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Defusing the Methane Greenhouse Time Bomb
Christopher Mims, Scientific American
Methane trapped in Arctic ice (and elsewhere) could be rapidly released into the atmosphere as a result of global warming in a possible doomsday scenario for climate change, some scientists worry. After all, methane is 72 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over a 20-year timescale. But research announced at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union this December suggests that marine microbes could at least partially defeat the methane “time bomb” sitting at the bottom of the world’s oceans.
The conventional wisdom for decades has been that methane emanating from the seafloor could be consumed by a special class of bacteria called methanotrophs. It has long been known, for instance, that these organisms at the bottom of the Black Sea consume methane produced in its deep oxygen-free waters.
What has not been clear is whether these bacteria would be of any use in the event that a special class of ice at the bottom of the ocean is destabilized by a warmer climate. This ice, known as clathrates, or methane hydrates, consists of a cage of water molecules surrounding individual molecules of methane, and it exists under conditions of low temperature and high pressure. These conditions can be found on the continental shelf the world over, but there is an extra large quantity of seafloor suitable for methane hydrates in the Arctic because of its low temperatures and a seafloor plateau that happens to be at the optimum depth for clathrate formation. The Arctic also happens to be more vulnerable to climate change because parts of the poles are warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the world.
To investigate this Arctic ice more carefully, Scott Elliott, a biogeochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, used the Coyote supercomputer to model the complex interplay of physical and biological systems that govern the fate of methane released from Arctic clathrates during the first few decades of projected future global warming…
(5 Feb 2010)
Think-tanks take oil money and use it to fund climate deniers
Jonathan Owen and Paul Bignell, The Independent
An orchestrated campaign is being waged against climate change science to undermine public acceptance of man-made global warming, environment experts claimed last night.
The attack against scientists supportive of the idea of man-made climate change has grown in ferocity since the leak of thousands of documents on the subject from the University of East Anglia (UEA) on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit last December.
Free-market, anti-climate change think-tanks such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in the US and the International Policy Network in the UK have received grants totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds from the multinational energy company ExxonMobil. Both organisations have funded international seminars pulling together climate change deniers from across the globe…
(7 Feb 2010)
China: Prince of Denmark
Walden Bello, Business Mirror
Like Hamlet, Shakespeare’s conflicted Prince of Denmark, China was caught between multiple currents in Copenhagen. Its failure to manage these challenges, argues Walden Bello, led to its biggest diplomatic debacle in years.
More than a month after the debacle at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen (Conference of Parties, or COP 15), the question of who scuttled the talks elicits fury and derision.
In many accounts, President Barack Obama comes across either as a figure who valiantly tries to rescue a doomed conference or as a well-meaning head of state whose hands are unfortunately tied by the realities of US politics.
As the villain of the continuing climate drama, Washington has been replaced in much of the media by Beijing. China did make mistakes in Copenhagen, but the media portrayal of it as the spoiler of climate-change negotiations is neither accurate nor fair. Like Hamlet, Shakespeare’s conflicted Prince of Denmark, China was caught in multiple crosscurrents in Copenhagen. Its failure to manage these led to one of its biggest diplomatic setbacks in years…
(7 Feb 2010)
Loss Of Species Hits Economy
Reuters via New York Times
Losses of animal and plant species are an increasing economic threat and the world needs new goals for protecting nature after failing to achieve a 2010 U.N. target of slowing extinctions, experts said on Friday.
Losses of biodiversity “have increasingly dangerous consequences for human well-being, even survival for some societies,” according to a summary of a 90-nation U.N. backed conference in Norway from February 1-5.
The United Nations says that the world is facing the worst extinction crisis since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, driven by a rising human population and spinoffs such as pollution, expanding cities and global warming.
Damage to coral reefs in the tropics, creeping desertification in Africa or felling of the Amazon rainforest were among threats to wildlife and so to human livelihoods.
“Many more economic sectors than we realise depend on biodiversity,” the co-chairs of the conference said in their summary…
(5 Feb 2010)
