Economic recession has failed to curb rising emissions, undermining hope of keeping global warming to safe levels Photograph: Dave Reede/All Canada Photos/Corbis

Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.

The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” – is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions.

Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel – a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data.

“I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions,” Birol told the Guardian. “It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say.”

Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. “These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a ‘business as usual’ path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path … would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100,” he said.

“Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.”

Birol said disaster could yet be averted, if governments heed the warning. “If we have bold, decisive and urgent action, very soon, we still have a chance of succeeding,” he said.

The IEA has calculated that if the world is to escape the most damaging effects of global warming, annual energy-related emissions should be no more than 32Gt by 2020. If this year’s emissions rise by as much as they did in 2010, that limit will be exceeded nine years ahead of schedule, making it all but impossible to hold warming to a manageable degree.

Emissions from energy fell slightly between 2008 and 2009, from 29.3Gt to 29Gt, due to the financial crisis. A small rise was predicted for 2010 as economies recovered, but the scale of the increase has shocked the IEA. “I was expecting a rebound, but not such a strong one,” said Birol, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on energy.

John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace UK, said time was running out. “This news should shock the world. Yet even now politicians in each of the great powers are eyeing up extraordinary and risky ways to extract the world’s last remaining reserves of fossil fuels – even from under the melting ice of the Arctic. You don’t put out a fire with gasoline. It will now be up to us to stop them.”

Most of the rise – about three-quarters – has come from developing countries, as rapidly emerging economies have weathered the financial crisis and the recession that has gripped most of the developed world.

But he added that, while the emissions data was bad enough news, there were other factors that made it even less likely that the world would meet its greenhouse gas targets.

• About 80% of the power stations likely to be in use in 2020 are either already built or under construction, the IEA found. Most of these are fossil fuel power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early, so they will continue to pour out carbon – possibly into the mid-century. The emissions from these stations amount to about 11.2Gt, out of a total of 13.7Gt from the electricity sector. These “locked-in” emissions mean savings must be found elsewhere.

“It means the room for manoeuvre is shrinking,” warned Birol.

• Another factor that suggests emissions will continue their climb is the crisis in the nuclear power industry. Following the tsunami damage at Fukushima, Japan and Germany have called a halt to their reactor programmes, and other countries are reconsidering nuclear power.

“People may not like nuclear, but it is one of the major technologies for generating electricity without carbon dioxide,” said Birol. The gap left by scaling back the world’s nuclear ambitions is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels.

• Added to that, the United Nations-led negotiations on a new global treaty on climate change have stalled. “The significance of climate change in international policy debates is much less pronounced than it was a few years ago,” said Birol.

He urged governments to take action urgently. “This should be a wake-up call. A chance [of staying below 2 degrees] would be if we had a legally binding international agreement or major moves on clean energy technologies, energy efficiency and other technologies.”

Governments are to meet next week in Bonn for the next round of the UN talks, but little progress is expected.

Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said the global emissions figures showed that the link between rising GDP and rising emissions had not been broken. “The only people who will be surprised by this are people who have not been reading the situation properly,” he said.

Forthcoming research led by Sir David will show the west has only managed to reduce emissions by relying on imports from countries such as China.

Another telling message from the IEA’s estimates is the relatively small effect that the recession – the worst since the 1930s – had on emissions. Initially, the agency had hoped the resulting reduction in emissions could be maintained, helping to give the world a “breathing space” and set countries on a low-carbon path. The new estimates suggest that opportunity may have been missed.

Source Guardian

We are entering a new era, one of rapid and often unpredictable climate change. In fact, the new climate norm is change. The 25 warmest years on record have come since 1980. And the 10 warmest years since global recordkeeping began in 1880 have come since 1998.

The effects of rising temperature are pervasive. Higher temperatures diminish crop yields, melt the mountain glaciers that feed rivers, generate more-destructive storms, increase the severity of flooding, intensify drought, cause more-frequent and destructive wildfires, and alter ecosystems everywhere. We are altering the earth’s climate, setting in motion trends we do not always understand with consequences we cannot anticipate.

