Climategate: An Autopsy

How did emails stolen from climate scientists snowball into a global news story in less than 48 hours?

"A lot is happening behind the scenes. It is not being ignored. Much is being coordinated among major players and the media. Thank you very much. You will notice the beginnings of activity on other sites now. Here soon to follow. ~ ctm [Charles Rotter, moderator on WattsUpWithThat.com]"

'Climategate', or 'Swifthack' was a media story about a set of hacked emails that was pushed by a group of avid climate skeptics, including bloggers Steven Mosher, Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Patrick Condon, Lucia Liljegren, Charles Rotter and Anthony Watts. Collectively, they took a mountain of stolen material, condensed it into a well-packaged pitch, and sparked a scandalous story that reached virtually every major news outlet in the world.

Brief Overview of Events:

In November 2009, an unidentified hacker stole 61 megabytes of data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The data contained thousands of private emails, internal documents and climate data sets dating back to 1996. The hacker gave the file to a small group of climate skeptics, who pored over it to pick out potentially controversial snippets. The bloggers sifted through the data to find quotes in private emails which could be used to condemn the scientists and question their research.

They developed a narrative asserting that climate scientists lied to the public, manipulated data and suppressed dissenting views. They implied that the contents of the emails cast doubt on the whole of climate science. The timing of the release of this story was perfect, coming less than a month before the highly-anticipated Copenhagen climate talks. Such a scandal had the potential to dampen public support for global efforts to mitigate global warming.

Background: November 2009

Steve McIntyre has used Freedom of Information (FOIA or FoI) requests to gain access to CRU data since 2007. McIntyre maintains climateaudit.com and, with co-author Ross McKitrick, has published two articles in minor journals that point to flaws in the original hockey-stick graph. McIntyre has spent his carreer working for and running Canadian oil and mineral companies.

McIntyre filed or coordinated the filing of dozens of FOIA requests to climate scientists at East Anglia beginning in 2007, with the pace escalating significantly in the months leading up to the leak. According to a 2009 interview with Phil Jones in the TimesOnline, "in July alone the [CRU] unit received 60 FoI requests from across the world."

“We were clearly being targeted,” says Phil Jones of East Anglia University. “Only 22% of the FoI enquiries were identifiably from within the UK, 39% were from abroad and 39% were untraceable.” What irked him was that the foreign applicants would all have had sources closer to hand in their own countries.

Scientists did not fill those requests, stating that much of the information was already publicly available, fulfilling some of the requests would be a huge time burden and, in some cases, would potentially violate the terms of agreement between CRU and the original sources of the data. (Ironically, some of the raw climate data the bloggers requested was actually found months earlier on unsecured links at UEA due to network glitches.)

The emails that made up the now infamous "FOIA2009.zip" file that the hacker sent to the bloggers in late November were compiled in three batches, from Sept 2009 to Nov 13, 2009. Steve Mosher speculated that the emails were sorted using fairly simple search functions to weed out the truly inane (out of office replies, etc) so that only emails likely to be relevant to skeptics' arguments remained. He also speculated the hacker understood enough about climate skeptics' previous arguments to know what types of information to highlight, but did not spend enough time with the file to find all of what would be considered 'juicy' evidence.

Steve Mosher is an open-source software developer and one of the moderators of The Blackboard. He also studied English in grad school at UCLA, specializing in statistical analysis of word frequencies. According to Patrick Courrielche at BigJournalism.com, Steve Mosher is "an open-source software developer, statistical data analyst, and thought of as the spokesperson of the lukewarmer set..."

Initially the hacker was suspected to be a highly sophisticated person or team, but analysis by the Guardian shows that the hack and the posting likely did not involve a high level of sophistication. Downloading the files, sorting them and uploading them onto a Russian or Turkish FTP server are not difficult tasks technically, as long as someone had access to the East Anglia servers, which had been proven to be less than secure. The next step of hacking into the backend of RealClimate.org to upload the .zip file could be considered moderately difficult, requiring familiarity with the weaknesses of the WordPress blog platform.

