Yves here. This post is a useful reminder of a particularly powerful global warming feedback loop, namely thawing permafrost throwing off methane. We tend to think of permafrost melting in places like Siberia, but it also happens on the ocean floor where temperatures are normally frigid.
More cheery sightings:
Siberia is heating up around twice as quickly as other parts of the world. The rapid change is causing the frozen ground known as permafrost that coats about two-thirds of Russia to thaw for the first time in ages. https://t.co/rECwCFZEOS
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 3, 2024
Permafrost is found in areas where temperatures rarely rise above freezing. This means permafrost is often found in Arctic regions such as Greenland, the U.S. state of Alaska, Russia, China, and Eastern Europe. Permafrost thickness can range from one meter (about three feet) to… pic.twitter.com/MVpehuOg4u
— India's Decade (@Indias_Decade) January 4, 2024
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
It’s difficult for most people in the climate world to talk about methane and climate change. Methane certainly has an effect on the climate. Methane is a powerful but short-lived greenhouse gas that’s both encased in and produced by thawing permafrost. Thawing permafrost releases carbon, and it also “wakes up” dormant bacteria that feed on the half-decayed organic matter, producing methane. Permafrost is like a frozen compost heap, only massively larger. The above video from PBS is good on this subject.
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Missing the cause, effect & outcome ramifications of everything posted: a slick-water fracking Ponzi scheme, (after Katrina wiped out lots of gas infrastructure: Mars TLP) as Obama’s G20’s “bridge fuels” scam has released exponentially more methane, after 2006. Now again as Biden’s fracking neocon cabal was installed to pick war to stop Rooski gas (cut EU’s AGW-mitigating BEV & efficient commercial vehicle construction) and supplant, with FAR more expensive fracked LNG, oil, bitumen-based, coal, nuclear & biomass (ergo: weapon sales & MICIMATT involvement in Gaza, Gaza, West Africa, etc. win, win!) The higher than predicted (unflared) methane releases were predicted in various presentations we’d posted AGES ago; with supporting data from slick-water fracking developer, Schlumberger as to predicted failure/ blow-out rate, as scores of impossible-to-plug wells kick, are re-fracked & abandoned. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PGfIjCG-zB4
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/increase-in-atmospheric-methane-set-another-record-during-2021
All of those frackers earlier this century were extremely leveraged. When the price of natural gas plunged, servicing that debt became a problem. Even pushing “clean, cheap” gas couldn’t produce enough demand in this country to get the price back up high enough to make the frackers profitable; moreover, fracked wells run dry faster than conventional wells so must keep drilling more and more… And then there were those pesky Rooskis and their pipelines undercutting the European market. What to do? We can’t have all those financial institutions [again] holding a pile of worthless paper. I know! Let’s have a war! Sever those ties to Russia and make Europe reliant on US energy, get the price of gas back up so the fracking loans can be repaid and our banker friends are happy, get rid of that rascal Putin so our oligarch friends can resume operations there, and increase business for our weapons industry. Win, win, win, win!
Our neolib/neocon owners just love efficiency. It’s a tell when a policy is simultaneously profitable along multiple axes. And if the biosphere gets trashed along the way, oh well…
We’d actually bet on how long, the first Nord Stream would survive? Sy Hersh’s USN Salvage driver’s school is near EuroPipe Mülheim’s sister plant Berg in Florida, but Norway seemed less likely than Poland or Ukraine when it happened? Now, I’m curious to see what a Javelin does to a LNG tanker in some huge port city (or, if we move on to Guyana, West Africa, Baltic…
* We, in NYC have to convert ancient fuel oil boilers to fracked gas, poisoning folks in PA since 2006.
https://www.pipeline-journal.net/news/east-med-gas-pipeline-resumes-operations-after-month-long-halt#:
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/charting-energy-transitions-in-the-eastern-mediterranean-and-arabian-peninsula/
In the teens, I drove across Pennsylvania on I80 a number of times… such a beautiful state. Whenever I stopped to stretch my legs, I could smell the mercaptan. Those were leaks after the gas was brought to the surface and readied for the pipelines. I carried my own water.