Crop-withering heat waves have lowered grain harvests in key food-producing regions in recent years. One with a profoundly direct human impact was the searing heat wave that broke temperature records across Europe in 2003. The intense heat, which contributed to the world grain harvest falling short of consumption by 90 million tons, also claimed more than 52,000 lives.

There has also been a dramatic increase in the land area affected by drought in recent decades. A team of scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that the area of the globe experiencing very dry conditions expanded from less than 15 percent in the 1970s to roughly 30 percent by 2002. The scientists attribute part of the change to a rise in temperature and part to reduced precipitation, with high temperatures becoming progressively more important during the latter part of the period. A 2009 report published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reinforces these findings. It concludes that if atmospheric CO2 climbs to 450–600 ppm, the world will face irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions of the world. The study likened the conditions to those of the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.

The warming is caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping “greenhouse” gases and other pollutants in the atmosphere. Of the greenhouse gases, CO2 accounts for 63 percent of the recent warming trend, methane 18 percent, and nitrous oxide 6 percent, with several lesser gases accounting for the remaining 13 percent. Carbon dioxide comes mostly from electricity generation, heating, transportation, and industry. In contrast, human-caused methane and nitrous oxide emissions come largely from agriculture—methane from rice paddies and cattle and nitrous oxide from the use of nitrogenous fertilizer.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the principal driver of climate change, have climbed from nearly 280 parts per million (ppm) when the Industrial Revolution began around 1760 to 387 ppm in 2009. The annual rise in atmospheric CO2 level, now one of the world’s most predictable environmental trends, results from emissions on a scale that is overwhelming nature’s capacity to absorb carbon. In 2008, some 7.9 billion tons of carbon were emitted from the burning of fossil fuels and 1.5 billion tons were emitted from deforestation, for a total of 9.4 billion tons. But since nature has been absorbing only about 5 billion tons per year in oceans, soils, and vegetation, nearly half of those emissions stay in the atmosphere, pushing up CO2 levels.

Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is produced when organic matter is broken down under anaerobic conditions, including the decomposition of plant material in bogs, organic materials in landfills, or forage in a cow’s stomach. Methane can also be released with the thawing of permafrost, the frozen ground underlying the tundra that covers nearly 9 million square miles in the northern latitudes. All together, Arctic soils contain more carbon than currently resides in the atmosphere, which is a worry considering that permafrost is now melting in Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia, creating lakes and releasing methane. Once they get under way, permafrost melting, the release of methane and CO2, and rising temperature create a self-reinforcing trend, what scientists call a “ positive feedback loop.” The risk is that the release of a massive amount of methane into the atmosphere from melting permafrost could simply overwhelm efforts to stabilize climate.

Another unsettling development is the effect of atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs) consisting of soot particles from burning coal, diesel fuel, or wood. These particles affect climate in three ways. First, by intercepting sunlight, they heat the upper atmosphere. Second, because they also reflect sunlight, they have a dimming effect, lowering the earth’s surface temperature. And third, if particles from these brown clouds are deposited on snow and ice, they darken the surface and accelerate melting. These effects are of particular concern in India and China, where a large ABC over the Tibetan Plateau is contributing to the melting of glaciers that supply the major rivers of Asia. Soot deposition causes earlier seasonal melting of mountain snow in ranges as different as the Himalayas of Asia and the Sierra Nevada of California, and it is also believed to be accelerating the melting of Arctic sea ice.

In contrast to CO2, which may remain in the atmosphere for a century or more, soot particles in ABCs are typically airborne for only a matter of weeks. Thus, once coal-fired power plants are closed or wood cooking stoves are replaced with solar cookers, atmospheric soot disappears rapidly.

If we continue with business as usual, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) projected rise in the earth’s average temperature of 1.1–6.4 degrees Celsius (2–11 degrees Fahrenheit) during this century seems all too possible. Unfortunately, during the several years since the IPCC study was released, both global CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentrations have exceeded those in its worst-case scenario. With each passing year the chorus of urgency from the scientific community intensifies. Each new report indicates that we are running out of time. For instance, a landmark 2009 study by a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that the effects of climate change will be twice as severe as those they projected as recently as six years prior. Instead of a likely global temperature rise of 2.4 degrees Celsius, they now see a rise exceeding 5 degrees.

