The Arctic Methane Bomb

This following information is the heart of the environmental crisis. Methane is "the Achilles heel in our climate system.” It's the "dark horse". Paul Beckwith, Ira Leifer, and other experts believe "our climate system is in early stages of abrupt climate change that will lead to a temperature rise of 5 to 6 degrees Celsius within a decade or two,” with unprecedented effects that threaten human existence.... But let's back up:

Egocentric people couldn't care less about the global commons unless you scare them into seeing merely how it affects their own narcissistic existence, whereupon you have simply reinforced exactly the self-centric survival motives that are the cause of the problem. in the first place. You just reinforce all of that with ecological scare tactics. It is at a global, postconventional, worldcentric stance that individuals can recognize the global dimensions of the environmental crisis and, more important, possess the moral vision and moral fortitude to proceed on a global basis. Obviously, then, a significant number of individuals must reach this level of development in order to be a significant force in global care and ecological reform.   - Ken Wilber. See, blog-post, Evolution of Consciousness

Projected temperature spikes of 3-6°C before 2100 are outside the realm of human existence. This graph shows 90% of Earth’s temperature history. For context, humans have been evolving about 6my and the 10 thousand year Holocene stability allowed for agriculture and our 5 to 10 thousand-year civilization.  A global average rise in 4˚C is “incompatible with civilization” and 5˚C represents likely human extinction.

Vast amounts of methane lie frozen in the Arctic and the Arctic sea ice is melting rapidly, which releases the methane. Additionally, lying along the Arctic’s subsea continental margins and beneath Arctic permafrost are methane hydrates, often described as methane gas surrounded by ice the equivalent of 1,000 to 10,000 gigatons of carbon. (Science, March 2010).  For perspective, humans have released approximately 1,475 gigatons in total carbon dioxide since the year 1850.  Significant methane releases are already happening: researchers have found increasing amounts of methane emissions.

Effect of losing the Arctic sea ice & methane releases:

• much higher global average temperature.
• snow and ice in the northern hemisphere becomes very rare or even vanishes year round.
• solar radiation would be absorbed and heat those waters, and hence the planet.
• change global weather patterns: vary the flow of winds and alter the position of the jet streams. 
• runaway feedback loop, releasing more methane in the Arctic.
• increase the frequency, severity and duration of extreme weather events like torrential rains leading to widespread flooding in some regions and droughts in other regions. 
• change the climate everywhere in the world.
• a severe and grave threat to ecosystems and our global food supply. 

US Navy researchers have predicted periods of an ice-free Arctic ocean in the summer by 2016. There's an exponential decline in Arctic summer sea ice volume has already been determined by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System data and models, which have been corroborated with recent CryoSat measurements, as well as modeling by the Naval Graduate School Regional Climate Models. The advent of the “blue Arctic Ocean” will most likely happen before 2020.

British scientist John Nissen, chairman of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, suggests that if the summer sea ice loss passes “the point of no return” and “catastrophic Arctic methane feedbacks” kick in, we’ll be in an “instant planetary emergency.”

In the atmosphere, methane is a greenhouse gas that, on a relatively short-term time scale, is far more destructive than carbon dioxide. When it comes to heating the planet, methane is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide, per molecule, on a 100-year timescale, and 105 times more potent on a 20-year timescale – and the Arctic permafrost, onshore and off, is packed with the stuff.

According to a study published in Nature Geoscience, twice as much methane as previously thought is being released from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a 2 million square kilometer area off the coast of northern Siberia. The recent study’s researchers found that at least 17 teragrams (17 million tons) of methane are being released into the atmosphere each year, whereas a 2010 study had found only 7 teragrams heading into the atmosphere.

