A longtime friend—an American, with a degree in engineering who’s been living and working in Moscow for the past several years—recently visited my husband and me in New York. We got to talking about global warming, which an increasing number of Americans think the media exaggerates. Party affiliation comes into play: Only 31 percent of Republicans think global warming is already happening, compared to 66 percent of Democrats. With Republicans taking control of the House of Representatives, there will undoubtedly be resistance to the consensus science of climate change. The EPA, which is now, for the first time, putting its tootsies into regulating climate-altering gases emitted by factories, will face such skeptics as Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, who is on record saying, “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic.”
Americans as a whole are in deep denial not merely about global warming, but about the concomitant issue of energy consumption. For example, even with many new, green, energy efficient vehicles now on the market, sales of SUV’s rose 41 percent in the last 11 months. Nero fiddling, Rome burning, and all that.
Anyway, my friend’s firsthand observations about what’s going on in the north of Russia is a sobering tale. I asked him to send me an email about it so I could post it on this blog. Here’s what he wrote.
I buy and sell pipeline construction equipment, which has me spending a lot of time in the Great North, as Russians call it—that land near or above the Polar Circle. This is land that has permafrost—defined geologically as land where the earth stays frozen for at least 24 months at a time. In the summer, of course, the top one to five meters of soil melt and organic growth appears for a few months. But the permafrost below never melts. Permafrost varies from a few meters to many miles thick, depending on the location.
In 2010, I made several trips to the Komi Peninsula, way up North, to buy a package of equipment and send it out of Russia for rebuilding and resale. I base my buying in a city called Ukta, the largest crossroad of natural gas (methane) pipelines in Russia. Pipelines from all the extraction regions north and east of there converge in Ukta, and from there the natural gas is rerouted to energy markets in Europe. There are also factories nearby—including fertilizer and propane factories—both of which turn methane into higher value products. And a lot of methane gas is flared near Ukta—excess gas coming from the factories simply burned off straight into the atmosphere. Pipeline leaks occur regularly. The package of old equipment that I bought recently was an emergency pipeline repair fleet that I am sending out to be repaired.
This year I told locals that there was a smell in the air that I didn’t recognize. It’s a sweet smell, like a fresh lube oil meant for an engine. The locals said they smelled it too. They said that everyone is talking about it and that they’ve even heard reports that the oxygen content of the air has been going down in recent years.
“So the smell is methane?” I asked. “Probably,” they all answer with a shrug. They say people, especially children, are coming down with respiratory disorders. Headaches seem to be a new local malady. Of course, Russian health authorities say nothing.
Winters in the Great North are getting warmer and shorter, as climate change has a greater impact on the far northern climes than those further south. The permafrost, measured regularly, is receding northwards, and melting deeper, at an alarming rate. In Russia, because hydrocarbons (including methane) are abundant near the earth’s surface (not thousands of meters deep, as in the States and the Gulf of Mexico, for example) it follows that methane is being released as the permafrost recedes. Frozen methane is in the permafrost itself. As it recedes, more methane is released into the air. More ominously, if the permafrost in any given area should disappear entirely (which is possible in some places), some of the huge natural gas deposits deeper in the earth will lose their ‘cap” and come to the surface.
Because methane blocks heat from leaving the earth’s atmosphere with 25 times the effectiveness of carbon dioxide, it is the most powerful of the greenhouse gases. However, methane in the atmosphere is not stable. When mixed with oxygen and light, it oxidizes and after about ten years, turns into carbon dioxide. But for those ten years, atmospheric methane heats the planet at 25 times the rate of carbon dioxide. So if the permafrost cap on a large gas reservoir lying beneath the surface should melt, the earth conceivably could “belch” an enormous emission of methane. Predictions about the consequences of this run, as usual, from calamitous to insignificant. We’ll see.