Another report, this one prepared independently as a background document for the December 2009 international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, indicated that every effort should be made to hold the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Beyond this, dangerous climate change is considered inevitable. To hold the temperature rise to 2 degrees, the scientists note that CO2 emissions should be reduced by 60–80 percent immediately, but since this is not possible, they note that, “To limit the extent of the overshoot, emissions should peak in the near future.”

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change sponsored an analysis of some 40 scientific studies that link rising temperature with changes in ecosystems. Among the many changes reported are spring arriving nearly two weeks earlier in the United States, tree swallows nesting nine days earlier than they did 40 years ago, and a northward shift of red fox habitat that has it encroaching on the Arctic fox’s range. Inuits have been surprised by the appearance of robins, a bird they have never seen before. Indeed, there is no word in Inuit for “robin.”

Douglas Inkley, National Wildlife Federation senior science advisor, notes, “We face the prospect that the world of wildlife that we now know—and many of the places we have invested decades of work in conserving as refuges and habitats for wildlife—will cease to exist as we know them, unless we change this forecast.” Unfortunately, this observation holds true for humans as well. If we cannot quickly reduce carbon emissions, it is civilization itself that is at risk.

Adapted from Chapter 3, “Climate Change and the Energy Transition,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available online at www.earth-policy.org/books/pb4.

Additional data and information sources at http://www.earth-policy.org/.

Should we try to change their minds? Send me your thoughts.

“Assuming no new climate policies,” the EIA says, “worldwide increases in output per capita and relatively moderate population growth overwhelm projected improvements in energy intensity and carbon intensity.”

EIA’s predictions may not come true for two reasons. First, China, the country that emits the most greenhouse gases (GHG), pledged to reduce emissions by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. Second, last week, companies from China and Finland signed 12 clean technology deals with a value of about $250 million. 

Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang said of the deals, “As China is experiencing rapid industrialization and urbanization, we have to build a resource-saving and environmentally friendly society as soon as possible.” He added, “Finland has advanced capability in clean tech innovation and application, so there’s great potential for cooperation between the two countries in this regard. I hope our companies will grasp the opportunity, strengthen development and application of clean tech and carry out more reciprocal cooperation.”

What about America?

What about the U.S., the second largest emitter of GHGs? Unfortunately, the outlook for climate change legislation to pass in Congress this year is not sunny with November elections coming up for Congress followed by the December break for Congress.

“There is little chance anything will happen this year,” said Tom Lewis, chief executive. “Healthcare legislation was passed because the president made a major push but no one is willing to take a major step prior to the mid-term elections,” Lewis said. “The Democrats are in line to lose a number of seats and I don’t see a passionate push between now and November 2 to get this over the finishing line,” he added.

President Obama said he hopes bill will pass this year because the oil spill highlights the need for energy reform, but he may have used up his political influence to pass healthcare reform legislation in March.

“Obama may have used all his political capital to get healthcare over the finishing line,” said Chelsea Maxwell, managing partner of the Clark Group and former senior climate advisor to Senator John Warner.

A recent article in the Guardian, a British newspaper, hit the proverbial nail on the head when it comes to the U.S. government and the oil industry. The article says that politicians have “allowed themselves to be seduced by the cheap petrol and tax provided by BP.” The article added that in the U.S. “big oil firms, like big banks are too big to bury.” There is one factor the article overlooks: the American people, who are disgusted by the disaster in the Gulf, and BP’s bungling of it.

Source Care2

China’s leaders are so concerned about rising energy use and declining energy efficiency that the cabinet held a special meeting this week to discuss the problem, according to a statement Thursday from the ministry of industry and information technology. Coal-fired electricity and oil sales each climbed 24 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, on the heels of similar increases in the fourth quarter

Premier Wen Jiabao promised tougher policies to enforce energy conservation, including a ban on government approval of any new projects by companies that failed to eliminate inefficient capacity, the ministry said. Mr. Wen also said that China had to find a way to meet the target in its current five-year plan of a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency.

“We can never break our pledge, stagger our resolution or weaken our efforts, no matter how difficult it is,” Mr. Wen said. Western experts say it will be hard to meet the target, but that China’s leaders seem determined.

