The $60 Trillion Climate Time Bomb

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Quote of the day

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.

- Walt Whitman

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Bubbles of methane emerge from sediments below a frozen Alaskan lake.

In an August 2011 post, I mentioned the severe impact on the global warming process from the release of methane trapped in ice and ocean sediment in arctic regions. A temperature increase of a few degrees in the Earth's annual temperature would cause this methane to begin to volatilize and get into the atmosphere. Methane is a strong greenhouse gas and this increased concentration in the atmosphere would further raise temperatures, leading to a runaway effect. There are 400 billion tons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - more than enough to fuel this chain reaction.

In July, the journal Nature published a study of the economic impact of the release of methane from a 50 billion ton reservoir of methane on the East Siberian shelf. The authors, researchers from Cambridge and from Erasmus University, in Rotterdam believe that the "economic impacts of a warming Arctic are being ignored" and they set out to remedy that. Using a sophisticated climate change model called PAGE09, they quantified how methane released from this one reservoir would affect the global economy. Their sobering conclusion: the release of methane would "bring forward by 15–35 years the average date at which the global mean temperature rise exceeds 2° Celsius above pre-industrial levels." This methane release would add significantly to the already staggering costs of climate change. It is an economic time bomb. 

The 2 degree figure is the estimated maximum global temperature rise above which the Earth would experience devastating climate effects such as crop failure and melting glaciers.   Now for the really bad news..."[T]he International Energy Agency warned [in June] that the world is on course for a rise of 3.6 to 5.3 degrees Celsius citing record high global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions last year." [Reuters/Huffington Post]

The authors of the Nature article "calculate that the costs of a melting Arctic will be huge, because the region is pivotal to the functioning of Earth systems such as oceans and the climate. The release of methane from thawing permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea, off northern Russia, alone comes with an average global price tag of $60 trillion in the absence of mitigating action — a figure comparable to the size of the world economy in 2012 (about $70 trillion). The total cost of Arctic change will be much higher."

The researchers also looked at a "low emissions" case where mitigation steps were taken to keep the global mean temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius. The results of the low emissions case are somewhat better but would still cause a global economic impact of $37 trillion.

"Much of the cost will be borne by developing countries, which will face extreme weather, poorer health and lower agricultural production as Arctic warming affects climate. All nations will be affected, not just those in the far north, and all should be concerned about changes occurring in this region...Mid-latitude economies such as those in Europe and the United States could be threatened, for example, by a suggested link between sea-ice retreat and the strength and position of the jet stream8, bringing extreme winter and spring weather. Unusual positioning of the jet stream over the Atlantic is thought to have caused this year's protracted cold spell in Europe."

The authors conclude that it may be too late to prevent this methane release and recommend that responsible bodies such as the World Economic Forum "should...encourage innovative adaptation and mitigation plans. It will be difficult — perhaps impossible — to avoid large methane releases in the East Siberian Sea without major reductions in global emissions of CO2."

Other Stuff

The methane trapped in the sea in the form of methane hydrates represents a huge potential energy source. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 trillion cubic feet out there. "To put that in perspective, that is an amount equal to, or greater than the total amount of all other fossil fuels on the planet. Estimates vary, but even the conservative ones say there is more than twice as much methane hydrate as there is natural gas." [Triple Pundit Website]

The Atlantic's May 2013 cover story was "We Will Never Run Out of Oil". Author Charles C. Mann describes the efforts of the Japanese to commercialize the extraction process. With little in the way of coal and oil reserves, the Japanese are in the forefront of this effort that "could free not just Japan but much of the world from the dependence on Middle Eastern oil that has bedeviled politiican's since Churchill's day."

Clive Cussler's adventure novel Fire Ice, published in 2002, has the ocean's methane hydrate formations off the eastern US coast as its focal point. Cussler and co-author Paul Kemprecos spin a thrilling tale of a megalomaniacal plot to set off methane hydrates in the seabed, triggering devastating earthquakes and tidal waves.

[Photo Credit: Josh Haner/The New York Times/Redux/Eyevine - from July 24 Nature article]