2 greenhouse gases on the rise worry scientists
Published - Oct 24 2008 05:51PM EDT | AP
By SETH BORENSTEIN - AP Science Writer


This undated handout photo provided by the Scripps Institute shows Scripps geoscientists Ray Weiss, left, and Jens Muehle in San Diego, Calif., amid collection cylinders used to collect air samples from a variety of locations around the world. Weiss and Muehle led a study that found that the greenhouse gas nitrogen trifluoride, used in the manufacture of flat-panel monitors, escapes to the atmosphere at levels much higher than previously assumed. Two major and potent greenhouse gases are building in the atmosphere, raising an unexpected new threat for accelerating global warming, new studies show. The gases are methane and nitrogen trifluoride, and their levels are building faster than expected. (AP Photo/Scripps Institute, Robert Monroe)

Carbon dioxide isn't the only greenhouse gas that worries climate scientists. Airborne levels of two other potent gases _ one from ancient plants, the other from flat-panel screen technology _ are on the rise, too. And that's got scientists concerned about accelerated global warming.

The gases are methane and nitrogen trifluoride. Both pale in comparison to the global warming effects of carbon dioxide, produced by the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. In the past couple of years, however, these other two gases have been on the rise, according to two new studies. The increase is not accounted for in predictions for future global warming and comes as a nasty surprise to climate watchers.

Methane is by far the bigger worry. It is considered the No. 2 greenhouse gas based on the amount of warming it causes and the amount in the atmosphere. The total effect of methane on global warming is about one-third that of man-made carbon dioxide.

Methane comes from landfills, natural gas, coal mining, animal waste, and decaying plants. But it's the decaying plants that worry scientists most. That's because thousands of years ago billions of tons of methane were created by decaying Arctic plants. It lies frozen in permafrost wetlands and trapped in the ocean floor. As the Arctic warms, the concern is this methane will be freed and worsen warming. Scientists have been trying to figure out how they would know if this process is starting.

It's still early and the data are far from conclusive, but scientists say they are concerned that what they are seeing could be the start of the release of the Arctic methane.

After almost eight years of stability, atmospheric methane levels _ measured every 40 minutes by monitors near remote coastal cliffs _ suddenly started rising in 2006. The amount of methane in the air has jumped by nearly 28 million tons from June 2006 to October 2007. There is now more than 5.6 billion tons of methane in the air.

"If it's sustained, it's bad news," said MIT atmospheric scientist Ron Prinn, lead author of the methane study, which will be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters Oct. 31. "This is a heads up. We're seeing smoke. It remains to be seen whether this is the fire we're really worried about.

"Whenever methane increases, you are accelerating climate change," he said.

By contrast, nitrogen trifluoride has been considered such a small problem that it's generally been ignored. The gas is used as a cleaning agent during the manufacture of liquid crystal display television and computer monitors and for thin-film solar panels.

Earlier efforts to determine how much nitrogen trifluoride is in the air dramatically underestimated the amounts, said Ray Weiss, a geochemistry professor with Scripps Institution of Oceanography and lead author on a nitrogen trifluoride paper. It is set to be published in Geophysical Letters in November.

Nitrogen trifluoride levels in the air _ measured in parts per trillion _ have quadrupled in the last decade and increased 30-fold since 1978, according to Weiss, who is also a co-author of the methane paper.

It contributes only 0.04 percent of the total global warming effect that man-made carbon dioxide does from the burning of fossil fuels.

But nitrogen trifluoride is one of the more potent gases, thousands of times stronger at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Methane is more than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a per molecule basis. Carbon dioxide remains the most important gas because of its huge levels and rapid growth.

Still, methane and the potential of future increases is a worry, Weiss and others say.

Its recent increase coincides with anecdotal evidence of more methane being released in the shallow parts of the Arctic Ocean. A scientific survey in late summer found methane levels in the east Siberian Sea up to 10,000 times higher than normal, said Orjan Gustafsson, an environmental scientist at Stockholm University who has just returned from the six-week survey.

Prinn's data are consistent with the early results of "whole fields of methane bubbles" that Gustafsson said he found last month.

The highest methane level increases were seen in monitoring stations in Alert, Canada, which with recent anecdotal evidence points to plants in permafrost thawing and decaying.

Stanford University environmental scientist Stephen Schneider cautioned that the recent increase is new and that "it is pretty hard to be very confident of any trend or big story yet on methane."