Alas.
I’d almost, responded, “hilarious!” But then, I’d realized, I’m trying to get my partner to “retire” to Pgh, right AS Fettermann, Biden, Lee… whomever, ALL want to make Cancer Valley, Frackistan WORSE, very quickly! I’d driven her to Falling Water early in our relationship (from a quiet literally Dickensian pipe mill in Steelton). 300′ windmills, GORGEOUS, verdant foliage, adorable armed & tattooed hillbillies & no WAY to legally show her a well pad, (Buffalo Bill’s house, bridge from Justified & TMI had to serve). We shopped where 300 Pinkertons fought Steelworkers, after driving through where the wealthiest monsters on earth drowned & burned 2,400 immigrants they’d imported (Johnstown).
Early in Fetterman’s con artist career he was ‘recruiting’ urban pioneers to recolonize the toxic wasteland of Braddrock PA as part of some scheme to boost real estate values that he had a vested interest in – typical yuppie gentrification scheme. At the time he was infamous for tattooing Braddrock’s zipcode on his forearm. There is a steel plant there still operating that is the major source of the community’s pollution. There is enough pcb’s on the bottom of the river there that if disturbed would give half the country cancer.
I checked the place out in the late 90s when I was looking to relocate my family back to my home state and always liked the old brick buildings in rust belt towns and would of been happy to dump a mil into renovating a couple of nice old structures. After researching the the level of persistent toxins in the environment I wouldn’t even raise a pet rock there. Raising children there would almost guarantee a lifetime of respiratory illness for a child. And here is mr hipster, mr silver spooner cool trying to sucker people for the sole purpose of what???? driving up his real estate investment at the cost of their health???
ET had a few of the only fracked wells in Allegheny CO. All of us thought the silly subterfuge hilarious (He’s not JUST a rich kid from York, he’s on the OTHER side). I used to help in their community gardens. Everything from palladium, strontium, Beryllium, asbestos & manganese. Far more important, to John: UPMC was buying every medical system/ research & device/ drug maker; robotics, facial recognition, autonomous vehicle and of course 3,500 gas leases, ethane cracking & green- washing carbon sequestration schtick in the Marcellus (along with Beddis Nuclear). He wasn’t there to defend himself from Black kids or sell Braddock to Anthony Bourdain?
And also, let’s ban gas stoves and water heaters. So we can compress all that gas int LNG for expensive sale to Europe instead.
Who is insuring those LNG tanker vessels? Ship, cargo, third party liability, etc.
With any luck the permafrost will also have a population control device frozen within it like an old plague. Waiting, much like Pandora’s Box, to thaw and fix the mess we’ve made of the earth without turning the place into a tomb like Venus. I am sure we as a species are much more fragile than the ecosystem.
Man I hope so! The Earth could use a chimp eraser. Was hoping Covid would do it but doesn’t look like it quite had the gumption to finish the job.
Given the history of extinction events, I am confident the biosphere will carry on with or without us. I think William Rees’s view is very reasonable, as expressed in his 2023 paper, Overshoot: Cognitive obsolescence and the population conundrum:
One wonders if we can get there from here.
Well, if women’s rights were respected all around the world, and having more than one child per family were tax-punished, and having child-number-one before the age of thirty were tax-punished,
and if only childless immigrants were allowed into America and only on the condition that they became permanently sterilized first before coming here ( and every other ” rich population-declining” country adopting the same policy), then we could get there from here.
And yes, I personally am childless unto this very day.
According to the google Methane is about 25 times as powerful as carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere, although its estimated atmospheric half-life is about 9 years, compared with CO2’s 100 years. Fossil fuel production and use account for about 30% of global methane emissions, NOAA says.
Seems possible for a methane related extinction of mankind without destroying earth’s capacity to bear life.
mrsyk: Seems possible for a methane related extinction of mankind without destroying earth’s capacity to bear life.
