www.climate-shift.info
 |
 |
HOME Page
| The contact form at right is provided as a courtesy to those sincerely interested in this project. As we will maintain a very limited staff, please recognize that replies will also be limited. Thank you for your input, and your understanding. |
Updated - September 1, 2008
Recognizing a fundamental flaw in the Fourth Assessment Report (2007) of the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with the capacity to mask the
development of climate issues having immediate and catastrophic implications, notices
were issued to political and scientific representatives of the United States and IPCC in fall
of 2007.
With evidence mounting of a destabilizing climate, and an abrupt disaster looming, in
spring of 2008 our privately-funded, independent project was launched in the U.S. Pacific
Northwest, tasked with providing a corrected re-assessment of critical issues as quickly
and thoroughly as resources allow, principally through grant-funding of strategic research
efforts.
The core of this project is the understanding that climate science is not simply an
academic issue, i.e. finding the “god” particle or the age of the universe. Nor is this an
issue for bureaucrats to endlessly debate while time and options are irretrievably lost.
The lives of every man, woman, and child now depend on the accuracy of this science,
and subsequently-appropriate actions.
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, PLEASE WATCH OUR VIDEO BELOW
Of the more than 60-known greenhouse gases, scientists consider methane one of the
three most influential (along with carbon dioxide and water vapour), due to its heat-
trapping efficiency and relative abundance in the atmosphere. But, methane’s unique
additional characteristic as an efficient fuel has also made it the Achilles heel of a long-
standing, universally-accepted procedure for evaluating the climate impacts these various
gases produce.
For the sake of convenience, all greenhouse gases are assigned values known as their
Global Warming Potentials, or GWP’s. The definition of a GWP for a particular
greenhouse gas is the ratio of heat trapped by one unit mass of the greenhouse gas to that
of one unit mass of carbon dioxide over a specified time period. Under guidelines
established by the United Nations for consistency among the international science
community, the specified time period (or “time horizon") used in climate science is 100-
years, a period well suited to the atmospheric lifetime of the baseline gas, carbon dioxide.
Based on this system, pound per pound, methane is currently considered to be 25-times
as effective at trapping heat as carbon dioxide. Fig. 1 from the IPCC’s 2007 report
provides this data, circled in red. While relying on the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report
(SAR, 1996) value of 21 (Fig. 1, circled in pink), U.S. EPA provides an interactive
calculator (see “Option 2”) that demonstrates this simplistic method of greenhouse gas
evaluation.
Because methane rapidly oxidizes once released into the atmosphere, converting into
carbon dioxide and water vapour in roughly 8-1/2 years, it only produces a climate impact
(including residual effects) for 12 years (See Fig. 1, circled in green). As GWP values
simply represent the cumulative warming a greenhouse gas will produce over a specified
time period relative to that produced by carbon dioxide, a comparison of alternative time
horizon GWP values for methane (Fig. 1 circled in blue, and Fig. 2) reveals a great deal
about the relevance of methane’s 100-year value used in climate science.
To put these GWP values in more practical terms, Fig. 3 compares the quantities (by
weight) of carbon dioxide (in green) and methane (in red) required to produce an equal
warming effect when measured over the standard time horizon of 100-years. Fig. 4
demonstrates the comparison when measured over a 10-year time horizon, with the light
green simply providing distinction for the addition in this higher ratio. Fig. 5 represents the
ratio when measured over a 1-year time horizon.
Given methane’s short atmospheric lifetime, its powerful dynamics are completely
obscured by introduction of the artificial time horizon of 100-years in this “one-size-fits-
all” system. An analogy can be drawn to a bullet fired from a gun. When it leaves the
barrel, a bullet carries devastating force, traveling several hundred miles per hour. As
aerodynamic friction brings it to a stop within several seconds, the bullet could be said to
have traveled at just ten miles per hour when measured over a time horizon of five
minutes, or slightly faster than a person simply walking for that same period of time.
While academically accurate, would you bet your life on such distorted data?
When related effects are accounted for, under the current method of evaluation, methane
is believed to produce a global climate impact roughly half that of carbon dioxide. A
correction of data would go far to explain the growing range of failures evident in the
IPCC’s 2007 report, among them rates of ice sheet reduction and sea-level rise, and
changes in precipitation and weather patterns.
