Problems in Geoengineering Atmospheric Methane Levels

                                       Recent variations in atmospheric methane concentrations.

Over the last 10 years atmospheric methane levels have increased from about 1790 to about 1860 parts per billion (shown as nmol/mol in the plot above)---an increase of about 3%.  In comparison atmospheric CO2 has increased from about 380 to 401 ppm over the last decade---an increase of about 5.5%.  Since CO2 is about 200 times more abundant then CH4 and is accumulating more rapidly in the atmosphere, it might seem that theres not too much to worry about from the build-up of CH4 in the atmosphere.    However, while methane is present in much lower concentrations in the atmosphere then CO2, it is a much more effective greenhouse gas ---- a molecule of CH4 captures about 20 times more heat then a molecule of CO2.

Much more attention has been focused on methods of Geoengineering CO2 removal from the atmosphere then CH4 removal for the simple reason that CO2 is responsible for most of the global warming occurring on the earth today.  Also slowing down the development of ideas for geoengineering methane is the fact that there is no natural or "green" way to reduce methane concentrations in the atmosphere.   To the best of my knowledge there is no major geologic or biologic processes that involves methane so its not possible to pump down CH4 by enhancing a natural  process.   I've discussed earlier in this blog that most of the geoengineering ideas for pumping down CO2 are based on idea to enhance natural processes ----this approach just won't work for methane.

Nonetheless, when Geoengineering of earth's climate eventually starts, it would be great if we could pump down CH4 at the same that CO2 is being removed from the atmosphere.  Methane makes a significant contribution to global warming, and current CH4 levels are about 40% higher then pre-industrial CH4 concentrations in the atmosphere.   

Green Geoengineering is a False Faustian Bargain

                                        The Faustian Bargain of Green Geoengineering

Some scientists have held out hope that green geoengineering would be able to help reduce the effects of CO2 buildup in the Earth's atmosphere.  The basic idea was that increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere would stimulate  the growth of trees and other plants, pumping down some of the CO2 in the atmosphere.  

The flaw in this idea is obvious----any storage of CO2 in the biosphere must inevitably be temporary---when trees and plants die all the CO2 returns stored in the plant will return to the atmosphere.  Over the last few decades numerous studies have confirmed that trees and plants in the Amazon Rain Forest areas were indeed undergoing accelerated growth due to higher CO2 and excitement was growing over the potential of green engineering to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.  Now new studies are showing that all the accelerated growth of trees has done is to create a larger-then-usual pool of carbon in the biosphere and solum that is now being released back to atmosphere as the trees and plants die.  Projections show that in short order so much of this excess CO2 will be released to the atmosphere at the Earth's biosphere is going to change from a carbon sink into a major carbon source.  

It turns out that "green geoengineering" has turned out to be a Faustian bargain, i.e. a foolish deal made for present without regard for future costs or consequences.    The claim that planting trees and other forms of green geoengineering would reduce atmospheric CO2 and mitigate global warming has had a very short shelf life.    Current estimates are that the biosphere will become a large net carbon source by the year 2100.

We can now declare that green geoengineering is essentially useless.  Any relief from higher atmospheric CO2 levels and global warming provided by green geoengineering will only be temporary--after only a few decades any excess CO2 stored in trees plants and soils will be returned to the atmosphere.   

But don't despair because green geoengineering has turned out to be a sham and a fraud.  There are still a variety of  other geoengineering proposals, including my own CO2 Antarctic Pumpdown Geoengineering proposal, that hold out promise of being ways to pump down and sequester CO2 over time periods that will actually help ameliorate global warming.

Let There be Blobs

                                                 Now there are three warm blobs in the Northeastern Pacific Ocean


How does a blob reproduce?  Does it extrude little blob seeds that float away and grow into new blobs or does it split itself in two like a giant amoeba?  Well, however it did it the area of very warm water off California known to scientists as the "Blob" now has two other Blobs to keep it company (see pic above).  A new Blob has formed in the Gulf of Alaska and another Blob covers all of Alaska's Bering Sea.  Both of the Alaska Blobs are bigger then original Blob off California.

Each of the three Blobs is a huge area of warm water with temperatures up to 5°C above normal.  The water in the Blobs is warm enough to contain species of fish that aren't normally seen in these areas, and to not contain the kinds of fish that are normally seen.   The California Blob has been implicated in the record warm temperatures and the drought affecting California and the western US, and no doubt the new Alaska Blobs will also have significant climatic effects on Alaska and nearby areas on the North American continent.

These Blobs are exactly the kind of thing one would expect to see after years of global warming.  Scientists have known for years that much of the excess heat trapped by Greenhouse gases has been going into the oceans, so it really shouldn't be surprising that huge areas of the ocean are warming and Blobs of warm water are appearing.   Nonetheless, there seems to be an odd reluctance to see the Blobs for what they are----a product of global warming.