Not necessarily true. There’ve been five great extinction events in Earth’s prehistory, each coinciding with massive methane releases into the atmosphere. The Permian Mass Extinction and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, in particular, almost ended all life on this planet.
Agreed on the not necessarily true part, but as you’ve shown, Mother Nature has chops (purging/coming back). I’m hoping dolphins come out on top next time.
If humans aren’t around to take care of the radioactive stuff they’ve cooked up, I’d conjecture life will evolve in a way that might pose challenges…even for nature herself. The containment structure at Chernobyl is good for what…a hundred years?
This WaPO item ….
Siberia is heating up around twice as quickly as other parts of the world. The rapid change is causing the frozen ground known as permafrost that coats about two-thirds of Russia to thaw for the first time in ages. https://t.co/rECwCFZEOS
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 3, 2024
… is ridiculously Panglossian. Thawing, my behind!
The reality is, there have permanently smouldering subterranean fires at the peatland level of the Siberian permafrost for the last half-dozen years.
Peat Fires Smolder in Siberia Despite Bone-Chilling Temperatures
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/01/27/peat-fires-smolder-in-siberia-despite-bone-chilling-temperatures-a72747
Imminent loss of climate space for permafrost peatlands in Europe and Western Siberia
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01296-7
This is kinda like being in a slow motion car crash. You can see what is happening, you understand how and why it is happening, have a beginning of an idea of the consequences – but there is not a damn thing you can do to stop it. All that burning of fossil fuels has baked a whole new climate for us whether we want it or not. The worse of it all is that we knew all this back in the 70s but our economic system demanded more and more burning of fossil fuels when we should have been reducing them instead. We had our chance back then and we blew it in an ever increasing orgy of fossil fuel burning.
We’d been taught Clathrate Gun Hypothesis in 1964, AMOC flipping, polar vortices coming over where the ice caps used to be & city sized fireballs, were supposed to happen AFTER boomer kids died? Jeepers, you don’t think jet-set, white-flight suburban sprawl & agribusiness… Look where AGW went exponential: somewhere between API’s 1965 “Time is Running Out” speech & “American Graffiti” “Two Lane Blacktop?” During Pittsburgh’s 2009 G20, locals wondered why old HIPPIES were trying to storm through Israeli trained cops, WEF/ WTO agents provocateurs & LRAD on military vehicles to Obama’s “that was ME people!” celebration of MSNBC’s Ed Rendell poisoning 850K, fracking reservoirs, ancient nuclear plants, schools, hospitals & unleashing run-away AGW. Oh, well… maybe whatever life form survives us?
https://www.fractracker.org/map/us/pennsylvania/
https://www.postcarbon.org/david-hughes-shale-reality-check-2019/
The motto for the year: 2024 — It’s already too late
“permafrost is often found in Arctic regions such as Greenland, the U.S. state of Alaska, Russia, China, and Eastern Europe.”
Not to mention CANADA?? Forgotten again. Sigh.
Permafrost in China? WHERE in China is there permafrost?
Distribution of Permafrost in China: An Overview of Existing Permafrost Maps
Youhua Ran, Xin Li, Guodong Cheng, Tingjun Zhang, Qingbai Wu, Huijun Jin, Rui Jin
20 November 2012
https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp.1756
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ppp.1756
…The total area of permafrost in China is estimated at ~ 1.59 × 106 km2 (glaciers and lakes excluded), and the area of seasonally frozen ground (excluding instantaneous frozen ground) is ~ 5.36 × 106 km2. The total area of high-altitude (plateau and mountain) permafrost in China is ~ 1.35 × 106 km2, the area of mountain permafrost is ~ 0.30 × 106 km2 and the area of plateau permafrost is ~ 1.05 × 106 km2. The latitudinal permafrost is located in the northern part of northeastern China, and its area is ~ 0.24 × 106 km….