“No country of this size has seen energy demand grow this fast before in absolute terms, and those who are most concerned about this are the Chinese themselves,” said Jonathan Sinton, the China program manager at the International Energy Agency in Paris.

China has been the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases each year since 2006, leading the United States by an ever-widening margin. A failure by China to meet its own energy efficiency targets would be a big setback for international efforts to limit such emissions.

Such a failure would also be a potential diplomatic embarrassment for the Chinese government, which promised the world just before the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December that it would improve energy efficiency.

The issue has major economic implications for China and for global energy markets. The nation’s ravenous appetite for fossil fuels is driven by China’s shifting economic base — away from light export industries like garment and shoe production and toward energy-intensive heavy industries like steel and cement manufacturing for cars and construction for the domestic market.

Almost all urban households in China now have a washing machine, a refrigerator and an air-conditioner, according to government statistics. Rural ownership of appliances is now soaring as well because of new government subsidies for their purchase since late 2008.

Car ownership is rising rapidly in the cities, while bicycle ownership is actually falling in rural areas as more families buy motorcycles and light trucks.

General Motors announced on Thursday that its sales in China rose 41 percent in April from a year earlier, virtually all of the vehicles made in China because of high import taxes.

Zhou Xi’an, a National Energy Administration official, said in a statement last month that fossil fuel consumption was likely to increase further in the second quarter of this year because of rising car ownership, diesel use in the increasingly mechanized agricultural sector and extra jet fuel consumption for travelers to the Shanghai Expo.

The shift in the composition of China’s economic output is overwhelming the effects of China’s rapid expansion of renewable energy and its existing energy conservation program, energy experts said.

The increase in oil and coal-fired electricity consumption in the first quarter was twice as fast as economic growth of about 12 percent for that period, a sign that rising energy consumption is not just the result of a rebounding economy but also of changes in the mix of industrial activity. The shift in activity is partly because of China’s economic stimulus program, which has resulted in a surge in public works construction that requires a lot of steel and cement.

Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which many scientists describe as the biggest man-made contributor to global warming.

President Hu Jintao pledged in November that by 2020 the Chinese government would slow its growth in greenhouse gases by sharply improving energy efficiency. Mr. Wen went to the Copenhagen climate meeting three weeks later and opposed any international monitoring of China’s energy efficiency effort or binding limits on China’s overall energy consumption.

China’s current five-year plan, from 2006 to 2010, already sets an efficiency target that the country may now be less likely to meet.

The plan calls for the energy needed for each unit of economic output to decline by 20 percent in 2010 compared to 2005.

For a while, China seemed to be on track toward that goal. According to the ministry of industry and information technology, energy efficiency actually improved by more than 14 percent from 2005 to 2009.

But it deteriorated by 3.2 percent in the first quarter, the ministry said on Thursday.

Mr. Wen said that this deterioration would make it “particularly difficult” for China to meet the 20 percent target.

Without big policy changes, like raising fuel taxes, “they can’t possibly make it,” said Julie Beatty, principal energy economist at Wood Mackenzie, a big energy consulting firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Mr. Hu promised last November that China would improve the energy efficiency of its economy by 40 to 45 percent by 2020. The ministry statement on Thursday did not mention whether Mr. Hu’s promise might still be achievable.

Complicating energy efficiency calculations is the fact that China’s National Bureau of Statistics has begun a comprehensive revision of all of the country’s energy statistics for the last 10 years, restating them with more of the details commonly available in other countries’ data. Western experts also expect the revision to show that China has been using even more energy and releasing even more greenhouse gases than previously thought.

Revising the data now runs the risk that other countries will distrust the results and demand greater international monitoring of any future pledges by China. If the National Bureau of Statistics revises up the 2005 data more than recent data, for example, then China might appear to have met its target at the end of this year for a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency.

China’s recent embrace of renewable energy has done little so far to slow the rise in emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

Wind energy effectively doubled in this year’s first quarter compared with a year earlier, as China has emerged as the world’s largest manufacturer and installer of wind turbines. But wind still accounts for just 2 percent of China’s electricity capacity — and only 1 percent of actual output, because the wind does not blow all the time.