                                       Record warm global temperatures in March 2015

The Blobs show up nicely in the new NOAA global temperature compilation.  The record warm temperatures produced by the three Blobs appear as a red band along the northwest coast of North America extending from Mexico to Alaska, marking one of the warmest anomalies on the entire planet, which also reached new record warm temperatures in March 2015.  

Personally, I expect still more Blobs to appear elsewhere in the Pacific as well as in other oceans in coming years as global warming becomes more and more intense.    In fact, I feel so strongly about this that I've written a poem on the subject.  Here it is:

There once was a Blob off California
Then two more Blobs formed off Alaska
I see it clear
In future years 
in oceans far and near
more Blobs will appear
So don't say I didn't warn ya



  



 

The Mystery of the Haboobs

                                        Recent haboob in Phoenix, Az.

Yet another scientific mystery is unfolding around the globe. Meteorologists are baffled as to the cause of giant sand and dust storms (haboobs) that are sweeping across arid regions and deserts....and still more haboobs that are now appearing outside of deserts. A recent newspaper article about the haboobs was headlined:

"Mystery of the dust storms sweeping the world: Experts baffled by spate of 'haboobs' which have brought travel chaos and turned day into night in cities thousands of miles from deserts

The newspaper went on to report:

"This year has seen a rash of massive dust storms around the world that have led to travel chaos and blocked out sunlight - but experts cannot pinpoint the reason...."

Take a deep breath, count to ten, and repeat after me: global warming is responsible for producing more haboobs. In fact, these giant dust storms should be seen as a form of proxy climate data. Larger and more frequent dust storms are exactly the sort of thing that one would expect to see more of if the world was undergoing global warming, and if drought and aridification was occurring over larger and larger regions. If water tables were falling and areas of bare ground were growing, if rain was falling less often and temperatures were growing warming, then you might expect more dust storms.  And that is exactly what is happening.

So why oh why are meteorologists puzzled by the abundance of large dust storms just now? It turns out to be very difficult to quantify something like global warming just using weather records because weather itself is so extremely variable. Most attempts to quantify the amount of global warming going on now are just based on instrumental readings of temperatures, and this kind of data shows the earth has warmed about 1 to 1.5°C over the last 150 years. However, if you only consider temperature, then you don't capture variations in cloud cover, wind and rainfall intensity, changes in seasons, humidity, and other weather phenomena that are also responding to global climate change.

That where proxy climate records come in handy. Natural features like glacier extents and river discharge grow or shrink in response to a whole suite of climate data ---- not just changes in temperature. Things like changes in glacier extents and river discharge provide an alternative proxy measure that integrates all the various aspects of climate changes currently affecting them.

Haboobs are another natural phenomena that will change in frequency and intensity in response to global warming. Its very difficult to quantify exactly how much more haboob activity is occurring now then in the past, because these events are not being consistently tracked on a global basis. To make it even more difficult, haboobs are called by a variety of names including dust storms in some areas of the world and sand storms in other areas. But there should be little doubt that ongoing global warming is responsible for the increasing frequency of haboobs we are currently seeing, and one would have to be a boob not to associate the haboobs with global warming.

                                             Recent haboob in Lubbock, Texas

                                                                        Recent haboob in eastern Washington State

                                                                                  Recent haboob in Dubai

                                                                       Recent haboob in Australia

Happy Earth Day!

                                         The first Earth Day (1970)

Just 45 years ago in 1970 the very first Earth Day was held. Earth Day events were held in two thousand colleges and universities, roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the United States. And at least 20 million Americans peacefully gathered together in mass demonstrations held in cities and towns across the United States to express support for protecting the environment.

A poll taken in1971 on the first anniversary of Earth Day found that 63 percent of respondents said that it was "very important" to work to restore and enhance the national environment, with 25 percent saying it was "fairly important" and only 8 percent saying it was "not too important." But when the same questions were asked in a US poll conducted in 2013, only 39 percent of respondents said it was very important, while 41 percent said it was fairly important and 16 percent said it was not too important.

How curious that 45 years after the first Earth Day was held in 1970, in a world where talk of global warming, superstorms, ice sheet melt, sea level rise, and massive droughts has become commonplace, public support for protecting the environment has fallen so dramatically.

Too Much Heat, Not Enough Light

                                                              Too much heat....not enough light


For years debate has raged over the reality of global warming.  On one side are most scientists (and a lot of politicians) who make predictions that global warming will cause the earth's mean annual temperature to rise by 2-3° C and sea level to rise by about a meter in response to rising levels of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere.  These predictions are based on principles of physics and atmospheric chemistry.  On the other side are a minority of scientists (and a lot of politicians) who question global warming science and doubt the  predictions that the earth will warm by 2-3° C and sea level will rise by a meter over the next 80 years.