I may be out of my academic pay grade here (I am not a chemist), but the hand wringing over permafrost and the furor over fracking ineptitude rather misses the mastodon (sorry!) in the room that our dear host mentioned in her intro: frozen undersea chunks of pure methane – “clathrates”- that exist in deep sea environs where extreme pressure allows water to stay liquid below 0 degrees C and as deep sea drillers in the Oil Patch all know, if the water’s that deep, it’s that cold regardless of latitude. (In the wake of the BP Macondo well disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, I became a frantic lurker at the Oil Drum blog, which naturally led me here as I began to “follow the money” behind Big Oil – and there sure is a sh*tload). A sudden change in ocean currents (say, an Antarctic ice sheet breaking loose) could trigger a rapid meltdown of these clathrates which either boil away into the atmosphere with attendant global warming (very bad) or unpredictable big kabooms (not as bad but still plenty of added CO2). Small consolation in that methane has a modestly short half-life but I’m pretty sure (IANACh) that the carbon molecules (probably as CO2) linger on. Interesting times ahead and Happy New Year!
The methane in the Siberia permafrost will be released first and the explosion in warming from that will then trigger the Arctic methane cloth rate release.
Clathrate! Not cloth rate — fricking, fracking spellcheck.
Forgot to add – in the Chinese calendar we’re coming into the year of the Dragon. Don’t it figger!
NC readers may be interested in an experience I had during the writing of my climate book Alligators in the Arctic and How to Avoid Them, which was published by Cambridge in 2022. In an earlier draft I had language about the high risk of methane releases as global temperatures increase, and I got a scathing review from a climate scientist who basically said I was propagating fake news (along with being a communist etc.). I did some more research and found there is a small but very combative minority of climate scientists who think peat and hydrate instability is BS. They even disagree strongly about how much stored methane is out there. I weighed their arguments against the mainstream view and found I agreed with the mainstreamers, but not being qualified I decided to leave the issue unsettled in the book and rely instead on the long list of other possible-to-likely positive feedback mechanisms. The biggest change I made, however, was dropping the “CO2 equivalent” formulation, which relies on a conversion of methane-to-CO2 greenhouse effectiveness. Here I mostly agree with the methane skeptics, so I separated off CO2 analysis with a little handwaving about how it all depends on other greenhouse gases as well. Imperfect but best under the circumstances. I’m doing the same with current work on translating remaining carbon budgets to annual emission reductions.
Several others have mentioned the danger posed by methyl clathrates. It’s my understanding that the greatest concentration is on the extensive continental shelf that extends from Siberia well into the Arctic ocean. The shelf is particularly shallow, perhaps a few hundred feet. Thus it’s more vulnerable to heating than clathrate deposits lower down in the water column where the heat has not penetrated as much. These Siberian clathrates are already melting, you can see the bubbles hitting the surface in Russian litoral waters.
Thanks for this. It’s no surprise that the Russians are thrilled with the thawing of a true “North Sea Passage”. There’s a whole lot of money to be made and all of this new shipping and industry – particularly gas and oil. I recently watched a lengthy and duly impressive video on Karlof1’s Substack showcasing a massive new LNG processing facility and shipping terminal rapidly nearing completion. These tankers can deliver to Europe or the far East with equal ease – probably at a lower price than the Western Hegemon. If only they could scoop up the clathrates with autonomous submersibles and beat Mother Nature to the punch. Shallow waters, should be nuthin butta thang! Now that would be some serious win-win! (Time for another puff methinks….;^) Happy Holidays and all praise to our humble host and mighty Commentariat! I am not worthy!
The RussiaGov has long supported global warming on the theory that a warming global will move agricultural zones northward and transform Siberia into a tropical paradise and turn it into the world’s “banana basket”.
I have read that permafrost is anywhere from 30% to 50% ice by volume. Which means if it all thaws and melts, that a thousand foot deep layer of permafrost will lose between 300 to 500 feet of altitude. Which makes me wonder . . . as the ex-permafrost subsides and the ocean rises, how much of sinking Siberia will disappear under a rising Arctic Ocean? And will the RussiaGov feel that its go-long gamble on global warming will have paid off in the long run?
