Jamais Cascio weighs in on the encroaching problem of methane leaking out from under the Arctic permafrost. Sounds scary… BUT THEN, I first heard of this in the context of a potential energy source. Apparently there’s enough methane under the Arctic permafrost to keep civilization going indefinitely. Iiiiiinteresting… any thoughts, oh readers?

A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

Here’s why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect—warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka “methane hydrates” and “methane clathrates”) is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there. If we see runaway methane from underneath the Siberian permafrost, we could see temperatures increasing far faster than even the most pessimistic CO2-driven scenarios—perhaps as much as 8-10° C, very much into the global catastrophe realm. To put it in context: rapid methane releases have been implicated in extinction events in Earth’s geologic past.

(Here’s one piece of mitigating information: it’s unclear how long this methane leak has been happening, or the degree to which the measured methane levels exceeds previous amounts. If we’re lucky, this is actually a status quo situation, and we still have time before we reach a tipping point. But basing our strategy on “if we’re lucky” is not very wise.)

(Open the Future: Pushing Back Against the Methane Tipping Point)

Burning methane is not a solution to AGW. 

First of all, when you burn it, you get CO2 as a byproduct, so it only exchanges one greenhouse gas for another.

Second of all, you really need to take the scope of the problem into account.  It is bubbling up at random patches in the ocean and from millions of little spots in the thawing bogs of Siberia and Canada.

You would never be able to catch enough of it to prevent the worst effects of AGW.

Third, a methane tipping point is not someplace that anyone wants to consider going past.  That truly would be catastrophic.  Methane release is sufficient to push all climate models into absolute worst case scenario predictions.  We simply can not go there.