Methane levels have kept scientists guessing for the past decade. They were on the rise until about 1997, then soared in 1998 and then leveled off until jumping again in 2006.

http://www.rr.com/view/content/story.cfm...ct=sidebar

Since the world is getting colder and has since 2000, I think this is all a crock. By the way with all the propaganda about the arctic ice patch melting; it ended up far thicker than last year but the MSM ignored it because it does not fit the narrative nor does the cold that has blanketed the southern hemisphere. Now we have other gases to worry about, right. It appears that sunspot activity has a far greater correlation to global temperatures than supposed greenhouse gases.

Anything to get some research dollars.

pobearman Wrote:Since the world is getting colder and has since 2000, I think this is all a crock. By the way with all the propaganda about the arctic ice patch melting; it ended up far thicker than last year but the MSM ignored it because it does not fit the narrative nor does the cold that has blanketed the southern hemisphere. Now we have other gases to worry about, right. It appears that sunspot activity has a far greater correlation to global temperatures than supposed greenhouse gases.

Source, please? It's widely accepted that the earth is warming, the "debate" is whether it's human-caused or not.

Also, almost everything I've read still says the Arctic ice cap is melting.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=26566

Edit: To see the effects of global warming, you shouldn't just look at temperatures of the last 8-9 years. It's not enough time to base a conclusion off of.

lt7784 Wrote:Edit: To see the effects of global warming, you shouldn't just look at temperatures of the last 8-9 years. It's not enough time to base a conclusion off of.

Correct! The Earth has been cooling for the last 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for 1.5 - 3 billion years.

QSECOFR Wrote:

lt7784 Wrote:Edit: To see the effects of global warming, you shouldn't just look at temperatures of the last 8-9 years. It's not enough time to base a conclusion off of.

Correct! The Earth has been cooling for the last 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for 1.5 - 3 billion years.

Obviously the earth has cooled since it's beginnings, don't ignore the fact that the earth's temperature has varied between cold and hot periods since.

lt7784 Wrote:

QSECOFR Wrote:

lt7784 Wrote:Edit: To see the effects of global warming, you shouldn't just look at temperatures of the last 8-9 years. It's not enough time to base a conclusion off of.

Correct! The Earth has been cooling for the last 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for 1.5 - 3 billion years.

Obviously the earth has cooled since it's beginnings, don't ignore the fact that the earth's temperature has varied between cold and hot periods since.

The Earth has been cooling along a relatively straight line for 4.5 billion years. Many thousands of times -- along that line -- have been minor variations. More than 99.999% of those variations occured before man existed. During those times of variation, the carbon content of the atmosphere has varied but not in lock-step with the temperature changes.

Regardless of what man does or doesn't do, the aforementioned trend will continue for the next 1.5 - 3 billion years depending on whose data you believe. At that point, our Sun will make its transition to a red giant and the entire Earth will be incinerated.

Just before the time when the Sun makes its transition to the red giant stage, the Earth will be a frozen wasteland where few, if any, forms of life will exist.

A link to a recent article on Arctic ice: http://www.thedailygreen.com/environment...-47121205.

I do not disagree the earth is warming, I am skeptical of the impact of man and more importantly the validity of the models. As an example, if the federal reserve's and the investment bank's models could not predict this financial meltdown largely because they forgot to assume that housing prices could decrease how much certainty can we place in models of climate, when climate is vastly more complicated.

More importantly, I worry that the true costs of a significant reduction in CO2 is vastly understated and that those costs will be borne by the poor and middle class around the world for a potential benefit that is far in future. How much of a reduction in our standard of living are we willing to accept to reduce CO2 by 25% to 50% or more.

QSECOFR Wrote:

lt7784 Wrote:

QSECOFR Wrote:

lt7784 Wrote:Edit: To see the effects of global warming, you shouldn't just look at temperatures of the last 8-9 years. It's not enough time to base a conclusion off of.

Correct! The Earth has been cooling for the last 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for 1.5 - 3 billion years.

Obviously the earth has cooled since it's beginnings, don't ignore the fact that the earth's temperature has varied between cold and hot periods since.

The Earth has been cooling along a relatively straight line for 4.5 billion years. Many thousands of times -- along that line -- have been minor variations. More than 99.999% of those variations occured before man existed. During those times of variation, the carbon content of the atmosphere has varied but not in lock-step with the temperature changes.

...Minor variations like ice ages and warming periods.

I know about the cyclical heating and cooling of the earth's atmosphere, but I think the increase of CO2 put in the atmosphere is expediting global warming. Do you believe that man's CO2 emissions are insignificant compared to the CO2 naturally in the atmosphere? Or do you not even believe in the greenhouse effect, and CO2 and atmosphere temperature have no correlation?

pobearman Wrote:More importantly, I worry that the true costs of a significant reduction in CO2 is vastly understated and that those costs will be borne by the poor and middle class around the world for a potential benefit that is far in future. How much of a reduction in our standard of living are we willing to accept to reduce CO2 by 25% to 50% or more.

