{"id":12182,"date":"2014-08-06T03:52:27","date_gmt":"2014-08-06T07:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=12182"},"modified":"2014-08-06T03:52:27","modified_gmt":"2014-08-06T07:52:27","slug":"if-we-release-a-small-fraction-of-arctic-carbon-were-fucked-climatologist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/if-we-release-a-small-fraction-of-arctic-carbon-were-fucked-climatologist\/","title":{"rendered":"If We Release a Small Fraction of Arctic Carbon, ‘We’re Fucked’: Climatologist"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Below the opening paragraphs of an article by\u00a0\u00a0BRIAN MERCHANT<\/a>\u00a0from motherboard. You can read the full piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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This week, scientists made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw\u00a0“vast methane\u00a0plumes escaping from the seafloor,” as the Stockholm University put it in\u00a0a release disclosing\u00a0the observations<\/a>. The plume of methane\u2014a potent\u00a0greenhouse gas that traps heat more powerfully than carbon dioxide, the chief driver of climate change\u2014was\u00a0unsettling to the scientists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But it was even more unnerving to Dr. Jason Box, a widely published climatologist who had been following the expedition. As I was digging into the new development, I stumbled upon his tweet, which, coming from a scientist, was downright chilling:<\/p>\n

\"JasonBox\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Box, who is currently a professor of glaciology at the\u00a0Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland<\/a>,\u00a0has been studying the Arctic for decades. His accolade-packed\u00a0Wikipedia page<\/a>\u00a0notes that he’s\u00a0made some 20 expeditions to the Arctic since 1994, and served as\u00a0the lead author on the Greenland section of\u00a0NOAA’s State of the Climate report from 2008-2012. He also runs\u00a0the Dark Snow project<\/a>\u00a0and writes about the latest findings in the field at his blog,\u00a0Meltfactor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In other words, Box knows the Arctic, and he knows climate change\u2014and the methane plumes had him blitzed enough to bring out the\u00a0F bombs.<\/p>\n

Now, the scientists in the Arctic didn’t fully understand why the plumes were occurring.\u00a0But\u00a0they speculated<\/a>\u00a0that a warmer “tongue” of ocean current was destabilizing methane hydrates on the Arctic slope.<\/p>\n

I called the scientist at his office in Copenhagen, and he talked frankly and emphatically about the new threat, and about the specter of\u00a0climate change in general. He also swore like a sailor, which I’ve often wondered how climatologists refrain from doing, given the urgency of the problem\u2014it’s certainly\u00a0an entirely accurate way to communicate the climate plight<\/a>.<\/p>\n

First of all, I asked Box\u00a0if he stood by that tweet. He did. He’d revise it a bit, to include surface carbon\u2014methane locked in the permafrost that’s also beginning to leak out\u2014because if we loose enough of either, we’re in trouble.<\/p>\n

“Even if a small fraction of the Arctic carbon were released to the atmosphere, we’re fucked,” he told me. What alarmed him was that\u00a0“the methane bubbles were reaching the surface. That was something new in my survey of methane bubbles,” he said.<\/p>\n