Over the past decade, considerable effort has been made to reduce the 60% of methane
emissions currently resulting from human activities. Coupled with consequential effects of
the Soviet Union’s collapse, global methane emissions have remained virtually flat since
1998, following two centuries with a rate of increase far in excess of carbon dioxide’s.
Unfortunately, that changed during 2007, when annual global emissions unexpectedly
jumped by 27 million tons.
To put this value in perspective, measured over this methane's first year in the
atmosphere, it will have produced roughly twice the climate impact as that produced by
the emissions from all passenger vehicles on earth over the same time period.
With our warming climate rapidly thawing Arctic tundra, carbon deposits frozen for
millennia, and totaling perhaps one trillion tons in mass, are now being released into the
atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane gas. (See “Arctic Tundra” on our LINKS
page) Much of this region is remote, and until recently, quantities of methane emissions
have remained difficult to accurately assess. Before 2007, emissions from thawing tundra
were probably approaching 50 million tons per year. Many scientists consider Arctic
tundra the most likely source of the recent spike in global emissions.
Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 provide direct comparisons of methane modelling methods, with an
equal emission modelled using the standard method ("measured over a 100-year time
horizon"), and a representation of the same emission's chemical decay and physical
dispersion characteristics in a dynamic model. As greenhouse warming functions on the
molecular level, the specific location and concentration of greenhouse gas molecules
determine where, and to what extent, warming will occur. Since methane emissions are
concentrated and trap heat most effectively immediately upon release, its ability to
accelerate the regional thawing and emissions process in the Arctic remains vastly
underestimated in all research relying on the 100-year GWP value.
As a subsequent chain reaction to the warming Arctic region, a critical situation is now
unfolding in which methane’s true dynamics will play a pivotal role in both the timing and
magnitude of a potentially abrupt and catastrophic event with global repercussions.
Within the world’s largest and most-shallow continental shelf (beneath the East Siberian
Sea in the Arctic basin) lies a submarine counterpart to the land-based Arctic permafrost
discussed above. Containing roughly 540 billion tons of methane in a frozen layer known
as methane hydrate, and holding an additional 360 billion tons of highly-pressurized
methane gas below, this structure is now thawing and growing porous rapidly. Already
releasing methane from the sea floor at an accelerating pace (recent measurements of
regional sea water have shown methane concentrations up to 12,000% of super
saturation, and atmospheric concentrations 5-times above normal), an eventual structural
failure in this formation now appears to be a virtual certainty. Arctic scientists studying
the East Siberian Sea hydrate feature recently reported to the European Geosciences
Union that "we consider release of up to 50 Gt [billion tons] of predicted amount of
hydrate storage as highly possible for abrupt release at any time." Such an event would
increase global atmospheric methane levels by a factor of twelve, immediately causing
catastrophic global warming. As scientific studies continue to rely on the artificially-
deflated 100-year GWP value in determining methane’s significance as a positive feedback
mechanism, the deterioration of this hydrate structure will accelerate far more quickly
than presently anticipated. Highlighting this is the unprecedented acceleration in Arctic
Sea Ice loss during August 2008, a month historically marked by a slowing of the melting
process as solar energy is diminished with summer's end. At the same time, scientists on
an Arctic research vessel have issued "alarming" reports of methane bursts from the
ocean surface, perhaps the first sign of the submarine hydrate structure's collapse.
A re-assessment of this critical issue is now of paramount importance to our project, with
research focused on the feedback effects of altered albedo from accelerating sea ice loss
coupled with atmospheric decay and dispersion rates of methane emissions on the Arctic
hydrate degradation process.
The United States can not afford to wait for, nor expect, the “bureaucracy” of climate
science to correct itself, given the enormous resources invested to evaluate methane’s
climate impacts through the legacy system. Nor can we afford to run ill-prepared into an
unexpected and underestimated disaster far worse than any in human history.
We are grateful to those professionals and students who have, and will, step up to the
plate with us and strive for the answers we now need, and for those individuals willing to
assist this project financially.
