METHANE: The Next Global Crisis

From Worldometer,  COVID-19 new deaths:

           DAY USA   WORLD   Brazil   India   South Africa

June      9     1093    4732         1185      246         82

           10       982    5163         1300      388         48
           11       904    4951         1261      394         74
           12       791    4603           843      389         70
           13       702    4229           890      309         69
           14       331    3263           598      321         57
           15       425    3415           729      395         88
           16       849    6592         1338        ?           57
           17       809    5264         1209      341         49
           18       747    5123         1204      342         63
           19       719    5066         1221      366         94
           20       573    4428           968      307         46
           21       267    3338           601      426         53
           22       363    3880           748      312         61
           23       863    5465         1364      468        111
           24       808    6071         1103      424        103
           25       649    5179         1180      401          87
           26       663    4893         1055      381         48
           27       512    4547           994      414         73
           28       285    3463           555      384         43
           29       346    3415           727      417         73
           30       764    5072         1271      506       128
July       1       676    4857        1057      438         92
             2       687    5155         1277      377         95
             3       616    5170         1264      444       108
             4       254    4494         1111       610         74
             5       251    3572          535       421       173
             6       378    3573          656       474       111
             7       993    5504        1312       479       192
             8       890    5507        1187       491       100
             9       960    5411        1199       479       118
           10       849    5416        1270       521       140
           11       731    4995          968       543       111
           12       380    4118          659       500       108
           13       465    3729          770       540         93
           14       935    5414        1341       586       174
           15     1001    5760        1261       614       107
           16       963    5742        1299       680       216

Summary:

• Not a good way to end the week.  New deaths are mostly up and new cases are hitting all-time records.  The USA had another record-breaker with 73,388 new cases.  The world had about a quarter million.
• Another record shatterer was PhD clinical psychologist Mary Trump's book about her uncle, Too Much and Never Enough:  How My Family Created the Most Dangerous Man, selling almost a million copies on day one.  I happen to watch her entire interview by Rachel Maddow.  For example:

Rachel Maddow: “Have you heard the president use the N-word?”

Mary Trump: “Yeah.”

Rachel Maddow: “And anti-Semitic slurs specifically?”

Mary Trump: “Yes.”

People are reporting that an electronic copy is all over the world wide web.  Thus, the nearly million copies on the first day should be multiplied by a certain factor to accurately appreciate how swiftly this scorcher is spreading.

• Trump keeps bragging about graduating from Wharton.  Well, he paid someone to take the entrance exam for him.  You know how many parents got implicated and jailed for doing this last year?  Just another few months to be added to his sentence when he is sent to jail after being booted out of office.  How can he continue to be supported by his die-hards???

• Challenging Trump for making the most stupid moves during this pandemic is Georgia Governor Brian Kemp for suing Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms over the city's must wear mask mandate.  Why her when a bunch of other cities has already done this in that state?  Remember, he was one of those Trump sycophants who opened his state too early.

• Another is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who, while he won't sue any mayor for mask-wearing, won't do this statewide.  Have you ever seen him in public hearings?  You would think the embarrassment of his Trump-loving proclivities would shame him into sensibility.

• Then there is Governor Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, who flouted mask-wearing, especially during the Trump Tulsa rally.  He is now a COVID-19 patient.

To follow-up on my posting yesterday on the Chemistry of Life, a dozen years ago I wrote for The Huffington Post:

     The Venus Syndrome (Part One)

A few quotes:

Ah, but it turns out that there is another greenhouse gas, methane, that shows promise for becoming the doomsday gas. Methane is the simplest hydrocarbon and is most of natural gas. Cows burp and flatulate this gas, while biomass generally also produce some in the decay process.

So what’s the big deal? Well, one molecule of methane is from 20 to 60 times worse (note that methane apparently is even more potent, as shown later) than one molecule of carbon dioxide in causing global warming. This miniscule amount of methane in our atmosphere already has half the potency of carbon dioxide in warming our globe.

Let’s take the case of our planetary neighbor. Venus is mostly carbon dioxide at a surface temperature of almost 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Could you imagine a scenario where sufficient methane contaminates our atmosphere to really cause trouble? Methane tends to oxidize into carbon dioxide over time. Ergo... the potential for an atmosphere and surface temperature on Earth like Venus.

We tend to ignore the ocean in our scientific analyses. Did you know that there is more combined mass in the bacteria, viruses and archaea in the ocean than in all the larger life forms (fish, trees, you) in the ocean and on land? You probably never even ever heard of archaea. The scary thing is that marine microorganisms at the surface expire, drop to the bottom of the ocean, and in an absence of oxygen, are converted into methane and other compounds, which, because of the pressure and temperature at depth, generally become trapped in ice as marine methane hydrates. It is said that there might be twice the energy in this methane at the seabed than all the known coal, oil and natural gas. Let me repeat: TWICE AS MUCH ENERGY IN METHANE IN METASTABLE EQUILIBRIUM AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN THAN ALL THE KNOWN COAL, OIL AND NATURAL GAS DEPOSITS, WHICH ARE RATHER SAFELY RESTING DEEP UNDERGROUND.

The paper went on to say that this sudden release of methane hydrates might well have caused the planet to warm and significantly contribute to various extinction events.  Should you want to read Part 2, click on that.  Did you know that this methane hydrate ice burns?

I toss in all the above because Hiroko Tabuchi, global warming reporter for The New York Times,   this week reported that methane emissions climbed to record high.  To summarize:

• While global warming received a reprieve from this pandemic from a drop in the use of fossil fuels, thus reducing carbon dioxide emissions, turns out that the climb of METHANE continued to increase because methane continue to leak from fossil fuel facilities and cows continued to burp and flatulate this gas.  Shale oil development only worsens the situation.  If those current sites are abandoned, methane will continue to escape.

• A big unknown is the bubbling up of methane from ocean deposits and vast tundra sites.
• Much is beginning to be done about controlling carbon dioxide, but there is no plan for methane.

• She said that, mass for mass, methane is 86 times worse for inducing warming than carbon dioxide.  I only said 20 to 60 times to be conservative.  Other experts have said this number could be up to 120.

One of the reasons why methane has generally been neglected is that it is only 10% the cause of warming, versus 81% for carbon dioxide.

Also:

Actually, greenhouse gases are a small fraction of our atmospheric composition. To begin:

Not included above is water vapor, which dominates the other gases (excluding nitrogen, oxygen and argon):

When you eliminate water vapor, carbon dioxide dominates:

Thus, you can imagine why methane has historically not been of particular interest to atmospheric scientists, it's virtually nonexistent.  Yet, it is today one-eighth as important as carbon dioxide.  If you reduce carbon dioxide, and the methane concentration increases, the world could well still be in trouble.

So if the planet and ocean warm, the dynamic equilibrium currently keeping all that methane well-stored at ocean depths in the form of hydrates could cataclysmically be released into the atmosphere.  There are some who believe that some of the mass extinction events were triggered by this phenomenon.

In our geologic past there have been five of them.  The most recent one 65 million years ago was probably  caused by an asteroid.  However one or more of the other four might have been the result of methane hydrates.  The sixth could well cascade into the creation of a second Venus. All this is depicted in Part 2 of my HuffPo on this subject.

Note that the world is approaching 0.6 million deaths from COVID-19.  Here is one historical perspective, and you should note that the world population in 1920 was only 2 billion, while today we have almost four times more people:

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