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Methane - an important factor of the Climate Crisis

Research by various scientists is putting attention to the fact that CO2 may not be the most critical component of the current climate crisis. It is well known that there are other climate active gases which compound to the climate crisis to a significant amount. Among those, Methane (CH4) is the most prominent. Although its concentration is about three magnitudes of order lower than that of CO2 (ppb, compared with 415 ppm), it has a climate impact far larger than that, with currently about 1/6 of the total impact of all climate gases except H2O, which is only a derivative climate gas with an amplifier role.

The high climate impact of Methane is caused by its high absorption coefficient in the infrared band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Where CO2 and H2O are molecules comprised of 3 atoms, Methane consists of 5 atoms, one carbon and four hydrogen, which gives it many modes of vibration which can fall into resonance with infrared light and absorb its energy. This can be understood intuitively especially if you look at other gases in the atmosphere, like Nitrogen (N2) and Oxygen (O2), both two-atom-molecules, and both not at all climate active. They have both only very limited ways to vibrate and therefore are relatively transparent to all kinds of light. Luckily, for us, as those two gases make up 98% of the atmosphere. If it were different, the world would be hellishly hot like Venus, whose atmosphere consists mainly of the climate gas CO2.

The influence of Methane is mitigated, though, by its property as a combustible gas. In the low concentrations in which it is found in the atmosphere, it cannot "burn" in the classical sense, but over decades it will be oxidized, ie converted into H2O and CO2. Its impact on the climate is therefore generally measured over a certain number of years, eg 20 or 100 years - over 20 years, it is about 100 times as climate active as CO2, over 100 years about 30 times. Methane can be seen to be similar to radioactive material in the sense that it also has a "half-life", a period of about 10 years where half of a given concentration will be broken up in the atmosphere, although this depends on various external factors, e.g. the presence of hydroxyle (OH), in contrast to radioactive decay.

A stable Methane concentration in the atmosphere therefore does not mean that there is no additional methane added to the atmosphere, but that there is an equilibrium between insertion and destruction. Unluckily, that equilibrium has been destroyed - methane concentrations have risen sharply in the last decade, after a kind of pause in the preceding one.

Methane Sources

There are multiple sources of CH4, many of them directly aligned to human activities. The most often mentioned source is the digestive tract of cattle where Methane is generated by bacteria which are part of the digestive processes. As meat and especially beef consumption has risen sharply with reduced levels of poverty, and as milk and milk products have found new markets all over the world, the number of cattle has also risen over the last decades.

Another source of Methane is natural gas production, both by conventional means and by fracking. In principle, methane is a much more climate friendly source of energy than e.g. coal. While, for coal, all energy is generated by oxidizing Carbon to CO2, for Methane, the energy is also generated by oxidizing the hydrogen atoms, converting them to water. But the extraction and transport of Methane are no perfectly clean processes, a certain percentage is always lost. With current techniques, enough Methane is lost to make gas power plants roughly as climate destructive as coal power plants if the whole chain of production is taken into account.

But there are further sources, which are in a way "natural" sources. Bacteria convert biomass into Methane. This results naturally in swamps, creating "swamp gas", as well in biogas production facilities. That would be not much of a problem as long as the process stays on a stable equilibrium level. But this is no longer the case. Large deposits of biomass have accumulated in Arctic regions in Russia, Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Scandinavia over the last ice age and the current postglacial (it no longer makes sense to call it "interglacial") which has started about 12'000 years ago. The slow warming after the end of the ice age certainly has released much Methane, but distributed over thousands of years, its influence on climate has been small due to its relatively short "half-life". But if the temperature change is fast enough, Methane will accumulate faster in the atmosphere than it can be broken down.

Unluckily, the classical CO2 based climate change is happening especially fast in the arctic regions of the planet, due to various factors like the Albedo effect, melting ice and open sea being darker than stable ice surfaces covered by snow and therefore absorbing more sunlight. Where globally about 1°C have been reached since pre-industrial times, the value for the arctic regions is between 2°C and 3.5°C. Permafrost areas have already started to thaw, and surprisingly high levels of Methane have been measured in the Arctic regions. There are videos of ice covered Arctic lakes where holes hacked into the ice release so much Methane that it can be set on fire. Biomass which has accumulated over hundreds of thousand years is being converted into CO2 and Methane in a process which cannot be stopped any more. It is like a forest which has been protected from fire for many years, accumulating deadwood and fallen leaves and branches, and which then is set on fire by an arsonist.

But this is not all. Some decades ago, scientists discovered a strange substance in the deep oceans, a substance which consists of a combination of ice and Methane. It is called Methane Hydrate or Clathrate and it is formed under conditions of low temperature (1-3°C) and high pressure (150 to 2000m sea depth). As it is lighter than water, it forms only on the ocean ground, attached to the surface or held down by ocean sediment. Estimates of its total volume are difficult, but it is assumed that there is about twice as much carbon bound in it than is found in all coal, oil and geologic natural gas reserves worldwide. It must have been formed over hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions, collecting Methane generated by bacteria living off biomass on the ocean floors. Its stability is guaranteed by the low temperature variation in the deep oceans. Any rise in deep sea temperature would reduce the zone in which Methane Hydrate can exist and release those deposits which end up outside that zone. Were it released, even partially, in a period in the same order of magnitude as the Methane "half time", its impact on our climate would be extreme.

Switching Off The Deep Sea Cooler

Although it "feels" obvious that the darkest depths of the oceans are cold, it is anything but. The surface temperature of the oceans correspond to the average air temperatures, which are well above the actual deep ocean temperature. The ocean floors are heated by geothermal processes - as the ocean floor is much thinner than the continental shelves, this is a significant heat source, with extremes like the hot vents in the mid oceanic ridges. Why then is the water between the geothermally heated sea floor and the relatively warm surface so cold?

