Professor Peter Wadhams On Subsea Permafrost Methane Releases And Impacts on Civilisation

In this interview conducted in November 2013, Professor Peter Wadhams of University of Cambridge, UK, explains how methane releases such as those being witnessed in the Arctic could impact life on Earth.

[cherrypie]

So basically we are screwed !! Thank you for sharing.

[markwilcons]

This video is from 2014. Surely if Wadhams is correct, that annual studies of the ESAS show increasing amounts of methane emissions, then we need an updated report. Has it continued to increase since 2014 or stabilized? It's been 5 years - so what's going on now?

[Anne-LiseH]

Is there an updated video on this topic?

[normski]

the problem is we now have self reinforcing feedback loops of themane, and all those nice Linier models they have made have flown out the window! It’s now Aug 2014, and we will more than likely see a 2 to 3 degree rise in global warming with 8 to 10 years, which roughly equates to a 4 to 6 degree rise by the time another  15 to 20 years have past from now possibly even more. In short there is almost nothing we can do about it, and within 2 to 4 years life for 70 to 80% of life on this planet will start to get very, very difficult. The more methane is released, the warmer it gets, thus it releases even more methane, and it gets faster, and more and more. We don’t have long pips, so just enjoy yourself, don’t bother planning a future which extends past 5 or 6 years, cos there ain’t  gonna be one! It’s goodnight Vienna, asta lavista humanity. Humanity was crap anyway!   

[raindancinghorse]

, If you have a tube of CO2 and you fire infrared light through it, what is the resulting blocking of infrared transmission (absorption and reradiation)  per molecule or per gram of CO2 inside the tube?
Then do the same thing with a tube full of CH4. How much more does CH4 absorb-reradiate than CO2? This was done crudely by  John Tyndall 1859 with primitive equipment? What is the answer now that we have  lot of very sophisticated equipment? That is what I cannot find out.

[mpy]

My friend wants to except this data, but he has understandable trouble accepting data from individuals. He wants (and I want) peer-reviewed data published by Wadham's and other like organized voices on this issue, especially the 10.02 Celsius degree increase by 2026 as projected by arctic-news at blogspot. Is there any way that can be provided?

[raindancinghorse]

.I am trying to find out the forcing factor of CH4 over C02 in time frames that matter, like what is the forcing factor when the CH4 is only a week old?
This is the question my friend Kevin posed to someone the other day, his explanation is way better than I could manage.

.For more than a year I have been very troubled by the way the relative warming effect of methane compared to carbon dioxide is calculated, the UNIPCC initially assigning a value of 23 times CO2 over 100 years and 72 times CO2 over 20 years, which were subsequently increased to 34 times CO2 over 100 years and 86 times CO2 over 20 years.

I have searched, with no success, for the instantaneous absorption-re radiation value of CH4 versus CO2, and many months ago telephoned (and emailed) Paul Beckwith at the University of Ottawa to discuss the matter; at the time he said  he thought it was about 250, but has not confirmed this figure. The decay curves I have seen suggest an instantaneous value for methane of the order of 300 times that of carbon dioxide, and I have seen an unreferenced article by Malcolm Light suggesting a value between 1, 000 and 300 times CO2 for times scales that matter.

It seems to me there is something very suspect in the manner in which the IPCC calculates the effect of methane  in the atmosphere, in that it treats methane as though it decays to carbon dioxide (which we know it does) and assigns and average value over time for the decay.  Yet the concentration of methane in the atmosphere does not decline because every molecule of methane that gets oxidized by the OH ion or OH radical mechanism is replaced by another. Indeed, the rate of release of methane molecules into the atmosphere clearly far exceeds the rate of oxidation, so the concentration and actual mass of atmospheric methane both increase.

[donnareeves]

The Arctic never got below 0 degrees this year, very bad news.

[rupertmurdoch]

Ask yourself  "What do I need?"  "What are the consequences of my desires?"

[devinspruill]

Seems the reason for space exploration & living off the planet. Our tax dollars paying for life we will never see.