Hacker Action:

The hacker used several methods to anonymously send the file to a small set of skeptical bloggers. He first hacked into RealClimate.org (a site maintained by climate scientists Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and others) and uploaded the FOIA.zip file. The hacker then attempted to write a post on RealClimate, which was not successfully published. He then commented on ClimateAudit.org listing his name as "RC" at 10:54 GMT on November 17th with the text "a miracle just happened" and linking to Realclimate.org/foia.zip.

About twelve hours later, a comment linking to the same file but located on a Russian FTP server was posted to WattsUpWithThat.com stating "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps" and listing a "sample" of 19 email file names and snippets. Charles Rotter, also known as Charles the Moderator or CTM, did not approve the comment but he did notify Anthony Watts immediately. Anthony Watts runs WattsUpWithThat.com. He is a former TV meteorologist who started by blogging about locations of surface weather stations. His site is regarded as the largest and most active of the climate skeptic sites.

The hacker then placed a brief comment on a more obscure climate skeptic site called the Air Vent maintained by Patrick Condon (aka Jeff "Id") and a long comment on Climate Skeptic identical to the WUWT comment, both linking to the Russian FTP site. These actions occurred between 11:20am on the 17th and 3:47am UMT on the 18th.

Gavin Schmidt, NASA climatologist and moderator of RealClimate.org, says that up to four downloads were started while the file was hosted on the Real Climate site on the 17th, although the downloads may not have been completed. As soon as he discovered it, Schmidt notified the University of East Anglia about the breach. East Anglia began taking security measures and notifying their staff of a leak. Additionally, Rotter and Watts virus-scanned and downloaded the file from the Russian server late on the 17th California time. The link on Climate Audit, linking to the Real Climate went without comment for two days.

File Analysis:

Rotter is the head moderator of WattsUpWithThat, a volunteer position. He only revealed his last name after heightened scrutiny following the leaked emails. He made a CD copy of the file and gave it to Steve Mosher around 9:36pm PST on November 17th. (Rotter and Mosher are flatmates in San Francisco.) Watts was traveling in Europe and says he didn't look at file. Rotter felt that Mosher was far more qualified to look at it than he was.

Mosher started analyzing the emails for their validity. He and/or Rotter first called McIntyre late in the evening of November 17th to confirm some of the emails, which included conversations between Phil Jones, Michael Mann and McIntyre regarding FOIA requests. McIntyre confirmed the emails involving him were genuine, and said he was intrigued, but claims he didn't get the actual file until the 19th. Mosher apparently spoke to McIntyre frequently over the next 36 hours.

On November 19th Paul Dennis, an isotope specialist and employee of CRU, emailed McIntyre to notify him of the security breach. McIntyre shared the email with Mosher, providing further assurance that the FOIA2009.zip files were genuine.

"Much is being co-ordinated among major players and the media"

The last known activity by the hacker happened just after Mosher and Rotter began distributing the story, about 60 hours after the first known activity of hacking into RealClimate.org.

Mosher says he became sure of the validity of the files right around the same time as he found the comment on Air Vent, which had gone unnoticed since the 17th. He said in an interview that, “My first reaction to the link [on Air Vent] was relief. I didn’t want to be the only person who had these files..."

At 1:55 central time on the 19th, Mosher posted a comment #23722 under an unrelated thread on Lucia Liljegren's blog. Minutes later he posted a similar comment on Climate Audit (McIntyre's blog). In the same hour, Rotter made a similar comment on Bishop Hill's blog under the name devilinthedetails. Liljegren saw the comment and made a new post, saying "Steve Mosher alerted us to an interesting development," and questioning the validity of the files.

Mosher also emailed Tom Fuller, a blogger at Examiner.com and sent a facebook message to Andy Revkin at the NYTimes. We don't know what other media people Mosher notified. While he has written extensively about the incident, he rarely mentions notifying Fuller, and I only found one reference to contacting Revkin (a note Revkins said he saw five hours later, after he had already seen the story elsewhere.)

