaller amount of methane (something we can conceive of easily given how much oil is leaking now, and invisible methane wtih it) getting to the surface and into the atmosphere. We have to make a credible case for believable scenarios and not raise fantasy stories that just cause people to tune out.
The Russians incidentally have offered help with submersibles they say have worked at such depths successfully and they say the US is not asking for help.
I might inject that a factor involved here may be lack of science education and interest in the U.S.
Polar caps are white, meaning they reflect light in all wavelengths, much of it back out into space, and that means the earth stays cool up there. If the caps melt, the ocean is blue. That means that a bunch of light is being absorbed, not reflected, and that means energy is being stored in the ocean. Energy translates to heat. And so the earth warms. Unevenly, mind you. The heat is trapped in the ocean and doesn't initially hit the air. But it means that things that expected to be cooled by the arctic aren't, and so they stay warm. And that propagates through the system.
When it propagates, the arctic won't be as cold and the permafrost will melt. And then the bad release of methane in that frozen ice will occur. And that will make the atmosphere act more greenhouse like, increasing warming. It's a bad cycle. The oil spill makes it worse by increasing the methane availability. Not all of that methane may get to the surface right away, but it might later. There are a lot of unknowns. But perturbing the system seems ill advised just now.
At minimum, I think taking moratoriums on new drilling of this kind seriously is wise. Whatever the case may be for oil drilling, I don't think you'll be seeing any headline ever in your life saying “global warming found to be radically reduced by recent deep water oil drilling.”
I think that some of the problem with science education is simply not caring, which is sad. We have left our schools in simple disrepair. But there is also an active campaign against being well-informed that is being mounted in a bogus attempt to separate science from religion. I don't think these two have to be in tension with one another, certainly not to the degree they are. I think that certain selfish people, grabbing for power, are doing two things: (a) taking advantage of those not well-schooled, and (b) fearing that science cannot be controlled (weird for scientists to think, since they can't probably understand how something can be controlled unscientifically, but think like a fiction writer: you can shape some things in your story but not the physics. If you're a politician trying to spin a fiction, science can derail you. So the less science, the more any given spin will work...)
You can't put five politicians in a room and get them to agree on any part of global warming or anything else. There is never going to be much of a green energy initiative because it will never be seriously discussed. The temperatures will continue to rise and polar bears will be walking down Pennsylvania Avenue and still there will be people who refuse to believe or admit that humans created global warming.
Politicians will still be whining about the taxes their grandchildren might have to pay for cap and trade. About the only way I see to save the human race is for everyone to quit breeding for two generations and start all over again in fifty years. But of course, that is bad for business. I think it will take something that drastic to make much of a difference, otherwise, this game is over.
Perhaps the homo sapiens branch of hominids is just imbued with too many imperfections to make a long run of it as a species. Still, it's worth the try. I hammer on my friends who are partly skeptical and do what I can politically. If enough people do what they can, maybe soon we can get some real cutbacks on carbon emissions. I'd be much more despairing if I were in my 20s instead of my 50s.
This is a technical question and I don't intend to be a wise guy but do you know how dissolved methane can produce a dead zone? I don't know why that would happen.
Nice work!
hatchetface, I guess it wouldn't sound right for me to protest that you're not wise at all, so I'll just let the comment stand. Heh... But yes, your summary looks right.
Steve, thanks for visiting. I agree with you about Friedman. His writings are quite important on this topic. He's a clear thinker and has a lot of good ideas.
Karin, we need more scared people, that's for sure. I don't want people to panic. But they have to not just forget or dismiss things.
about 95% of earth's species are extinct. we might join them soon.
I doubt if humans will go extinct as such. It's just that our civilizations will come crashing down, reducing our population to a tiny fraction of what it once was and leaving the survivors in a state similar to the people in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." It will be a restoration of balance after massive overpopulation and its resulting environmental degradation, and is easily predictable from a basic knowledge of how ecosystems work. It's not a question of if but when, and the when is looking sooner rather than later.
My view is a little unpopular because I'm in the camp that accepts that global warming happens, it's part of the planet's natural cycle, we can not stop it. But I do believe that we are likely accelerating the process with our actions.
My view point is also unpopular in that I simply don't accept that we are going to destroy the planet, the planet will go along quite well apart from us (so long as we don't figure out a way to split it from the core out). What we will destroy (and this is similar to Bonnie's comment) is ourselves, we can destroy the environment that supports our form of life. But not the planet. Splitting hairs I guess, but it bothers me that we don't make the distinction between destroying ourselves and the hubris of thinking we can destroy the planet :).
That said. I appreciate this piece for the simple reason that people need to wake up and *prepare*. I'm not at all sure that *repair* is possible no matter what measure/s we take - but if we are going to survive we need to be thinking about what it's going to take to do that with regards to any case scenario.
To that end this is a good, thoughtful, reasoned read. It is to be hoped that folks listen and begin to think about it, whatever their personal view point might be.
Rated for need.
Nana, what makes you think we'd survive at all?
I love it when your intelligent and cogent articles make the cover.
I think you are right about the attitude shift that needs to happen on an individual level. When I was a research assistatnt for a book about the social construction around climate change, it was the attitude of the populace which drove their country's policies about Climate Change. If the people did not care, the nation ignored the issue.
