Meet the Methane

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

07 August 14

few years ago, in the course of researching a book, I spent several days on Shishmaref, a barrier island in arctic Alaska that is gradually being eaten away by the Chukchi Sea. One of the reasons it is being devoured is that, because of the Great Climate Change Hoax, the permafrost in the ground is disappearing so the storms that regularly batter the island can now swallow great chunks of unfrozen turf. (Among other things, this has caused the demise of what the folks there call the "Eskimo freezer" -- their ability to bury meat in the frozen earth, thereby keeping it fresh throughout what used to be a long winter.) Part of what happens when the permafrost becomes less perma is that methane gets released, permafrost being a highly organic phenomenon. As all parts of the Arctic melt, more methane gets released, and methane is worse for climate change than CO2 is, which is why scientists got shocked into f-bombing us this week.

In a case where scientists in the Arctic discovered massive plumes of methane escaping from the seafloor, climatologist and Arctic expert Jason Box sums that essence up thusly: If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd.

Well said.

In other methane-related news, Siberia seems to be eating itself.

Leibman, the chief scientist at the Earth Cryosphere Institute of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has studied permafrost since 1973 and has a remarkable publication record. She describes how the first hole (and presumably the new one) appear to have formed as methane is released from a warming mix of ice, water and soil, building up pressure that explosively pushed out the top of the hole, heaving chunks of earth many yards in some directions. She said there were no signs of combustion, that the hole had to be at least a year old because there was fresh greenery from this summer season with no overlying layer of mud or the like.

Leibman is an optimist. She thinks Siberia will get some nice lakes out of the deal.

And, of course, there's the methane released through our scramble to become the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.

The generally accepted climate benefit of natural gas is that it emits about half as much CO2 as coal per kilowatt-hour generated. But this measure of climate impact applies only to combustion, it does not include methane leaks, which can dramatically alter the equation. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that forces about 80 times more global warming than carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere. Methane's warming power declines to roughly 30 times CO2 after about 100 years. No one has any idea how much methane is leaking from our sprawling and growing natural gas system. This is a major problem, because without a precise understanding of the leak rate natural gas could actually make climate change worse, but we would never know.

Somebody should really, you know, get an idea on this subject. And fairly quickly, I'd say. When I told the people in Shishmaref that, down here in the Continental 48, there are people getting rich off the notion that what is happening to Shishmaref isn't really happening, they looked at me as though I had two heads.