An hour after these first comments from Mosher and Rotter, the hacker made a comment on WUWT which was held in moderation. According to Mosher, it said roughly "'what the eff' why isnt anybody talking about this". Rotter, as moderator, replied via the comment forum at 1:16pm CST, or 70 minutes after Mosher's first post on Liljegren's site.

"A lot is happening behind the scenes. It is not being ignored. Much is being coordinated among major players and the media. Thank you very much. You will notice the beginnings of activity on other sites now. Here soon to follow. ~ ctm"

By the time Liljegren made her short post, Mosher had almost two days to pore over the files. Despite Liljegren's apprehension about posting the contents of any emails, Mosher proceeded to post four of the emails as comments within 30 minutes. Lucia Liljegren studies fluid dynamics at Argonne National Lab and teaches university in Ames, IA. She began her site, The Blackboard, in Nov 2007 to document 'teaching herself R' (a statistical method) and using the European Climate Assessment database as her test set. She says "I firmly believe CO2 will tend to cause global warming and the effect is sufficiently large to worry about. That said, I’m also interested in reading the questions and arguments presented by skeptics."

In addition to posting to Liljegren's site, Mosher also posted three of the emails as comments on an unrelated thread on McIntyre's site. Three of the six total emails were part of the 'random' selection posted by the hacker in the original comment, and the other three were new. One of the new ones contained the now-famous 'hide the decline' phrase that became and stayed the top-line message on the scandal among the right wing media. The 'hide the decline' email was the only email Mosher posted on both sites.

Watts posted on the story on his site from Dulles airport on his way back from Europe within 90 minutes of Liljegren's post on the afternoon of the 19th, according to the time-stamp on the first comment.

Only 10 minutes after the first comment on Watts' post, Ian Wishart in New Zealand made a brief post, linking to Watts and stating that he had emailed Phil Jones to confirm. Wishart maintains a blog called The Briefing Room and also writes for or edits Investigatemagazine.com, also known as TGIF. Wishart spoke to Jones in an 'exclusive' interview sometime in the next 12 hours and posted a story on TBR and TGIF at 9:30pm NZ time, (8:30am on the 20th UK time), who confirmed that the files were in fact real and the CRU had in fact been hacked. The TGIF article is referred to as proof of the validity of the stolen emails in most early stories.

5 1/2 hours after Liljegren's initial post (now about 8:50 pm EST on the 19th), Tom Fuller posted on the Examiner.com that files were stolen, other people were writing about them. "I'm not going to publish the files. I hesitate to even write about what's in them, other than in the most general terms." Fuller posted two more blogs over the following twelve hours with more complete details. (Fuller also went on to write the Climategate book with Mosher.)

At 8:53 EST on the 19th, an hour after Fuller, Examiner writer Terry Hurlburt posted a long blog with full details and essentially the same messaging that would be used throughout the news cycle. His post is rarely mentioned in other accounts of Climategate, but at the time many other blogs linked back to his. He made several updates to that post, and it's possible he could have altered his initial post to make it more appealing and fleshed out, but the writing and circumstances to indicate that he didn't alter his original text. The Examiner's editorial and business model allows for thousands of writers to keep their own blogs and who are given free rein to post as they please, with editors then selecting and promoting pieces. It is likely that when his post began to generate traffic from bloggers, the editors noticed and began to promote it as well.

Possibly after seeing Wishart's post, and two hours after Hurlburt's post, Andrew Bolt in Melbourne wrote another comprehensive post at 4:36am UMT which, similar to Hurlburt's, captured the story as it would later be written by many larger outlets.

Mark Morano at Climatedepot.com first linked to Andrew Bolt's account with the headline: "Update: 'CRU director admits emails seem to be genuine' -- Climatic Research Unit Hacked? 'Warmist conspiracy exposed?' Morano doesn't write posts, only publishes headlines and links to other sites, and his links don't have time-stamps so it's difficult to determine exactly when he became involved. However, first linking to Bolt and following links backwards from there is a plausible way he arrived at the story. He then links to Liljegren, Fuller, Hurlburt and then Condon and posts regularly on the story from there. Many of Morano's headlines were short, attention-grabbing quotes from emails or commentary from bloggers. He also quickly and repeatedly used headlines criticizing the mainstream media for not covering climate skeptics.