Thanks, Kent, marvelous piece.
o'steph, thanks for the support. The difficulty is figuring out what people need to know and how to present it so that it's intelligible and motivating. I keep trying it from different angles. Without a clear public mandate, it's hard for politicians to care.
Thanks for a thoughtful and well researched post! With luck each of us can find some serious ways to change our habits for the better of the planet.
Sometimes I think the U.S. is a barbarous state, Kenghis Khan of corporatism...but, aside from (apparently) some nordic countries, the whole planet (haha, meaning the human biomass) is like that... Plus us innocents, who *carry on* because we don't know what else to do... (I don't eat beef, I A/C one small room and only at night, have always lived modestly (by first-world standards)...except for recent travel... Oh well, garden here I come.
P.S. - Must look into what, if anything, Canada, occupier of great expanses of permafrost, is contemplating... What from Russia? As for Alaska, I see drilling will now be permitted in thousands of square miles...
Once the crops start to fail it won't be a matter of people struggling to survive, there will be major wars to gets what's left and I have no idea how vicious it may get with huge bands of starving refugees and execution squads to keep them away.
Humanity is and has been suffering from the disease of money raping the planet for a long time (see http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair07092010.html ) and things are finally edging towards a breaking point.
At 84 I will be hopefully dead when the full impact hits as it certainly will.
the scientific consensus represents the most conservative estimate of how global warming will affect our environment and civilization, and is most often not extended beyond the end of the current century, every year the predictions of that consensus grow more dire as we march from the hypothetical to the concrete and measurable, all the while ignoring what this change means two hundred, five hundred, a thousand years down the road
I agree with nanatehay that humans are likely adaptable enough to survive as a species, but a massive population crash is probably inevitable, my question is how much of the accumulated store of human knowledge and expertise is likely to survive, how much of the global infrastructure will a drastically reduced population be able to maintain? I have a depressing vision of a scattered human population of a few millions living underground around the margins of the Arctic, scrabbling a living from an impoverished and uncertain agriculture, desperately trying to preserve some fraction of our hard-won common inheritance through millennia of hell on earth
Whether you agree with Kent's information or not, at least he is *looking*.
During our particularly cold and snowy (!) winter here in the Deep South, I argued with quite a few people I know who pointed to these abnormally cool temperatures as evidence that the planet is NOT warming. I was genuinely overwhelmed at the magnitude of ignorance about this topic conveyed in their laughing denials. I explained that an increase in the planets average temperature is predicted to bring about unstable weather patterns, patterns that tend toward extremes but they didn't even argue the facts with me. They just pointed to those now debunked "smoking gun" emails that claimed a climate scientist was misrepresenting data.
Now that we are having a miserably hot summer, with temps topping 90 degrees back in May and climbing ever higher, should I ask them if they have changed their opinion on climate change? No, because it won't matter. When there are active and ongoing campaigns by the media, elected officials, political parties, religious organizations, and just about every other "voice of authority" to undermine science and reason, we can't expect people to listen to science and reason. The public has been captured by the propagandists and I'm at a loss as to how we can go about undoing the damage.
Oh, and Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs. But you already knew that, right?
Aaron (Firestorm), I responded to your critiques on your thread so I won't duplicate my response here. I was disappointed that so much of your comments were personally directed at me. I had no real problem with the technical/scientific observations you were making. What's funny (and a bit sad) is that in response to my Corexit post, I got commentary from hatchetface which was really of similar character to what you wrote. That is, it added considerable detail and came at things from a more technical angle. His remarks were offered as helpful—in truth, he was much more kind than was necessary given the degree of disagreement he had. But the point is that by offering his remarks “in stride” it led immediately to an interesting discussion that I think offered more light than heat... in contrast to your critique, which gets lost in the heat. Oh well. I certainly would encourage others to read your remarks if they don't mind picking through the critiques of me to find the technical points.
Seer, thanks for the supportive remarks. Yes, this is just offered as one of many points in a dialog. If all it does is help people to understand why predicting the future based on the past, it's a step forward. People see the temperature rise a couple of degrees and say “no big deal” and think that's proof that another couple of degrees will be the same. They need to see that it might not be. Even if I were wholly wrong here (Aaron disputes a lot of it, and some of his arguments seem sound, while I question others of them), it matters that people see the questions as urgent and they start caring about dialog on these matters at least as much as the tabloid fare that seems to occupy our time and energy. In retrospect, I bet we'll all wish we'd used our time differently.
and a person would think since we could put men on the moon that we could come up with some sorta idea to collect and use all this gas
thats just hanging out (just me) as the rest of "global warming,climate changeing (ect) could all this just be a reaction to a action with this tumbleing rock we all live on? how long have we abused "mother nature" i'd say she's about pissed putting it lightly
but there are more points and reasons the list goes on an on
lol but say blame it on oboma....he seems to be doing a good job of messing things up this wouldnt matter to much more
"This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. " Chief Seattle
Bubba, yes, pigs, too. I certainly wouldn't blame this problem on Obama—it's a problem of global scope and what's mostly holding it back is the public will to fix it. I do wish Obama would push harder, but it's not just his fault he's not.
Mishima, hi, thanks for visiting. Glad to do a bit of consciousness raising.
Tom, thanks for dropping in and for the good quote.
which is run the nation 'for the people.'
By the way, I'm assuming you're referring to The National Initiative for Democracy?