Welcome to an edition of my newsletter which offers a round-up of the week’s causes for optimism, or debunkings of pessimism.
This special edition is an ‘Arctic special’ mini-edition, responding to specific points in this week’s media coverage.
* Amid questionable alarmist articles at Wired and elsewhere about an Arctic ‘methane bomb’ / ‘carbon bomb’, it’s evident that the commentators and report-writers appear to be overlooking good scientific news from the Arctic. Not least of which is that the U.S. Geological Survey has completely debunked the ‘methane bomb’ notion.
* Even the ‘carbon bomb’ notion is made questionable by a new 2019 study in the journal Nature Geoscience, titled “Negligible cycling of terrestrial carbon in many lakes of the arid circumpolar landscape”. This looked at the high Arctic lakes, and was funded by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Based on actual intrepid fieldwork by plane and boat, rather than computer models or lab simulations, the researchers found that… “nearly every lake they tested showed no sign of ancient carbon from permafrost, and much less production of carbon dioxide than expected.” […] “We found that not all high-latitude lakes are big chimneys of carbon to the atmosphere, and that lakes in the region are not actively processing much permafrost or plant carbon from land”. This appears to bolster an earlier 2015 study titled “Climate change and the permafrost carbon feedback” (Nature, April 2015) which found no chance of an explosive ‘carbon bomb’ and that thawing permafrost carbon will percolate only gradually into the atmosphere. They found that over the next 85 years this release is likely to be equivalent to less than 10 percent of the world’s current fossil fuel emissions.
* Also in the Arctic, a similarly intrepid fieldwork-based study in 2018 found the ‘active’ layer of thawing/freezing soil above the permafrost is home to active microbial life that consumes almost all of the volatile products of outgassing. The on-the-spot fieldwork study by Denmark found that, according to the Danish media coverage… “The active soil layer harbours an active microbial community ready to ‘booze’ on the permafrost VOC gases like ethanol, as they diffuse upwards on melting” but that “almost all of the permafrost [VOCs, i.e. the released volatile organic compounds] never made it through the active soil layer” to the atmosphere. They were eaten by the microbes, even at very low temperatures. One can also observe that by a decade after the thaw the top-soil will no longer be waterlogged, and thus its new vegetation will likely further buffer ‘burbs’ of methane that may still be emerging from the deeper sub-soil.
* But what of methane itself? Well, microbes and methane were the subject of a 2011 study in Nature that similarly concluded… “Methane previously accumulated in permafrost is released during thaw and subsequently consumed by methanotrophic bacteria.” (See also the USGS research on methane, whose… “sober, data-driven analyses and conclusions challenge the popular perception that warming climate will lead to a catastrophic release of methane to the atmosphere as a result of gas hydrate breakdown.”).
* And finally, the computer models said California’s drought was locked-in and ‘permanent’, and the drought was widely blamed on the distant Arctic and its variable sea-ice. But now the sunshine state is officially drought-free. Even better, California is reportedly being deluged with the rain that wasn’t supposed to be coming ever again. Admittedly, the rains don’t mean that the state’s overtaxed underground aquifers are yet brimming again, but there’s now even said to be a lake in Death Valley. “Conditions have also improved in other western states” reports the trade journal Irrigation & Green Industry, and in many places in the Sierras there’s 50 feet of snow right now. California’s tourism has also been boosted by a great wildflower year so far, as new plants spring up from what was formerly just dust, and the butterflies are also migrating into the state in their millions.
None of which is to say that there are not measurable observed changes going on in many parts of the Arctic. There are, including slightly earlier springtime animal migration in some areas. Tribal peoples say in Canadian surveys that they notice the ice melts a little earlier in spring. But the Arctic is obviously a highly sensitive set of systems with multiple inputs that produce hundreds of variables. Including non-natural ones such as human-made aerosols which could, in some circumstances, increase cloud formation and thus warm the tundra a little. In the words of the authoritative article “Variability and Change in Arctic Climate” in the Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences (Second Edition, 2015)…
“Observed changes in the Arctic environment over the past decade are generally viewed as reflecting the combined influences of natural variability in patterns of atmospheric and oceanic circulation having strong regional expressions, superposed upon a general warming linked to fossil fuel burning.”
To conclude, all I’m suggesting here is that when an activist says ‘bombs’ or a supercomputer tweaker says ‘permanent’, journalists and readers need to be cautious about their track-record of past predictions and ask hard questions about the science (both stated and conveniently overlooked) before booking a ticket to the Apocalypse.
My guess is that the alarmists will now turn to claiming that ‘tropical wetland methane release is the problem’. This is a factor but is also a huge unknown, in terms of near complete lack of direct observations from fieldwork. This lack is rather surprising, given the vast funds flowing to anything to do with greehouse warming. But such lacks can fuel alarmism, because there’s little to contradict the claims.
This ‘tropical methane’ claim may thus fuel alarmism for a while, but the maps from the new methane mapping satellites (about to be launched, some already in orbit) should be very interesting in due course.
My guess is that the orbital emission maps of large tropical wetlands may not confirm the alarmism, and it could even be that the thick vegetation mats and damp semi-soils overlaying still tropical wetlands have a similar sort of methane-munching active microbial community as the Arctic does. Of course, some methane might come up through tree bark and cavities in some way, but not all large tropical still wetlands have large trees in and densely around them. It’s also quite possible that detectable methane release from tropical wetlands will not be found to be very dependent on temperature elevations above normal, since the tropics are already quite hot enough and a little more heat seems unlikely to make much difference to the overall process. The latter finding would then hopefully lessen the alarmism about future temperature changes.
Update, 2022: Interestingly, activists are still using the TV documentary Climate Change – The Facts (BBC/PBS, spring 2019) as part of political indoctrination sessions here in the UK. A key point in this TV show uses the now-debunked ‘Arctic methane’ scare. Some of its information about ice-melt is also now way out-of-date, and has been debunked at the highest levels (e.g. Antarctica).
20/20 : Tracking Optimism 