25 Responses to We’re All Fiddling While the Earth Burns
gameswithwords - January 3, 2011 at 7:51 pm
Yes, the permafrost has been melting for a long time. I remember talking with a lot of folk about this when I visited Yakutsk (on my way to the Arctic) in 2004. Even then, lakes were disappearing, having drained out when the permafrost below melted. In Irkutsk, a lot farther south, I was told that the winters were noticeably much warmer than previously. Many people alive could remember winters that were -30 degrees Celcius, but it hadn’t gotten that cold in some time.
wilson44691 - January 4, 2011 at 6:21 am
“Permafrost varies from a few meters to many miles thick, depending on the location.” — Permafrost is never more than a few hundred meters thick, which is not even close to one mile. The geothermal gradient melts it.
“This year I told locals that there was a smell in the air that I didn’t recognize. It’s a sweet smell, like a fresh lube oil meant for an engine. The locals said they smelled it too. They said that everyone is talking about it and that they’ve even heard reports that the oxygen content of the air has been going down in recent years. ‘So the smell is methane?’ I asked. ‘Probably,’ they all answer with a shrug.” — Methane is odorless and nowhere on Earth is the oxygen content of the air we breathe significantly decreasing or increasing.
Climate change is clearly upon us. Let’s not confuse the issues with inaccurate science and Russian rumors.
mathgrace - January 4, 2011 at 8:03 am
Wilson,
“The thickness of permafrost varies from less than one meter to more than 1500 meters.”
http://ipa.arcticportal.org/resources/what-is-permafrost
“The deepest permafrost ever found is in Siberia, a region in northern Russia. One area in Siberia has a permafrost layer that extends down 1,650 meters (5,413 feet).”
http://nsidc.org/frozenground/how_fg_forms.html
While this isn’t a few miles, it’s definitely over one.
Just sayin…
rgregory - January 4, 2011 at 9:18 am
Wilson – Methane itself is odorless, but rarely is methane the only gaseous compound in natural gas deposits. The factories use only methane to create the higher valued products, but it is entirely likely that a good deal of what the locals are sniffing are larger organic molecules trapped in the deposits. The fact that they refer to the natural gas deposits as methane is not surprising since that is what the factories use but that is likely the inaccuaracy, not that they are smelling something that indicates the deposits are being released.
mainiac - January 4, 2011 at 10:52 am
It’s about time for an Extermination Event……
softshellcrab - January 4, 2011 at 1:25 pm
If “man made” global warming is the reality, why did the scientists who the idea have to fake their research and withhold evidence? Why did they have to send out emails discussing how to defame and destroy the scientists who disagreed with them?
These are not just my ignorant accusations. The faking of the research, the hiding of evidence, and and the attempts to conspire to defame and destroy those scientists not on board the man-mde-global-warming bus are all thoroughly documented and widely published, when “emailgate” revealed these.
I know that this is not the primary issue. Global warming is either real or it isn’t. And if it is happening, it is either significantly contributed to by humans or it isn’t. But it certainly has not helped the arguments for it, when we find that the scientists who claim that mankind is causing global warming are proven to be have been faking their research, concealing conflicting evidence, and conspiring to destroy those who question their conclusions.
dank48 - January 4, 2011 at 1:32 pm
I’m not a climatologist, or any sort of scientist for that matter, but “Americans as a whole are in deep denial not merely about global warming . . .” seems to me a bit much. Pace a lot of commenters in these pages and elsewhere, what there is not on the issue of climate change is consensus.
Whatever the topic, limiting the franchise to those folks who agree with me, then taking a vote, does not produce consensus. I haven’t the slightest doubt that the earth’s climate is changing; it always has been, and our understanding of the extent, speed, and long-term effects of change is limited at present. I do wonder how much of the change is human-caused, and I do question whether the confidently proferred solutions are truly effective, efficient, feasible, and practical. I also question whether the long-term effects of any such solution are well understood.
In any case, there has been far too much heat and far too little light shed on the subject, imo. And I agree with Freeman Dyson that some people have in effect made climate change into a secular religion, complete with unquestionable dogma, intolerable heresy, and demonization of those who disagree.
Americans’ reckless use of energy, it seems to me, is less a matter of individuals’ refusal to face reality than it is a result of decades of national, state, and local policies that may or may not have been intended to make public transportation unavailable to many people outside the major population centers but definitely were intended to support the automobile and aircraft industries. Many of the original goals seemed laudable at the time, and perhaps were. Many of the long-term effects were utterly unforeseen, and have been less positive, to put it mildly.
