Wetland emission and atmospheric sink changes explain methane growth in 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Wetland emission and atmospheric sink changes explain methane growth in 2020

nature.com

54 pointspseudolus35 comments

> "In addition, the year 2020 was exceptionally hot from early spring to late summer over northern Eurasia, a sensitive region for CH4 emissions from biogenic sources such as wetlands, permafrost slumps and arctic lakes, which are expected to emit more CH4 as the temperature increases."

I wish people would be realistic and just admit that the tipping point for climate is in the past - because even if there was complete elimination of fossil fuel use in the next decade (highly unlikely), polar warming has resulted in permafrost melt, so that's going to keep dumping carbon to the atmosphere at a slow steady rate. At best, elimination of fossil fuels over the next 3-5 decades will only result in slower warming over the last few decades of the 21st century. We also haven't even come close to realizing warming from the past 5 decades, as the time-to-equilibrium for current forcing is ~100 years. This means a return to climate conditions last seen 3-5 million years ago, during the Pliocene.

Practically, this means as much will have to be spent on adaptation to new conditions as will have to be spent on transition to a non-fossil energy system.

each of the IPCC, World Meteorological Association, US Global Change Study and the California Climate Reports, contain specifics on this .. a list most recent publications with citations next up?

... about halfway through searching a pile of reports.. so far all of these mention a permafrost/wetlands amplification cycle

Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol. 100, No. 9, September 2019 (see also 2015)

Blunden, J. and D. S. Arndt, Eds., 2019: State of the Climate in 2018. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 100 (9), Si–S305, doi:10.1175/2019BAMSStateoftheClimate.1

Chapter 19 Climate Change -- Evidence & Causes An overview from the Royal Society & the US National Academy of Sciences, 2014 (paid for partly with Sackler Money !! cannot make this up)

THE UNDERSTATEMENT OF EXISTENTIAL CLIMATE RISK BY DAVID SPRATT & IAN DUNLOP 2017. Revised and updated August 2018.

D E P A R T M E N T O F D E F E N S E C L I M AT E C H A N G E ADAPTATION ROADMAP 2014

Climate Change and the Electricity Sector: Guide for Climate Change Resilience Planning September 2016 U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis

Not sure what your point is.

The very first IPCC report (1.5°C) completely ignored permafrost.[^0] They basically admitted they didn't have data on it so they will just ignore the effect altogether. The IPCC reports that followed have all been increasingly grim. In large part, imo, because they stopped ignoring permafrost

[^0]: IPCC chapter 2:

> The reduced complexity climate models employed in this assessment do not take into account permafrost or non-CO2 Earth system feedbacks, although the MAGICC model has a permafrost module that can be enabled. Taking the current climate and Earth system feedbacks understanding together, there is a possibility that these models would underestimate the longer-term future temperature response to stringent emission pathways (Section 2.2.2).

Is this the same IPCC that strongly claimed "nuclear energy" is bad in 2009, and now are strongly advocating the use of nuclear energy in 2022?

Interesting! Do you have a link to IPCC's anti-nuclear stances in 2009? Genuinely would like to read more, but having a hard time finding it

I'm not aware of any evidence of this, actually. Can you point to some?

Search Google Scholar for "committed warming" for a quick intro. For example:

> "We have asked the illustrative but specific question of should atmospheric greenhouse gases suddenly stop increasing, what additional global warming will occur based on current understanding? Such a constant composition commitment is less ambitious than the recent aspiration of many to achieve “net-zero” global emissions of GHGs. Net-zero has been generally defined as not including natural sinks and is only achieved when anthropogenic CO2 emissions are balanced globally by anthropogenic removals. "

(2020) "CMIP6 climate models imply high committed warming"

Read the paper at sci-hub, check the references for more.

https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/s10584-020-02849-5

As this paper notes,

> "...there is often a misunderstanding in society, corresponding to a belief that achieving constant atmospheric GHG composition implies that global mean temperatures will not change from that point forward."

Note also that these models are generally not including the non-anthropogenic feedback process, such as permafrost melt and carbon release, and the relatively uncertain but potentially very large effects of methane release from shallow marine sediments due to warming polar oceans.

Dr. Claire Parkinson, eminent NASA ice shelf expert, creator of mapping ice shelf by satellite since 1970s.

Still claims that ice shelf extents are within historical norms.

https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sed/bio/claire.l.parkinson

Not evidence of OP's trend but authoritative data on Ice Shelf Index by GSFC at NASA.

https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-...

Well, there's still iron-salt aerosol geoengineering for atmospheric methane removal. Big bet, though.