At 6:40am EST (11:40am UMT) on Friday morning, UK-based reporters began emailing Michael Mann in the US for confirmation and reactions to the story. This was less than 16 hours since the first public comment by Mosher on Liljegren's blog. Three more requests for comment arrived in Mann's inbox by 9am EST and they kept coming throughout the day, as well as phone calls, as US media started picking up the story.

By late afternoon on Friday the 20th, Competitive Enterprise institute had issued a press release on the scandal, complete with a quote from Myron Ebell saying in part: "Some of the e-mails that I have read are blatant displays of personal pettiness, unethical conniving, and twisting the science to support their political position."

Spreading the Story Far and Wide:

Six hours after Wishart confirmed the leak in TGIF, James Delingpole published the story in a Telegraph blog, with the meme 'the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming'. Minutes later the BBC posts its first story at 2:13pm, UMT time. Four hours after that, Fox News started posting it online in the US with the hook 'skeptics see smoking gun in leaked climate science emails.' At 1:48pm on Friday the Drudge Report first found the story, spreading it to an even broader network.

By the time Bolt had the story in Melbourne there were likely dozens of bloggers downloading the file and scanning it for quotes to share. Based on the number of comments that day and the average readership of the skeptic blogs, they had an army poring over the files in a race to find the next 'juicy' comment from the climate scientists. However, the media headlines were all shaped by the relatively small number of comments discovered and featured by Mosher.

Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia and the CATO institute was quoted by the New York Times on the 20th declaring the end of climate science. The Washington Post quoted Myron Ebell from the Competitive Enterprise Institute on Saturday, a quote repeated by CBS News. Chris Horner of CEI first used the phrase the 'blue dress moment for global warming' late on the 19th and repeated it again the next morning, and then kept writing about the story, presumably on CEI's dime. He called for an investigation, acused the media of missing the story, decided to sue NASA over more FOIA requests and wrapped up his week by giving thanks on thanksgiving for the files being illegally stolen.

On Monday the 23rd, Glenn Beck did a segment, and on Tuesday Pat Michaels was interviewed on Fox News. A mid-western group even produced a video on the 24th called 'hide the decline' which rose to 500,000 views on Youtube after it was promoted by Rush Limbaugh.

Steve Mosher and Tom Fuller went on to write a book detailing the series of events around the hack. Collectively, the group of skeptic bloggers have written extensively about the link and refer to it frequently. Police have made little progress in identifying who stole or leaked the files. The skeptic bloggers were able to take a security breach and present it to the PR and media organizations invested in opposing action to reduce global warming emissions.

Phil Jones Exonerated by British House of Commons

The British House of Commons today issued a report exonerating Professor Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Dr. Jones was embroiled in controversy following the theft of internal emails and documents from the University’s servers in November of last year.

The report states that “the focus on CRU and Professor Phil Jones, Director of CRU, in particular, has largely been misplaced,” and that Dr. Jones’s actions were “in line with common practice in the climate science community,” and the CRU’s “analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified.”

The review by the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee began in January in the wake of the ‘Climategate’ media frenzy. While the committee’s report recommends that climate scientists should seek to improve transparency in their work, release raw data when possible, and provide more detail on their methodologies, the committee firmly concludes that there was no dishonesty on the part of Dr. Jones and the CRU. The committee compared the results of other independent analyses of climate data to that of the CRU, and found that they are consistent and independently verifiable.

From a statement released by the committee to the press today:

“The focus on Professor Jones and CRU has been largely misplaced. On the accusations relating to Professor Jones’s refusal to share raw data and computer codes, the Committee considers that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community but that those practices need to change.