I don’t think we as a species can claim that our cleverness is matched by our wisdom. We simply are not smart enough to predict what all the effects of our decisions will be, or even what the major effects will be. (For example, does anyone think today’s America is what LBJ had in mind when he introduced the Great Society?)
It’s striking how little attention is paid by climate-change activists to the sun, which contains 99.86% of the matter in the solar system and which contributes four pounds of energy to the earth every single second, 24/7/365. The implications of this are not immediately obvious.
So, I guess it comes down to this. I don’t think using the term “in denial” about those we disagree with is prudent, reasonable, or fair. There are indeed people who refuse to face reality in any of its less-pleasant forms. There are also people who have to believe that the sky is falling.
megginson - January 4, 2011 at 5:37 pm
softshellcrab: You are clearly referring to the Climategate e-mails. I sympathize with your concern about folks who seek to “defame and destroy” those who disagree with them, and for that reason know that you would never have made those devastating accusations about folks faking research and conspiring together without having specific passages from the Climategate e-mails that you are willing to cite in their extended context to support your accusations. Please do so, since I don’t seem to be able to find them when I look. And neither have the folks who have conducted the investigation clearing Mann, and they looked pretty hard. Perhaps they could use your help.
sfpaul118 - January 4, 2011 at 10:25 pm
The following information is probably far too detailed for this forum, but the true nature of methane’s contribution to global warming is more complicated than depicted in the article. And, if cost-effective control strategies are to be adopted, policy makers need to understand methane’s true contribution. Anyway, methane is NOT the most powerful of the greenhouse gases, but if the government is determined that climate change is a severe problem that must be addressed in the near term, then methane is is the most important GHG to control.
At first, it may seem to contradict the above assertion that methane is not the most “powerful” GHG, but for the first 10 years after a slug of methane is emitted into the atmosphere, it heats the planet at a rate that’s considerably greater than 25 times that of carbon dioxide. Firstly, note that the figure of “25 times worse” harkens back to an averaging calculation, adopted by IPCC several decades ago, that employs (somewhat arbitrarily) a “100-year time horizon”. By standardizing on averaging over 100 years, that calculation includes methane’s contribution for the ten years of methane’s lifetime in the atmosphere but averages in 90 years worth of of zeros after that. In the end, the calculation shows that methane is over 100 times more potent an earth warmer than carbon dioxide, not 25. It’s the 100-year averaging that brings that number down to 25. A 20-year average brings it down to 72, and a 10-year average brings it down to 92.
And while a 10o fold increase is significant, methane is still very far from the “most powerful of the greenhouse gases”. Sulfur hexafluoride is about 15,000 times worse than CO2 and has a lifetime of 3,200 years! HFC-23 refrigerants are about 9,400 times as worse. Without question, everything possible should be done to control these two highly damaging gases first. But the overall benefit of controlling even these two bad actors is limited because, being a synthetic industrial gas, the quantity of SF6 and HFC-23 that is released into the atmosphere is minute compared to carbon dioxide emissions. Consequently, its overall contribution to global warming is estimated to be less than 0.2% of CO2. So the most powerful does not equate to the most important.
The next “most powerful” contributor is nitrous oxide (laughing gas), which is about 275 times more potent than carbon dioxide and lasts about 114 years. A naturally emitted gas, human activity is believed to account for 30% of total emissions. It should be controlled because there is a lot of it, accounting for around 6% of the global warming effect. But NO emissions are difficult and costly to control because tropical soils and oceanic release account for 70% of emissions. Who’s is going to collect all that gas from the ocean’s surface, and how? So powerful GHG plus significant in quantity does not equate to the most important, either.