The answer to this riddle is located in the arctic and antarctic regions of the planet. Surface water is cooled down there to about -2°C in winter, leading to sea ice. As it is salt water, it does only freeze below 0°C and becomes denser, heavier, the colder it gets. Therefore it sinks down, being replaced by warm surface water from temperate and tropical regions. In those regions, in contrast, cold deep sea water is slowly warmed geothermally and rises up, closing a very slow circular process. This process is so slow that the extra cold water created during the "little ice age" in the late middle ages seems to be arriving in parts of the Pacific only today, leading to a slight fall in central Pacific deep sea temperature over the last century.

But that means that the existence of the Methane Hydride deposits worldwide, not only those in polar regions, depend on the conditions in the Arctic and Antarctic seas. If this slow circular movement stops or is altered significantly, geothermal heat will slowly raise water temperatures in the deep ocean and dissolve the Methane Hydrate deposits.

There are two mechanisms which might cause this deep ocean cooling mechanism to stop. The first one is the general heating of the Arctic and Antarctic oceans. September ice coverage in the Arctic ocean has gone down massively. Reduced albedo and rising CO2 levels will amplify this process in the future. As long as the surface sea temperatures in winter still are low enough, the conveyor process will not stop, but slow down. But it might finally stop when a sufficient temperature level is reached. It is well known that polar regions have had basically temperate climates in the past, documented by fossils in Antarctica.

The second mechanism could act even faster. Polar climate changes leads to melting of polar glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica and to the release of huge amounts of fresh water, diluting the salty ocean water. This could suddenly stop the circulation by its lower density which stops it from sinking down to the ocean floor. The discussions regarding the Gulf Stream are generally known - the great fear of Europeans used to be that the stop of the Gulf Stream would lead to colder climates in Europe. But much more threatening than this effect would be the weakening or halting of the deep oceanic circulation.

It is important to note that both effects do not operate by injecting heat from the surface to the intermediate deep ocean, but by stopping to inject cold into it, precipitating a warming via ocean floor geothermal heat, a mechanism that might work much faster.

Learning from Deep Time

Changes in Gulf Stream strength and Arctic ocean temperatures have happened in the past. The reason why this did not have catastrophic consequences worldwide in most cases can be assumed to be the rate of change. The only natural process which has released as much CO2 and other climate gases over such a short period as it is happening now is the impact of the meteorite 66 million years ago which ended the Cretaceous age.

If we compare current CO2 levels with geohistoric ones, we see that at our current level, 415 ppm, a compareable period can be found in the Miocene, when Greenland was ice-free and sea levels about 6-8m higher. And at 500 ppm, a level which we will reach with high probability in about 30 years if there are no extreme measures being taken, we end up in the Eocene age, with Antarctica mostly ice free and sea levels about 70 m higher than now. Bad enough, that would mean many megacities and densely populated areas drowned. But those comparisons do not factor in the time factor - the respective climates were reached over thousands of years, which limited the influence of permafrost and Methane Hydrate climate gases emissions.

Now we are reaching those CO2 levels and the derived temperatures within a ten to 100 times shorter timeframe. If the assumptions about ocean temperatures and their effect on Methane Hydrate are right, we might have lit a fuse which even future technologies cannot put out anymore. Atlantic deep ocean temperatures have already gone up 0.1 degrees according to measurements.

There is one period in the Quaternary, the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum for which it is assumed Methane Hydride dissolution played a major role. We do not know exactly, though, because prehistoric Methane levels are much more difficult to derive than prehistoric CO2 levels. Temperatures rose 5-8°C within about 1000 years and stayed high for several thousands of years. But this ancient climate crisis was not reached by way of an ice age, ie there were no large permafrost areas releasing additional Methane. Calculations of Carbon emissions (CO2 and CH4 summed up together, as they are not easy to separate) show the total additional volume inserted to be much lower than today. Also the temperature rise was much slower. Finally we now have a high CO2 starting level reached by burning oil and coal reserves accumulated over millions of years - we could end up much worse than the mammals of that era, of which about 50% died out.

Climate Shock

We can expect an overshooting climate shock which goes far beyond even the hottest climates of the Quaternary age and which may last over several hundred years, until the massive amounts of Methane released from the various sources are broken down again and we end up in a "normal" hot climate age. Our descendants can only watch the unfolding disaster and pray that they will survive that climate shock. The only hope will be self-limiting effects of the extreme temperatures, like extremely strong cloud coverage and massive rainfall, but those come with other potentially fatal consequences. An important calculation would be to estimate when the infrared windows covered by CO2 and CH4 are so far closed that any additional closing would not matter much anymore.

Some people have argued that because there has been massive climate change in the geologic past, it is not a problem for us today. This is like arguing that because in the past, houses and whole cities have burned down, it is totally OK to set your neighbour's house on fire.

We behave like soldiers lighting a cigarette in a gunpowder storage bunker. Or, like the little girl in a sardonic four liner from Soviet Russia (they had an odd sense of humour in those times):

A little girls played with a hand grenade asking her uncle, "What is that ring for?" The uncle answered "Pull it, and you will find out". The little girl pulled it. Parts of her flew quite far.

A good site to track the rise of atmospheric methane is methanelevels.org .

Addendum:

Just after the bulk of the above had been prepared, the authors stumbled upon the "Deep Adaptation" paper by Jim Bendell . Although the focus of that author is quite different from the above, the influence of methane on the climate crisis plays an important role in the motivation of that paper.

Addendum 2020.10.28

Currently it is being reported that on the eastern coastline of the Arctic Ocean, Methane concentrations are measured which are 400 times higher than natural atmospheric equilibrium ones. Here the Guardian article reporting these findings.