But there is a third side to this argument that is rarely heard but brings an important perspective to the debate.  There are a small number of scientists who not only support the idea of global warming, but believe that the earth will become far hotter then is generally believed.   How much hotter??---some scientists predict the mean annual temperature of the  earth will be as much as 16°C (29° F) hotter then present by the year 2100.  

Since the earth has already warmed by about 1° C since 1850 in response to CO2 emissions, lets just stipulate that global warming is happening and go on to the next logical step which is to review the widely varying predictions of how much global warming we will be seeing because of CO2 emissions.   Why do some scientists believe global warming in the 21st century will be about 10 times greater then the conventional estimates of 2-3°C?

There are two ways to make predictions in Earth Science.  One way is to develop extremely complex numerical models that try to capture all of the relevant chemical and physical processes involved, and then use the numerical model to evaluate what happens as various parameters are changed.  For global warming, computer models designed to predict the weather patterns of the Earth are tweaked and run to simulate the earth's climate with higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.  These very complex models typically predict warming of 2-3°C.    Unfortuntely, the earth's climate system is so complex that even the largest computer model must make innumerable assumptions and simplifications so no computer model actually captures all the details of how earth's climate actually works.

The other way to make predictions in the earth sciences is by using numerical regressions.  This kind of modeling involves making repeat measurements of a process and the result and then extrapolating to predict what will happen if the process becomes more intense.  For instance, if you measure wind speed and ocean wave heights over a range of wind speeds you can develop a regression equation that will predict the wave height for any wind speed, even including greater windspeeds then you have actually observed.   Using paleoclimate data, regression curves have been developed that show how hot the earth was in the past at varying levels of atmospheric CO2.   The last time the earth had CO2 levels of ca. 1000 ppm comparable to those we will attain by the year 2100 was 30-100 million years ago, when tropical conditions reached all the way to the poles and the earth was about 16° C (29°F warmer then now).  

Both the numerical models and the regression climate models have obvious flaws.  The numerical models can never accurately model every aspects of the earth's climate system decades into the future, while regression models are so oversimplified that they don't include factors other then CO2 levels that may've amplified prehistoric temperatures to much higher levels then we may actually see by the year 2100.  But both kinds of models have some kind of inherent validity, and the extreme discordance between the these two kinds of modeling should be ringing alarm bells that global warming may turn out to be significantly more intense then most scientists now believe.

So far there has been too much heat and not enough light from the debate over the global climate problem.   In the future there will be too much heat....period.

Terraform Earth Using Synthetic Life to Stop Climate Change

                                                                            Its alive!  Its alive!  
                                            Igor---release the artifical life so it can begin capturing CO2!

Don't like the idea of geoengineering the climate?  How about  bioengineering synthetic life forms in the lab, and then seeding them around the planet so they can geoengineer terraform the Earth's climate instead? Bioengineers are proposing to do just that---they say then can create  new synthetic life that will go forth and terraform the Earth in order to stop global warming.

There are advantages to using synthetic life to terraform the Earth.  Life grows and reproduces naturally so after being released from the lab a new synthetic life form could easily grow and multiply and spread across the globe until it was capable of pumping down huge amounts of CO2.  Very little expense would be involved once the synthetic lifeform was released as it would feed on the same kinds of food as natural organisms.  If at went as planned, the synthetic organisms could go on to terraform the earth with absolutely no human supervision once they were released.  

Of course the very same things that are advantageous about creating synthetic life forms that will gobble up CO2 from the atmosphere could lead to problems.  What if the synthetic life form does better then expected and pumps down too much CO2 and starts an ice age?  What if it thrives to the point that it begins crowding out other natural organisms and altering ecosystem?  What if it triggers a chain of events that accelerates global warming?  One can imagine all sorts of Frankenstein-like scenarios, but the bioengineers say not to worry---they are testing various ways to ensure that the synthetic life they create will behave itself when released into the wild.   

Perhaps the greatest concern is what kind of changes will occur in the synethetic life forms after they are released from the lab and start to spread around the world.  Life is extremely tenacious and organisms typically evolve to compete with other organisms to fill all the available ecological niches---artificial life should behave no differently.   While various safeguards will be built into the genetics of any artificial lifeform released from the lab, the creatures will be subject to natural mutations and will start evolving as soon as they are are released into the wild.  One can imagine artificial lifeforms undergoing mutations that allow them to compete with existing organisms for the available ecological niches. 

Adding synthetic life into biosphere will very interesting at best--- at worst we might wind up having to geoegineer the earth twice---once to stop global warming and once to counteract the effects of terraforming done by out-of-control synthetic life forms.