That's true, but fossil fuels won't last forever, either, so we might as well start living more sustainably, right?

lt7784 Wrote:

QSECOFR Wrote:

lt7784 Wrote:

QSECOFR Wrote:

lt7784 Wrote:Edit: To see the effects of global warming, you shouldn't just look at temperatures of the last 8-9 years. It's not enough time to base a conclusion off of.

Correct! The Earth has been cooling for the last 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for 1.5 - 3 billion years.

Obviously the earth has cooled since it's beginnings, don't ignore the fact that the earth's temperature has varied between cold and hot periods since.

The Earth has been cooling along a relatively straight line for 4.5 billion years. Many thousands of times -- along that line -- have been minor variations. More than 99.999% of those variations occured before man existed. During those times of variation, the carbon content of the atmosphere has varied but not in lock-step with the temperature changes.

...Minor variations like ice ages and warming periods.

I know about the cyclical heating and cooling of the earth's atmosphere, but I think the increase of CO2 put in the atmosphere is expediting global warming. Do you believe that man's CO2 emissions are insignificant compared to the CO2 naturally in the atmosphere? Or do you not even believe in the greenhouse effect, and CO2 and atmosphere temperature have no correlation?

There are multiple models relative to "global climate". Most are oriented towards two different themes -- atmospheric composition or the effects of the Sun.

One of the tests of a time-based model is to run the model backwards in time. The atmospheric models have shown to be wildly inaccurate when run in reverse whereas the models that are based on the effects of the Sun tend to show far more accuracy when run in reverse.

That was my long-winded winded way of saying that, "No, I do not believe that I have seen credible data that supports the theory that the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere has a material effect on global climate."

lt7784 Wrote:

QSECOFR Wrote:

lt7784 Wrote:Edit: To see the effects of global warming, you shouldn't just look at temperatures of the last 8-9 years. It's not enough time to base a conclusion off of.

Correct! The Earth has been cooling for the last 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for 1.5 - 3 billion years.

Obviously the earth has cooled since it's beginnings, don't ignore the fact that the earth's temperature has varied between cold and hot periods since.

So true!

And its rare to even hear that fact acknowledged. Take a look at the global warming (now called "climate change" ) info and it is almost always completely ignored. As far as science based arguments go, that is a pretty bad sign, don't you think.

My study has led me to conclude that there is a stronger correlation between temp and CO2 than between CO2 and temp. In other words CO2 rises as the result of temp increases rather than it being a cause of temp change. You also note how it is now climate change not global warming; that is a significant indicator that the climate crazies understand that there is not a direct correlation.

As stated previously--the major component effecting Earth's temperature is, and always will be--the Sun.

I think you will find an interesting correlation that is entirely independent of "greenhouse gasses" and climate....

There is a 100% correlation between gasses produced that boost the world economy and gasses decried by environmentalists as harmful to the environment.

It seems that the basic message coming from this movement is to cease economic growth, reduce or eliminate the human population of the planet, and let other species hold dominion over the earth (like, say....cockroaches, rats, and crabgrass). At that point, the earth will have been saved from the influence of man.

I should point out that this only goes for thriving economies--third-world economies and socialist economies are exempt from this world view.

I'm not a big fan of this movement because I like economic growth, central air conditioning, worldwide travel, and canned soup. In the eyes of these people, I am a sinner and must be punished (ideally by having my material wealth taken from me, broken down, and either destroyed or given to a third-world country).

Until such time as those items are confiscated from me, I plan to use them to their fullest extent both to promote my personal bottom line as well as contribute to the growth of capitalism.

converrl Wrote:As stated previously--the major component effecting Earth's temperature is, and always will be--the Sun.

I think you will find an interesting correlation that is entirely independent of "greenhouse gasses" and climate....

There is a 100% correlation between gasses produced that boost the world economy and gasses decried by environmentalists as harmful to the environment.

It seems that the basic message coming from this movement is to cease economic growth, reduce or eliminate the human population of the planet, and let other species hold dominion over the earth (like, say....cockroaches, rats, and crabgrass). At that point, the earth will have been saved from the influence of man.

I should point out that this only goes for thriving economies--third-world economies and socialist economies are exempt from this world view.

I'm not a big fan of this movement because I like economic growth, central air conditioning, worldwide travel, and canned soup. In the eyes of these people, I am a sinner and must be punished (ideally by having my material wealth taken from me, broken down, and either destroyed or given to a third-world country).

Until such time as those items are confiscated from me, I plan to use them to their fullest extent both to promote my personal bottom line as well as contribute to the growth of capitalism.

Truer words were never spoken!