Meanwhile, fuel-intensive heavy industry output rose 22 percent in the first quarter in China from a year earlier, while light industry increased 14 percent.

Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations research unit, said in an e-mail message that he believed China was serious about addressing its emissions.

“There is a growing realization within Chinese society that major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be of overall benefit to China,” he wrote after learning of the latest Chinese energy statistics. “This is important not only for global reasons, because China is now responsible for the highest emissions of greenhouse gases, but also because its per capita emissions are increasing at a rapid rate.”

To some extent, China’s energy consumption now might actually help limit its global warming emissions in the future.

China, for example, used 200 million tons of cement in building rail lines last year, while the entire American economy only used 93 million tons, said David Fridley, a China energy specialist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Although production of that cement raised energy use and emissions of global warming gases, it also expanded a rail system that is among the most energy-efficient in the world.

China currently moves only 55 percent of its coal by rail, for example, which is down from 80 percent a decade ago, as many coal users have been forced by inadequate rail capacity to haul coal in trucks instead. The trucks burn 10 or more times as much fuel per mile to haul a ton of coal, Mr. Fridley said.

But now, with new high-speed passenger lines leaving more room on older lines to haul coal and other freight, the percentages could begin shifting away from energy-inefficient trucking, he said.

Source New York Times

Total World Coal Consumption in 2008: 7,238,207,000 Short Tons!
When it comes to global warming and air pollution, coal is the number one enemy. We were curious to know which countries burned the most, so we compiled a list of the top 10 coal-burning countries in the world based on the latest statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). We chose not to use per capita numbers because the atmosphere doesn’t care about that; in the end, all that matters is absolute numbers. Do you know which country’s number one? Could you guess most of the list?

#10 South-Korea 112,843 thousand short tons

#9 Poland 149,333 thousand short tons

#8 Australia 160,515 thousand short tons

#7 South Africa: 193,654 thousand short tons

#6 Japan: 203,979 thousand short tons

#5 Russia: 269,684 thousand short tons

#4 Germany: 269,892 thousand short tons

#3 India: 637,522 thousand short tons

#2 USA: 1,121,714 thousand short tons

#1 China: 2,829,515 thousand short tons

Danger! World Coal Consumption is Going Up Rapidly
According to the EIA numbers, between 2004 and 2008, total world consumption of coal went from 6,259,645,000 to 7,238,208,000 short tons. That’s a 15.6 percent increase of the most carbon-intensive kind of fuel in just four years. Ouch.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) forms during coal combustion when one atom of carbon (C) unites with two atoms of oxygen (O) from the air. Because the atomic weight of carbon is 12 and that of oxygen is 16, the atomic weight of carbon dioxide is 44. Based on that ratio, and assuming complete combustion, 1 pound of carbon combines with 2.667 pounds of oxygen to produce 3.667 pounds of carbon dioxide. For example, coal with a carbon content of 78 percent and a heating value of 14,000 Btu per pound emits about 204.3 pounds of carbon dioxide per million Btu when completely burned. Complete combustion of 1 short ton (2,000 pounds) of this coal will generate about 5,720 pounds (2.86 short tons) of carbon dioxide.

Via: EIA

As the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases at 20% of total global emissions how long will we wait before the upper level that causes catastrophic climate change is reached? Every day we wait another 45 millions tonnes of CO2 is pumped into the atmosphere.

It is time NOW to decarbonise and restructure a future that is safe for generations to come.

There are only two ways of enabling good policy legislation on climate change to be implemented. Either make the policy also good Politics and they’ll do it, or make it bad Politics if they don’t. What will it be the ‘carrot and the stick’ or the ‘stick and the carrot’?