On the much cited phrases in the leaked e-mails—“trick” and “hiding the decline”—the Committee considers that they were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead. Insofar as the Committee was able to consider accusations of dishonesty against CRU, the Committee considers that there is no case to answer.”

Even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified.

The committee’s report [PDF] provides detailed responses on each of the issues raised in its investigation.

On the matter of Dr. Jones’ use of the phrase “trick” in an email referring to Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick graph, the Committee concludes:
"Critics of CRU have suggested that Professor Jones’s use of the word “trick” is evidence that he was part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that did not fit his view that recent global warming is predominately caused by human activity. The balance of evidence patently fails to support this view. It appears to be a colloquialism for a “neat” method of handling data."

On the matter of Dr. Jones’ email including the phrase “hide the decline”, the Committee concludes:
"Critics of CRU have suggested that Professor Jones’s use of the words “hide the decline” is evidence that he was part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that did not fit his view that recent global warming is predominantly caused by human activity. That he has published papers—including a paper in Nature—dealing with this aspect of the science clearly refutes this allegation. In our view, it was shorthand for the practice of discarding data known to be erroneous."

On the matter of whether Dr. Jones suppressed or perverted the peer review process, the Committee concluded:
"The evidence that we have seen does not suggest that Professor Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process. Academics should not be criticised for making informal comments on academic papers."

The report goes into further detail on Freedom of Information requests and other issues, culminating in a set of recommendations for improving data access and transparency at CRU and increased transparency in the scientific community at large to ensure that the science remains “irreproachable.”

Download the full report: “The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.”

David Deutsch on our place in the cosmos - lõpetab Global Warminguga

A Must See!

"Thermopower waves"

The storage and generation of electricity is a hotbed of scientific study around the world. New and improved methods of storing electricity have a myriad of potential uses from phones and laptops that run longer to new electric vehicles with much greater driving range.

At the center of much of the research in the storage and generation of power in batteries and other devices are carbon nanotubes. The carbon nanotube has been studied for decades and new advances over the last few years have made the nanotubes easier to produce and have offered breakthroughs in the use of carbon nanotubes. Scientists at Rice University made a breakthrough in carbon nanotube processing in November of 2009 that uses processes similar to those that have been employed in the plastics industry to make the production of carbon nanotubes in bulk much easier.

Researchers in late 2009 also found that defective carbon nanotubes are more efficient at storing energy than carbon nanotubes that are uniform in size. In February 2010, Bayer announced that it was opening the world's largest carbon nanotube production facility to develop carbon nanotubes dubbed "Baytubes" using multi-wall carbon nanotube technology. The facility is expected to produce about 200 metric tons of nanotubes each year.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT have announced that they have made a new breakthrough for producing electricity with carbon nanotubes. The discovery may one day lead to a myriad of new devices such as sensors the size of dust that can be dispersed in air to monitor the environment or the tech might lead to implantable devices that produce their own power. The researchers discovered a phenomenon that was previously unknown that produces powerful waved of energy that shoots though carbon nanotubes, producing electricity.

The team of researchers called the phenomenon "thermopower waves." MIT's Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Professor of Chemical Engineering, and senior author of the paper reporting the findings said, "[Thermopower waves] opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare."

The thermal wave is a moving pulse of heat that travels along the microscopic carbon nanotubes and drives electrons along with it creating an electrical current. The team coated carbon nanotubes with a highly reactive fuel that produces heat as it decomposes. The fuel was ignited at one end of the nanotube with a laser beam or high-voltage spark.

The resulting ignition created a fast moving thermal wave that travels about 10,000 times faster than the normal speed of the reaction according to the team. The temperature of the ring of heat reaches about 3,000 kelvins, pushing electrons along the tube creating a substantial electrical current. Strano says that the combustion waves have been mathematically studied for more than a hundred years, but he claims to be the first to predict that the combustion waves could be guided by a nanotube or nanowire and push an electrical current along the wire.

Strano says, "[In early experiments] lo and behold, we were really surprised by the size of the resulting voltage peak." He continued saying, "There's something else happening here. We call it electron entrainment since part of the current appears to scale with wave velocity.