The Looming Specter of Abrupt Methane Release

Natalia Shakhova from the International Arctic Research Center focuses on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS). The ESAS is the largest shelf in the world and holds “at least 10 to 15 percent” of global methane hydrates. “These emissions are prone to be non-gradual (massive, abrupt) for a variety of reasons. There would be nothing “smooth, gradual or controlled” about it; we could be looking at non-linear releases of methane in amounts that are difficult to fathom. It's a phase transition: a relatively short, jump-like transformation from one state of the process to another state. The difference between the two states is like the difference between a closed valve and an open valve.  These immediate methane releases in the ESAS could be triggered at any moment by seismic or tectonic events, the subsiding of sediments caused by hydrate decay or sediment sliding due to permafrost degradation and thaw. The ESAS is 3 to 10 times more likely to see these immediate shifts because it is three times shallower than the mean depth of the continental shelf of the world ocean.

Shakhova warns that a  50-gigaton “burp” of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian sea is “highly possible at anytime.” That would be the equivalent of at least 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide. (Remember, for perspective, humans have released approximately 1,475 gigatons in total carbon dioxide since the year 1850.)

Even the IPCC warns of "the possibility of abrupt climate change and/or abrupt changes in the earth system triggered by climate change, with potentially catastrophic consequences, cannot be ruled out. Positive feedback from warming may cause the release of carbon or methane from the terrestrial biosphere and oceans.”

Some scientists warn of even worse consequences.

Global Implications

Ira Leifer, an atmospheric and marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of several Arctic methane studies, says that methane emissions from the Arctic are already larger than previously thought and that the dangers of methane-related warning are staggering. “The amount of methane trapped in submerged permafrost is vast, and if even a small fraction reaches the atmosphere on the time scale of a few decades, it would lead to a dramatic increase in warming on a global scale.” 

 

He went on to issue a stark warning. “Further acceleration of these processes is very likely to lead to an ‘abrupt climate change’ system reorganization from a cold, snowy, ice-covered Arctic Ocean to a ‘blue Arctic Ocean’ regime,” he said. “The final state could have a global temperature average being 5 or 6 degrees Celsius warmer and the transition to this state could occur in one to two decades, as has occurred many times in the past as recorded in paleorecords.”

Another “Great Dying?”

The Permian mass extinction that occurred 250 million years ago was related to methane – in fact, the gas is thought to be the key to what caused the extinction of approximately 95 percent of all species on the planet. Also known as “The Great Dying,” it was triggered by a massive lava flow in an area of Siberia that led to an increase in global temperatures of 6 degrees Celsius. That, in turn, caused the melting of frozen methane deposits under the seas. Released into the atmosphere, it caused temperatures to skyrocket further. All of this occurred over a period of approximately 80,000 years. 

We are already in the midst of what scientists consider the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, with between 150 and 200 species going extinct daily, a pace 1,000 times greater than the “natural” or “background” extinction rate. This event may already be comparable to, or even exceed, both the speed and intensity of the Permian mass extinction. The difference: Ours is human caused. Plus, it isn’t going to take 80,000 years; it has so far lasted just a few centuries, and is now gaining speed in a non-linear fashion.

It is possible that, on top of the vast quantities of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels that continue to enter the atmosphere in record amounts yearly, an increased release of methane could signal the beginning of the sort of process that led to the Great Dying. Scientits fear we are causing our own extinction and it's happening far more quickly than generally believed possible, in the couse of the next few decades.

How are you responding? 

Source: Dahr Jamail, Truthout, The Methane Monster Roars (13 Jan 2015).

The end of Unity includes a summary of actions for ways people can respond. Of course, preparing for emergencies, community emergency response team (CERT) trainings, developing adaptive capacity, and so on are important but these actions reflect lower consciousness based on fear and survival. (See Unity p.400, describing the levels of climate consciousness: unaware, preppers, environmentlaists, localvores with high adaptive capacity, spiritual eco-yogis, and weather workers).

Higher levels of consciousness involve developing a yoga practice for realizing Higher consciousness, commitment to models of lifestyle excellence, participating in community institutions that embody higher consciousness, and community networking.

My proposal in Unity for spiritual geoengineering is the only proposal for realistically dealing with this Arctic Methane Bomb. It involves developing and building a large group of (many thousands) advanced energy healers with higher consciousness that can literally dissolve the atmospheric methane. I describe how this is possible in Unity and I've described it further at the end of the blog-post, Updates to Unity.