Rather prefer space based foil-solar sail ice cap shielding and artifically growing glaciers near south and northpole..

Or, direct air carbon capture. Getting to net zero would cost ~ $1 / gallon of gasoline (and equivalent for other things that emit.) I think we should be paying ~ twice that, minimum.

It's far less risky than trying to block out the sun.

Growing massive amounts of seaweed near the ocean top and then sink it into deep waters?

Seaweed mostly floats. Dead seaweed gets degraded by bacteria (just like everything else) and the carbon returns to the atmosphere.

Unless you would create a elevator that takes it down to the sea floor..

This is one of the cascade effects predicted some time ago

> We found that most wetland areas of the world were exposed to warmer and wetter conditions in 2020 than normal years ...

... leading to greater methane growth.

A central reason for concern by geoscientists about human C02 and the boiling frog scenario is that slow rises in C02 eventually lead to warmer wetter conditions and then a subsequent positive feedback increase in water vapor and methene .. which are even better heat blankets than C02.

This describes the cycles which have taken place in the past. There apparently was enormous amounts of foliage (CO2 consumers) during time of dinosaurs. I expect these planet-scale cycles to continue.

If you're talking about the Carboniferous period, my understanding is that was a one time thing. There were no organisms to break down wood and other plant matter during that time period. Huge amounts of lignin in the trees meant that it just got buried as sequestered carbon. That won't happen a second time since nowadays it is possible for all modern trees to be decomposed by a subset of living organisms.

The closest thing to a modern equivalent is plastics, isn't it? Carbon polymers that current organisms cannot break down.

I don't think carbon is sequestered by plastic production, because it is not produced by photosynthesis.

Can you make plastic from CO2?

Time to sell my beach front property.

The problem with climate change isn't sea level rise, or the occasional heat wave that kills a few hundred or thousand people in your area, the problem is food security and political instability and creating refugees.

Sea level rise is already a problem and it's costing a lot of money to continuously repair flooding damage and to keep things from getting worse. There's also the problems of increasingly severe storm damage along the coasts. People will absolutely be driven inland by climate change. and if we were smart we'd start pulling back now, and avoid throwing away huge amounts of money year after year after year just so people can pretend it's not happening.

You could buy cheap property in currently cold regions. But only expect the ROI to occur after enough warming (decades).

Wetter and warmer conditions probably also mean more forrest growth etc. Nothing is so simple.

Not enough to counter the dwindling global forrest cover of the past century, and not something that will counter the effect of methane + water vapor as insulating agents that lead to further temp. increases.

THe full picture has may layers .. and you can read about at length in voluminous IPCC reports.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/

Do you not think that perhaps climate scientists may have thought about that?

Pretty bad news. I think most of us knew -- subconsciously at the least -- we might already be here. To see it documented like this is a major bummer though.

Adaptation was always going to have to happen. We definitely knew that. I don't feel governments, banks/corporates, or even private citizens have invested anywhere near enough in it though.

I suppose I'll be building a farm of some type, striving for self sufficiency. Wishing the best to everyone. Probably best to pursue projects like this collectively. Maybe HN could be a good space to facilitate that.

If you have food during a food shortage, you better be prepared to defend it.

I literally just finished watching this video with a presentation by astrophysicist Valentina Zharkova titled:

“In next 30 yrs, global warming prob. will be last thing in our mind”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYOMKLDbeYE

And to be honest, I don't know what to think anymore.

About VZ: No time to watch that video, but she has been proposing solar explanations for the observed temperature changes, so I assume that's the topic.

There are a lot of reasons to reject changes in solar forcing as an explanation for recent warming (as opposed to Milankovitch cycles) - and it has been rejected, although 15 years ago it was still treated seriously. Also, the CO2 rise is very real, and the link of CO2 to warming is clear.

It's easy to watch/read "point explanations" for climate phenomena, and get confused. ("I read this paper from 2015 in Nature and ...".) One reason is that laypeople, even those with physics backgrounds, just don't have enough background information to put claims in context. Earth science is hard - so many interacting systems.

A better source for motivated laypeople is the NCA - the National Climate Assessment - see https://nca2018.globalchange.gov . It's done every 5 years, and the next one is due in 2023.

If you don't know what to think when some person on youtube says one thing and a large collaboration of scientists who are the world's experts of a field (the IPCC) says the opposite in detailled reviews of the current science then you should probably start by learning a few basic things about the scientific process.

this has the outward appearance of an aging attention-seeker with excellent credentials from forty years ago?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com