Strano says that since the discovery is so new it is hard to predict how it could be used in practical application. The team plans to conduct more research using different kinds of reactive materials for the fuel coating and the team suspects that by using other materials for the coating the front of the wave could oscillate to produce an alternating current. The team points out that most of the power generated with the new method is given off as light and heat and work is ongoing to make the process more efficient.

http://www.dailytech.com/MIT+Researchers+Discover+New+Electricity+Production+Method/article17841.htm 

It Came From the Sea J. Craig Venter on the search for biological energy replacements

Science stunner: Vast EaScience stunner: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting

NSF issues world a wake-up call: "Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”

March 4, 2010

Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle. Research published in Friday’s journal Science finds a key “lid” on “the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir” near Eastern Siberia “is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH₄ [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere.”

Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane. Methane is is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!

The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“). Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below). No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.

The new Science study, led by University of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Centre and the Russian Academy of Sciences, is “Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf” (subs. req’d). The must-read National Science Foundation press release (click here), warns “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.” The NSF is normally a very staid organization. If they are worried, everybody should be.

It is increasingly clear that if the world strays significantly above 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide for any length of time, we will find it unimaginably difficult to stop short of 800 to 1000 ppm.

Note: As part of the Climate Science Project, I’m making this post as definitive as I can by including other recent scientific findings on the tundra. Please add other relevant links in the comments.

The lead author, Natalia Shakhova, explains the new findings in this video:

NSF explains:

“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans,” said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center. “Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.”

Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material (which contains carbon) stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under anaerobic conditions, gradually releases methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova’s research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.

“Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already,” she said. “If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.”

Shakhova notes that the Earth’s geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters (164 feet) or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth’s history. During the Earth’s coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the Earth warms and sea level rises, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.

“It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen,” Shakhova said. “Nobody considered this huge area.”

Last August I discussed findings by German and British scientists “that more than 250 plumes of bubbles of methane gas are rising from the seabed of the West Spitsbergen continental margin in the Arctic, in a depth range of 150 to 400 metres” (see “So many amplifying methane feedbacks, so little time to stop them all” and figure on right).

A lead researcher of that work said, “Our survey was designed to work out how much methane might be released by future ocean warming; we did not expect to discover such strong evidence that this process has already started.”

But the situation in the ESAS is far, far more dicey, as NSF explains:

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, in addition to holding large stores of frozen methane, is more of a concern because it is so shallow. In deep water, methane gas oxidizes into carbon dioxide before it reaches the surface. In the shallows of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane simply doesn’t have enough time to oxidize, which means more of it escapes into the atmosphere. That, combined with the sheer amount of methane in the region, could add a previously uncalculated variable to climate models.

“The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times,” Shakhova said. “The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict.”

And we also know that a key trigger for accelerated warming in the Arctic region is the loss of sea ice.

A 2008 study by leading tundra experts found “Accelerated Arctic land warming and permafrost degradation during rapid sea ice loss.” The lead author is David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), whom I interviewed for my book and interviewed again via e-mail in 2008. The study’s ominous conclusion:

We find that simulated western Arctic land warming trends during rapid sea ice loss are 3.5 times greater than secular 21st century climate-change trends. The accelerated warming signal penetrates up to 1500 km inland….

In other words, a continuation of the recent trend in sea ice loss may triple Arctic warming, causing large emissions in carbon dioxide and methane from the tundra this century.

Oh, and the Arctic warming could lead to another feedback according to a 2008 Science article: “Continuation of current trends in shrub and tree expansion could further amplify this atmospheric heating 2-7 times.” The point is that if you convert a white landscape to a boreal forest, the surface suddenly starts collecting a lot more solar energy (see “Tundra 3: Forests and fires foster feedbacks“).

That trend is occurring now, as seen in these two photos from a recent ScienceNews article, “Boreal forests shift north.”

“Upper photo taken in 1962 shows tundra-dominated mountain slope in Siberian Urals. A 2004 photo of the same site, below, shows conifers were setting up dense stand of forest.”