Recognizing a fundamental flaw in the Fourth Assessment Report (2007) of the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with the capacity to mask the
development of climate issues having immediate and catastrophic implications, notices
were issued to political and scientific representatives of the United States and IPCC in fall
of 2007.
With evidence mounting of a destabilizing climate, and an abrupt disaster looming, in
spring of 2008 our privately-funded, independent project was launched in the U.S. Pacific
Northwest, tasked with providing a corrected re-assessment of critical issues as quickly
and thoroughly as resources allow, principally through grant-funding of strategic research
efforts.
The core of this project is the understanding that climate science is not simply an
academic issue, i.e. finding the “god” particle or the age of the universe. Nor is this an
issue for bureaucrats to endlessly debate while time and options are irretrievably lost.
The lives of every man, woman, and child now depend on the accuracy of this science,
and subsequently-appropriate actions.
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, PLEASE WATCH OUR VIDEO BELOW
Of the more than 60-known greenhouse gases, scientists consider methane one of the
three most influential (along with carbon dioxide and water vapour), due to its heat-
trapping efficiency and relative abundance in the atmosphere. But, methane’s unique
additional characteristic as an efficient fuel has also made it the Achilles heel of a long-
standing, universally-accepted procedure for evaluating the climate impacts these various
gases produce.
For the sake of convenience, all greenhouse gases are assigned values known as their
Global Warming Potentials, or GWP’s. The definition of a GWP for a particular
greenhouse gas is the ratio of heat trapped by one unit mass of the greenhouse gas to that
of one unit mass of carbon dioxide over a specified time period. Under guidelines
established by the United Nations for consistency among the international science
community, the specified time period (or “time horizon") used in climate science is 100-
years, a period well suited to the atmospheric lifetime of the baseline gas, carbon dioxide.
Based on this system, pound per pound, methane is currently considered to be 25-times
as effective at trapping heat as carbon dioxide. Fig. 1 from the IPCC’s 2007 report
provides this data, circled in red. While relying on the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report
(SAR, 1996) value of 21 (Fig. 1, circled in pink), U.S. EPA provides an interactive
calculator (see “Option 2”) that demonstrates this simplistic method of greenhouse gas
evaluation.
Because methane rapidly oxidizes once released into the atmosphere, converting into
carbon dioxide and water vapour in roughly 8-1/2 years, it only produces a climate impact
(including residual effects) for 12 years (See Fig. 1, circled in green). As GWP values
simply represent the cumulative warming a greenhouse gas will produce over a specified
time period relative to that produced by carbon dioxide, a comparison of alternative time
horizon GWP values for methane (Fig. 1 circled in blue, and Fig. 2) reveals a great deal
about the relevance of methane’s 100-year value used in climate science.
To put these GWP values in more practical terms, Fig. 3 compares the quantities (by
weight) of carbon dioxide (in green) and methane (in red) required to produce an equal
warming effect when measured over the standard time horizon of 100-years. Fig. 4
demonstrates the comparison when measured over a 10-year time horizon, with the light
green simply providing distinction for the addition in this higher ratio. Fig. 5 represents the
ratio when measured over a 1-year time horizon.
Given methane’s short atmospheric lifetime, its powerful dynamics are completely
obscured by introduction of the artificial time horizon of 100-years in this “one-size-fits-
all” system. An analogy can be drawn to a bullet fired from a gun. When it leaves the
barrel, a bullet carries devastating force, traveling several hundred miles per hour. As
aerodynamic friction brings it to a stop within several seconds, the bullet could be said to
have traveled at just ten miles per hour when measured over a time horizon of five
minutes, or slightly faster than a person simply walking for that same period of time.
While academically accurate, would you bet your life on such distorted data?
When related effects are accounted for, under the current method of evaluation, methane
is believed to produce a global climate impact roughly half that of carbon dioxide. A
correction of data would go far to explain the growing range of failures evident in the
IPCC’s 2007 report, among them rates of ice sheet reduction and sea-level rise, and
changes in precipitation and weather patterns.
Over the past decade, considerable effort has been made to reduce the 60% of methane
emissions currently resulting from human activities. Coupled with consequential effects of
the Soviet Union’s collapse, global methane emissions have remained virtually flat since
1998, following two centuries with a rate of increase far in excess of carbon dioxide’s.