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Climate scientists have long warned that global warming could unlock vast stores of the greenhouse gas methane that are frozen into the Arctic permafrost, setting off potentially significant increases in global warming.
Now researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and elsewhere say this change is under way in a little-studied area under the sea, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, west of the Bering Strait.
Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the university and a leader of the study, said it was too soon to say whether the findings suggest that a dangerous release of methane looms. In a telephone news conference, she said researchers were only beginning to track the movement of this methane into the atmosphere as the undersea permafrost that traps it degrades.
But climate experts familiar with the new research reported in Friday’s issue of the journalScience that even though it does not suggest imminent climate catastrophe, it is important because of methane’s role as a greenhouse gas. Although carbon dioxide is far more abundant and persistent in the atmosphere, ton for ton atmospheric methane traps at least 25 times as much heat.
Until recently, undersea permafrost has been little studied, but work so far shows it is already sending surprising amounts of methane into the atmosphere, Dr. Shakhova and other researchers are finding.
Last year, scientists from Britain and Germany reported that they had detected plumes of methane rising from the Arctic seabed in the West Spitsbergen area, north of Scandinavia. At the time, they said they had begun their work hoping to gain data to predict future emissions and had not expected to find evidence that the process was under way.
It is “indispensable” to keep track of methane in the region, Martin Heimann of the Max Planck Institute in Germany said in a commentary accompanying the Science report. So far, Dr. Heimann wrote, methane contributions from Arctic permafrost have been “negligible.” He added: “But will this persist into the future under sustained warming trends? We do not know.”
In an e-mail message, Euan G. Nisbet of the University of London, an expert on atmospheric methane, said the situation “needs to be watched carefully.”
Atmospheric concentrations of methane have more than doubled since pre-industrial times, Dr. Heimann wrote. Most of it comes from human activities including energy production, cattle raising and the cultivation of rice. But about 40 percent is natural, including the decomposition of organic materials in wetlands and frozen wetlands like permafrost.
Dr. Shakhova said that permafrost in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, peat land that flooded as sea levels rose after the last ice age, is degrading in part because runoff from rivers that feed the Arctic Ocean is warmer than in the past.
She estimated that annual methane emissions from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf total about seven teragrams. (A teragram is 1.1 million tons.) By some estimates, global methane emissions total about 500 teragrams a year.
Dr. Shakhova said that undersea methane ordinarily undergoes oxidation as it rises to the surface, where it is released as carbon dioxide. But because water over the shelf is at most about 50 meters deep, she said, the gas bubbles to the surface there as methane. As a result, she said, atmospheric levels of methane over the Arctic are 1.85 parts per million, almost three times as high as the global average of 0.6 or 0.7 parts per million. Concentrations over the shelf are 2 parts per million or higher.
But, “I am not the person to judge” whether the Arctic findings suggest that estimates of climate change in coming decades should be rewritten, she added.
“I would not go so far as to suggest any implications,” she said. “We are at the very beginning of research.”

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More melting of the Arctic ice caused by accelerating warming would release further gases, setting off a “feedback” mechanism which could send climate change spinning out of control.

Methane (CH4) traps solar heat in the earth’s atmosphere even more effectively than CO2, which has been the focus of climate change fears for decades. Scientists believe it could cause 60 times more warming than carbon over a period of 20 years, though it also decays more quickly.

Atmospheric methane levels began rising in 2007, when an Arctic heatwave caused sea ice to shrink significantly. Now new preliminary results suggest levels have continued to rise through 2008 and 2009.

The new figures will be disclosed this morning at the start of a two-day conference on greenhouse gases at the Royal Society in London.

Professor Euan Nisbet, of Royal Holloway College of the University of London, and Dr Ed Dlugokencky of the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder Colorado, will set out their findings in a presentation on “Global atmospheric methane in 2010: budget, changes and dangers”.

After a decade of near-zero growth in methane levels, the two scientists will reveal that: “globally averaged atmospheric methane increased by [approximately] 7 ppb (parts per billion) per year during 2007 and 2008.”

They will go on: “During the first half of 2009, globally averaged atmospheric CH4 was [approximately] 7 ppb greater than it was in 2008, suggesting that the increase will continue in 2009. There is the potential for increased CH4 emissions from strong positive climate feedbacks in the Arctic where there are unstable stores of carbon in permafrost … so the causes of these recent increases must be understood.”

Professor Nisbet told The Independent at the weekend that the new figures did not necessarily mark a departure from the trend. “It may just be a couple of years of high growth, and it may drop back to what it was,” he said. “But there is a concern that things are beginning to change towards renewed growth from feedbacks.”

Source Telegraph

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