Another major study warns that the warming-driven northward march of vegetation poses yet another threat to the tundra: “Greater fire activity will likely accompany temperature-related increases in shrub-dominated tundra predicted for the 21^st century and beyond.” The concern is not so much the direct emissions from burning tundra, but the albedo change.

And all that warming would cause massive melting of the tundra and faster emissions release. That must be avoided at all cost, since the tundra feedback, coupled with the climate-carbon-cycle feedbacks that the IPCC models, could easily take us to the unmitigated catastrophe of 1000 ppm.

The good news is that a 2009 NOAA-led study found “Near-zero CH₄ growth in the Arctic during 2008 suggests we have not yet activated strong climate feedbacks from permafrost and CH₄ hydrates” (see “Is it just too damn late?“)

The bad news is we clearly are on very thin ice. Literally.

Lawrence revised and updated his 2005 analysis of tundra loss under different emissions scenarios (after some scientists criticized the original work) in this 2008 study, “Sensitivity of a model projection of near-surface permafrost degradation to soil column depth and representation of soil organic matter” (subs. req’d). The updated analysis still found: “the warming is enough to drive near-surface permafrost extent sharply down by 2100.”

I had asked Lawrence if it was still reasonable to keep using this figure in my presentation, since it is so much easier to understand than the figures in his new paper.

He said, “Using the old figure is still fine as long as one mentions the caveats that permafrost is probably degrading a bit too rapidly in the original.

So I will certainly use that caveat, though, of course, I will also caveat the caveat by saying the slightly slower rate of permafrost degradation does not include Lawrence’s new analysis on the accelerated warming of the permafrost due to sea ice loss (or, for that matter, the accelerated warming of the permafrost due to faster shrub encroachment).

Note that the “B1″ scenario stabilizes CO2 concentrations in the air at 550 ppm — and the near-surface permafrost permafrost (down to 11 feet) plummets from over 4 million square miles today to 1.5 million. If concentrations hit 850 ppm in 2100 (A2), permafrost would shrink to just 800,000 square miles.

And while these projections were done with one of the world’s most sophisticated climate system models, the calculations do not include the feedback effect of the released carbon from the permafrost. That is to say, the CO2 concentrations in the model rise only as a result of direct emissions from humans, with no extra emissions counted from soils or tundra. Thus they are conservative numbers–or overestimates–of how much CO2 concentrations have to rise to trigger irreversible melting.

In short, the would-be point of atmospheric stabilization, 550 ppm isn’t stable at all — it is past the point of no return. We must stay well below 450 ppm to save the tundra and hence the climate. The new research underscores that conclusion, especially since the planet will keep warming (slowly) for decades even once we slash emissions to near zero.

And that means we must begin a staggering amount of clean energy deployment as soon as possible (see “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution“).

Wake up media and politicians who are being duped by the anti-science disinformers into thinking there is any serious doubt about the catastrophe we face on our current path of unrestricted emissions!

UPDATE: WWF’s Nick Sundt points out:

A report released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, Abrupt Climate Change, said in December 2008 (during the Bush Administration) that warming in the Arctic could cause sea levels to rise substantially beyond scientists’ previous predictions and could result in massive releases of methane. The report said that the “rapid release to the atmosphere of methane trapped in permafrost and on continental margins” was among “four types of abrupt change in the paleoclimatic record that stand out as being so rapid and large in their impact that if they were to recur, they would pose clear risks to society in terms of our ability to adapt.”


SIIT

Prügist saab energiat, ehitusmaterjali ja vett

Mitte, et see uudis olek, aga konkreetsed numbrid teevad ettekujutuse asjast palju ilmekamaks. Tõenäosus, et selline asi massilisemaks ei kujune, on väga väike. Jätkusuutlik (globaalne) "Organism" (kus inimesed on "ensüümid" ja maavarad/ressursid on "toitained" organismile) peab olema suuteline töötlema oma sitta nii, et ta sinna sisse ära ei sure.

 

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