Challenging the media position on methane

On Friday Radio New Zealand did the following item on the methane craters in Yama, Siberia.

What follows is a letter written by Robert Atack of oilcrash.com to Radio New Zealand.

Robert Atack challenges Radio NZ

Hi Mary and Jim,

Thanks for the interview regarding the methane issues we are facing. 

 

The one problem I have with what Blair had to say was when he said methane sort of 'spikes' in the atmosphere, leading us to think it is a temporary issue.
The truth is CH4 has risen from an 800,000 year average of 0.7 ppm to now about 2.0 ppm, and has done so @ rate about 10,000 times faster than any time in the past ie prior to the last great extinction event, it took over 10,000 years for the environment to go from 280 ish ppm CO2 to 400 ppm CO2, and during the 10,000 year period CH4 would have been released, hung around for 12 years or so then converted to CO2 etc, this would have happened very slowly, over thousands of CH4 lifetimes.

Where as now we are looking at something like 833 CH4 lifetimes jammed into maybe 10  

Methane Hydrates - Extended Interview Extracts With Natalia Shakhova. 

Natalia is one of the top research scientists looking into methane, and here she is telling us how hard it has been for their information to get into the mainstream universities etc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVi1lotRLRU only 3:44 min.
The fact 'they' are not getting is that for every CH4 molecule that converts to CO2 or water vapor, there is 1 'born to replace it + a bit more.




More from Natalia

Published on Jun 25, 2014
Recorded on 20th June 2014

Content

1. Methane Fluxes
2. State of Permafrost in near shore ESAS
3. Gas Migration Pathways
4. Temperature of subsea permafrost
5. Storms impact on deep water mixing

Interview with Nick Breeze conducted via the Internet between London and Fairbanks, Alaska




Published on Jun 25, 2014
Part 2 filmed on 20th June 2014

Contents 

Ice cover & storms
Changes over the last decade
How much methane is being released?
How much is accumulated in the region?
What resources are needed to comprehensively monitor the region?
Creation of 'International Siberian Shelf Study'

Dynamics of the water column -  on Jun 26, 2014

problem

2. Highest potential methane emissions from Arctic shelves
3. Geoengineering / Intervention
4. Communicating research with the public and scientific community

And if you are still awake .... and doing your job, below was my last email to the IPCC


Dear Dr Rajendr,

I understand you mentioned me to a college in New Zealand, with regards to my question on the forcing factor of CH4/CO2, thanks for that.

Unfortunately, I couldn't quite get my question answered via anyone associated with the IPCC, but that is par for the coarse so not unexpected.

I will give you my thoughts, I will be happy to be proven wrong.

So here goes, if you are still there

I've read several times that 'we' are at a worse point than we have ever been in known climatic history, and during that history it has been proven that the planet heated up by 16C over as little as 10 years, if that is close to being true, and we are in a worse situation, then +16C could be just around the corner.

HOW?

Its the methane that is going to get us, as the last straw, you know better than me I'm sure how fast the CH4 content is rising in the atmosphere, (supposedly hit 1.910ppm) being about 1.85ppm at the moment (unless you know more?) and always increasing, so with that fact in mind what would the immortal effect of CH4 be compared to CO2?

How about this question?

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.

I posted this on a blog site the other day, again I'm happy to be proven wrong.
It is looking like it will be all over within the next 10 years, currently the environment is the closes to a massive temperature rise of no less than 9C, it has EVER been, never before has CO2 gone up so fast, never before has there been so much CH4 trapped by the rapid thawing ice,never before (to the best of our knowledge) has CH4 gone from an 800,000 year average of .7 ppm to 1.85 ppm in as little as 100 years. 

NEVER !!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

http://www.planetextinction.com/…/Methane,%20the%20Gakkel%2…


Everything is pointing to us currently at about 1,000ppm CO2/CO2e
400 ppm CO2

400 - 600ppm CO2e as CH4

100 ppm N20 (or some such? I isn't that smart)

and someone calculated the negative feed back of the particulates (smog) acting like a curtain = about 60 ppm CO2e

It's the methane, and 'they' don't want you to know, or it is so fucking bad they haven't a clue of how to tell you.

WASF.

So I think it is way to scarey a subject for you guys, or you are under political pressure to dumb down methane to maintain the bullshit shell game that is carbon trading?

And you wouldn't want your US masters, being outed for adding tons of CH4 to the environment via fracking. And of coarse everyone via coal.
To tell the truth I gave up on the IPCC the very first time I read something you put out.

Good luck

Regards,
Robert Atack www.oilcrash.com

My question

Hi Rajendra,

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.

Snip

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,.

End snip

So far I've sent this question out to maybe 30 'scientists', and have had 4 responses, happy to send them to you if you are interested, it is looking like CH4 is 300 - 400 times stronger a GHG than CO2?

Thanks,

Robert

I bet dollars for donuts you will do nothing about the above information

See Methane, the Gakkel Ridge and human survival