Unfortunately, that changed during 2007, when annual global emissions unexpectedly
jumped by 27 million tons.
To put this value in perspective, measured over this methane's first year in the
atmosphere, it will have produced roughly twice the climate impact as that produced by
the emissions from all passenger vehicles on earth over the same time period.
With our warming climate rapidly thawing Arctic tundra, carbon deposits frozen for
millennia, and totaling perhaps one trillion tons in mass, are now being released into the
atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane gas. (See “Arctic Tundra” on our LINKS
page) Much of this region is remote, and until recently, quantities of methane emissions
have remained difficult to accurately assess. Before 2007, emissions from thawing tundra
were probably approaching 50 million tons per year. Many scientists consider Arctic
tundra the most likely source of the recent spike in global emissions.
Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 provide direct comparisons of methane modelling methods, with an
equal emission modelled using the standard method ("measured over a 100-year time
horizon"), and a representation of the same emission's chemical decay and physical
dispersion characteristics in a dynamic model. As greenhouse warming functions on the
molecular level, the specific location and concentration of greenhouse gas molecules
determine where, and to what extent, warming will occur. Since methane emissions are
concentrated and trap heat most effectively immediately upon release, its ability to
accelerate the regional thawing and emissions process in the Arctic remains vastly
underestimated in all research relying on the 100-year GWP value.
As a subsequent chain reaction to the warming Arctic region, a critical situation is now
unfolding in which methane’s true dynamics will play a pivotal role in both the timing and
magnitude of a potentially abrupt and catastrophic event with global repercussions.
Within the world’s largest and most-shallow continental shelf (beneath the East Siberian
Sea in the Arctic basin) lies a submarine counterpart to the land-based Arctic permafrost
discussed above. Containing roughly 540 billion tons of methane in a frozen layer known
as methane hydrate, and holding an additional 360 billion tons of highly-pressurized
methane gas below, this structure is now thawing and growing porous rapidly. Already
releasing methane from the sea floor at an accelerating pace (recent measurements of
regional sea water have shown methane concentrations up to 12,000% of super
saturation, and atmospheric concentrations 5-times above normal), an eventual structural
failure in this formation now appears to be a virtual certainty. Arctic scientists studying
the East Siberian Sea hydrate feature recently reported to the European Geosciences
Union that "we consider release of up to 50 Gt [billion tons] of predicted amount of
hydrate storage as highly possible for abrupt release at any time." Such an event would
increase global atmospheric methane levels by a factor of twelve, immediately causing
catastrophic global warming. As scientific studies continue to rely on the artificially-
deflated 100-year GWP value in determining methane’s significance as a positive feedback
mechanism, the deterioration of this hydrate structure will accelerate far more quickly
than presently anticipated. Highlighting this is the unprecedented acceleration in Arctic
Sea Ice loss during August 2008, a month historically marked by a slowing of the melting
process as solar energy is diminished with summer's end. At the same time, scientists on
an Arctic research vessel have issued "alarming" reports of methane bursts from the
ocean surface, perhaps the first sign of the submarine hydrate structure's collapse.
A re-assessment of this critical issue is now of paramount importance to our project, with
research focused on the feedback effects of altered albedo from accelerating sea ice loss
coupled with atmospheric decay and dispersion rates of methane emissions on the Arctic
hydrate degradation process.
The United States can not afford to wait for, nor expect, the “bureaucracy” of climate
science to correct itself, given the enormous resources invested to evaluate methane’s
climate impacts through the legacy system. Nor can we afford to run ill-prepared into an
unexpected and underestimated disaster far worse than any in human history.
We are grateful to those professionals and students who have, and will, step up to the
plate with us and strive for the answers we now need, and for those individuals willing to
assist this project financially.
| THANK YOU For Your Support! |
 |
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
| Only through your generosity can we accomplish our mission! THANK YOU |
| For additional information, please watch our video "The Future Of Climate Change Is Now!" and visit our LINKS page. |
| AN AMERICAN PROJECT NEEDS YOUR HELP |
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