Forgive me if I am skeptical that the Russian Government supports global warming. I seriously doubt that the Russian Elites and Russian Scientists are anxious to experience and realistically anticipate that Siberia will become a tropical paradise within any politically or economically meaningful time-frame.
Rather than concern about ocean rise covering Siberia, I trust that Russian Elites and Russian Scientists are far more concerned about how ocean rise might impact Russian Naval installations and ports. Perhaps I am too hopeful or too naive — I believe, based on Putin’s handling of the Ukraine, that Russian Elites and Russian Scientists are far more realistic about what the coming climate transition could mean.
You may be correct. I only feel as if I remember a time when the RussiaGov looked forward to the warmup and Putin affected to believe human activity had nothing to do with it. Here is a link to an article describing Russia’s approach to the effects of global warming in the recent past which seems to be a lingering trace of that old approach I think I remember the RussiaGov having.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/05/russia-announces-plan-to-use-the-advantages-of-climate-change
More recently it seems that the RussiaGov may be viewing global warming as more problem than prospect. Here is an outsider’s view of what looms . . .
https://www.csis.org/analysis/climate-change-will-reshape-russia
And here is an article claiming that Putin himself, and probably therefor the RussiaGov in general, now sees problems from warming.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/why-vladimir-putin-suddenly-believes-in-global-warming-1.1323657
While the RussiaGov sees more immediate concerns than the low-altitude permafrost zone going under a rising sea, when that finally starts to happen, will the RussiaGov consider it a problem? Or will they write it off on the theory that they have land to burn . . . err . . . melt?
As an aside, i commend you for appending Gov to county names to avoid smearing an entire citizenry with the actions of its temporary political power flexers. I’d like to see IsraelGov and USAGov used, the former to help disarm the insulting “anti-semitic” blunderbuss.
Thank you for the kind words. Yes, I hope the use of Gov spreads. In the case of Israel, for example, hardly 10 percent of the Israeli electorate voted for Smotrich and ben Gvir combined. And yet the grubby little cynic Netanyahu turned policy and action power over to those two gentlemen in order to stay out of jail a little while longer. That’s the kind of thing a cynical operator can do in a Parliamentary Democracy.
Americans who bay and bray for a Parliamentary Democracy should put their noses up close to their computer screens and remind themselves that ” this is what Parliamentary Democracy smells like” before they resume their baying and braying for a Parliamentary Democracy here in America.
Paleoclimate data suggests the transition to a new climate will not be a smooth linear event. Many of the theorized positive feedbacks are poorly understood and probably incompletely understood. Even so, ‘interesting’ climate events could occur, probably much nuch sooner than any of the IPCC models project. Clathrates, permafrost, and other sources of methane gas were/are Guy McPherson’s hot rock for projecting various scenarios of doom. From my limited reading about paleoclimate transitions to new climate regimes I have the impression that there exist many unknown positive and negative feedback effects which occurred in those past climate transitions — and I tend to believe Guy McPherson is an alarmist — at least in the depths of the doom, which I believe he projects.
I remain very concerned about the efforts to oversimplify the complexities and manifold mysteries of climate science. Much of what we know or believe we know now is based on Science developed through studies of the Earth’s climate during a period of relatively stable climate … or through complex inferences about Climate Science based on studies of largely proxy data collected from evidence of the Earth’s past climates and climate transitions. I am also concerned that Humankind’s fixation on drama and big dramatic changes tends to obscure the very large impacts on Human systems that even seemingly small changes in the climate systems can have. I cannot but conjure the fearful vision of children playing with matches in a warm basement flooded with a foot of gasoline.
I am not terribly concerned that methane will push the climate past the IPCC’s 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Centigrade, politically determined threshold. I believe that the heat already absorbed in the oceans is probably sufficient to consider that threshold blown. Methane or some other green-house gas, or some other cause could/probably will accelerate our approach to and overshoot these thresholds. This is not to say I am unconcerned by the amplifications and consequent further acceleration methane promises. I believe the 2.0 degrees Centigrade “tipping point” is more political than actual. I believe we know too little about climate systems to craft carbon budgets and wring our hands over 1.5 degrees Centigrade or 2.0 degrees Centigrade.