So why is methane important? If it’s not because it is the most powerful (it isn’t) or that it has the longest lifetime (it doesn’t) or because there’s so much of it (it accounts for 20% of the total radiative forcing from greenhouse gases; 40% that of carbon dioxide) then why? It’s important because of the combination of these effects: (1) At 100x the potency of CO2 for warming it is quite strong (2) Lasting 12 years, it doesn’t take care of itself, (3) At a 20% contributor, it’s still a big player. But the big reason why it’s important is because of these factors plus the fact that in the U.S., most methane is emitted from point sources (solid waste landfills) making emissions control relatively cheap and easy. Reducing emissions of landfill gases (LFG) can even save money if smart strategies are used, such as diverting putrescible organic materials (e.g., waste food, unrecyclable paper like cups, plates, napkins, towels, etc., animal bedding and manure) from the landfills, thus preventing them from turning into LFG in the first place. Bio-refineries using demonstrated technologies can utilize these organic materials as feedstocks for manufacturing green chemicals and biofuels, actually reducing disposal costs by reducing the use of expensive landfills.
dank48 - January 5, 2011 at 1:40 pm
Sfpaul118, thanks for the methane information. That was rather long for this forum, but it illustrates the point that the subject is complicated, and no shoot-from-the-hip response is likely to be the best one. I’m wondering how much methane our passion for red meat is responsible for, in a country that slaughters about a million cattle a day.
I think it was H. L. Mencken who said that for every complicated problem there’s a simple solution–and it’s wrong.
There are also problems without solutions. For example, if it were to turn out (as I very much doubt) that the earth’s climate is indeed veering wildly into extremes of temperature, humidity, etc., that will make life for us awful if not quite impossible, due almost entirely to anomalous solar activity, then it would be up to us to face the fact that there’s not a damn thing we could do about it. And that would probably be harder for our species than anything else.
dozer - January 6, 2011 at 11:54 am
Hi . I am the author of the essay on what is happening in Russia’s Great North, and would like to comment.
Pure methane is odorless, but that which comes out of a gas well is not because of impurities and other gases. Melting permafrost emits a mixture of gases, not that which comes out of your Bunsen burner.
I called methane the most important greenhouse gas due to the amount of it in the atmosphere. There are much less frequently occuring gases which have a stronger greenhouse effect, as has been stated in Comments.
I am reporting perceptions of me and Russian residents of the Far North. I would assert that in the neighborhood of major pipeline intersections, propane production plants , fertilizer (Urea) factories and numerous flares and the Russian idiocracy , its more than just possible that oxygen content in the local atmosphere is often lower than usual.
I try to stay focused on the real effects of climate change on the planet, so as to avoid debates with those who espouse hopeful theories , those who are certain there is nothing to worry about. For what it is worth, I think most of these devout deniers just know that this could not happen to the human specie. But it can.
pdawalt - February 22, 2011 at 4:56 pm
It is a shame that politics plays a part in everything. This is so counter productive.
cbres - February 22, 2011 at 4:58 pm
I met Mr Fingerhut at a meeting of provosts in Columbus and was very impressed by his commitment to higher ed, his grasp of issues and his outright intelligence.
DF - February 22, 2011 at 6:16 pm
What’s counterproductive about listening to the voters? Oh, yeah, I forgot. Most academics want smart people to decide everything.
paldy - February 22, 2011 at 6:24 pm
Oh, now this exudes with intelligence. I’d say you don’t know a thing about academics. You only have images which you believe – fact or not. Now you can call me names, and sling innuendos for my challenge to you. That seems to be the norm from people who make comments like you. So far off base. A shame to read in a blog that should be above the usual bloggie people that post.
DF - February 22, 2011 at 6:36 pm
I have been a professor for 20 years, so I know all too well how most academics cannot bear letting conservative voters have a say.
firstone - February 22, 2011 at 8:05 pm
I don’t usually respond to articles, but thought this article and the first set of responses deserved more discussion. The shame of losing Mr. Fingerhut has nothing to do with liberal or conservative, but rather the loss of one of the most creative and thoughtful leaders in American higher education today. It would be hard to look at his work in Ohio and brand it as liberal. He fought for stronger public accountability, mostly through performance based funding. These are hardly liberal ideas. What made him so special, is that he pursued this agenda with his heart and mind both solidly grounded in the public good that public higher education provides and the need to restore the public trust in this enterprise.
arthist030 - April 1, 2011 at 7:32 pm
Wait, if he confirmed that open access articles are more likely to be read, isn’t that in itself enough of a justification to promote open access?
And, isn’t the whole point of citation counts to measure the influence of an article — not whether it happened to be published open-access or not? If it were the case that open-access increased citations, wouldn’t that mean that citation counts mattered less, because they reflected publication format (vs. quality of work)? People would say “that work is highly cited only because it’s open-access.”