The tie made between climate change and the rate of fossil fuel production and consumption is a red herring … in a certain sense. The way I hear the arguments made, climate change is the only consideration to worry us about producing and consuming fossil fuels as rapidly as humanly possible. All ‘economics’ aside — there is nothing rational or ‘optimal’ about producing and consuming a resource as rapidly as possible. Remove all the magical assumptions about Market efficiency and all the fallacious beliefs of infinite resources, and the ready substitution of substitute goods for goods that have no substitutes — and further arguments to constrain the present consumption of fossil fuels based solely on concerns about climate change and politically determined tipping point thresholds appears … I have no words within any realm of acceptability to describe my feelings of this.
Consider — what happens to the temperatures of a glass of iced tea on a hot day after all the ice melts. Consider — the AMOC and what Could happen as Atlantic waters freshen [hint: the AMOC could shut down and we could be more worried … over the Short Term … about global cooling than about global warming. Consider for a moment if nothing more happened as the climate changed than the Complete unpredictability of when freezes or heavy rains or droughts might occur and where, and for how long. Then consider the possible impacts on agriculture here and around the world. Movies need big climate changes for drama. Real life can become very dramatic through big climate changes, slowly realized.
Guys, relax! For some of us (billionaires) global warming is an opportunity, not a problem. We’re going to need a lot more metals/minerals for all these new Tesla models I have planned, and my buds are working on that:
Mining firm backed by Bezos and Gates to begin Greenland drilling (Reuters).
Invest in tech for capturing glacier melt freshwater and methane leaching from melting permafrost!
Tho methane is indeed relatively short-lived in the atmosphere (before breaking down), the duration of that interval is itself variable. The chemistry of decomposition of methane is in a reaction that requires hydroxyl molecules free-floating in the atmosphere and thus available.
But large methane releases reduce the relative availability of these in the atmosphere above the area of that release (as does a planetary increase in methane concentrations). So in a region where there is a consistent pattern of significant methane releases (East Siberia, for example), methane persists in the atmosphere for longer than it would otherwise, where it will have at least 20 times as great a greenhouse (heat-trapping) effect as does CO2.
Water is not colder or frozen ice at the bottom of ocean trenches. The coldest water in arctic regions is at the surface, where it becomes ice and floats at the surface.
I remember hearing a decade ago about Dr Shakhova’s work on assessing the threat of methane/ methane hydrates in Siberian permafrost/ the East Siberian Sea. It was pretty common for climate scientists and hoi polloi pundits to dismiss the threat. “If the permafrost does melt, it won’t melt significantly for hundreds of years.” “Methane is only powerful in the short term.”
It seems to me that if the temperature rise “in the short term” is significant enough to cause even a couple of years of serial cereal harvest failures, the vast majority of humanity won’t much benefit from lower temperatures in a couple of decades, assuming that the temperature rise somehow stops abruptly.
Even assuming that the scientists working on heat tolerant RuBisCo/ RuBisCo activase grains have rapid success, the increasingly erratic rain/ drought cycle in much of the world’s grain belts seems extremely worrisome.
. . . ” It seems to me that if the temperature rise “in the short term” is significant enough to cause even a couple of years of serial cereal harvest failures, the vast majority of humanity won’t much benefit from lower temperatures in a couple of decades, assuming that the temperature rise somehow stops abruptly. ” . . .
That seems like a deeply desired outcome for those committed to the Long Kill-off Plan, using global warming to help achieve it. ( I have decided to start using the words ” long die-off and long kill-off” instead of “jackpot” because “jackpot” is an insider cultural referrence which means nothing to most people. And so I will start using clear words for the long die-off kill-off which mean what they say and require no deep familiarity with the literary works of William Gibson).
” Long death-march through the Valley of Selection” might be another good phrase for what the Global Overclass is hoping to get away with carrying out while making it look like a century of coincidence, accidents and bad luck.