So the current situation – where open-access increases readership (a good thing) but doesn’t affect citation counts (thus preserving the integrity of citation counts as an index of quality) is fine.
I don’t see what the big problem is here.
Stevan Harnad - April 1, 2011 at 7:47 pm
“THE SOLE METHODOLOGICALLY SOUND STUDY OF THE OPEN ACCESS CITATION ADVANTAGE”
First, downloads of research findings are important, and they’re being measured. And evidence on the open-access *download* advantage is growing. See S. Hitchcock’s “The effect of open access and downloads (‘hits’) on citation impact: a bibliography of studies” http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
But the reason the open-access *citation* advantage — see Ben Wagner’s “Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography” http://www.istl.org/10-winter/article2.html — is especially important is that refereed research is conducted and published so it can be accessed, used, applied and built upon in further research. It is conducted by researchers, for uptake by researchers, for the benefit of the public that funds the research. Researchers’ careers and funding depend on their research impact.
The greatest growth potential for open access today is through open access self-archiving mandates by universities and research institutions (e.g., Harvard and MIT), the universal providers of research.
http://roarmap.eprints.org/
Universities adopt open access mandates in order to maximize their research impact. The large body of evidence, in field after field, that open access increases citation impact, helps motivate universities to mandate the open-access self-archiving of their research output, in order to make it accessible to all its potential users — not just to those whose universities can afford subscription access — so all can apply, build upon and cite it. (Universities can only afford subscription access to a fraction of research journals.)
The Davis study lacks the statistical power to show what it purports to show, which is that the open access citation advantage is not causal, but merely an artifact of authors self-selectively self-archiving their better (hence more citable) papers. The Davis study’s sample size was smaller than that of many of the studies reporting the open access citation advantage. Davis found no citation advantage for randomized open access. But that alone does not demonstrate that open access is a self-selection artifact — in that study or in any other study — for Davis did not replicate the widely reported self-archiving advantage either, and the studies on that advantage are often based on far larger samples. So the Davis study is merely a small non-replication of a widely-reported outcome. (There are a few other non-replications; but most of the studies to date replicate the citation advantage, especially those based on bigger samples.)
Davis says he does not see why the inferences he attempts to make from his results — that the reported open access citation advantage is an artifact, eliminated by randomization, that there is hence no citation advantage, which implies that there is no research access problem for researchers, and that researchers should just content themselves with the open access download advantage among lay users and forget about any citation advantage — are not welcomed by researchers.
These inferences are not welcomed because they are based on flawed methodology and insufficient statistical power and yet they are being widely touted (particularly by the publishing industry lobby) as being the sole methodologically sound test of the open access citation advantage! Ignore the many positive studies. They are all methodologically flawed. The definitive finding, from the sole methodologically sound study, is negative. So there’s no access problem, researchers have all the access they need — and hence there’s no need to mandate open access self-archiving.
No, this string of inferences is not a “blow to open access” — but it would be if it were taken seriously.
mbelvadi - April 4, 2011 at 9:00 am
While profs are mostly concerned with citation rates by their peers, in furtherance of their own careers, it’s important to remember that other mission of higher ed, the “ed” part. Open access exposes undergraduates, who wouldn’t have the time or patience to wait for interlibrary loan, or the connections to get copies “informally”, to more cutting edge research than they otherwise would see. Course-assigned papers’ citations obviously aren’t going to get picked up in this kind of research. And making only 20% of a given journal “open access” is close to worthless for students, because the searchable lists of journal “holdings” (what’s immediately available to for the student to read) that libraries maintain usually include only journals that are either under paid subscription or 100% (or close to it) open access. Undergrads aren’t known for using Google effectively to locate scholarly articles.
I know that serving undergrads better is not the focus of the open access movement, but it’s perhaps a valuable unintended consequence which is also worth considering in the discussion. After all the undergrads, and their parents, are among the taxpayers who paid for the research too. And there might be second-order effects much later on, as some of these undergrads go on to be grad students and “real researchers,” and might be inspired by or even just remember that important article they found as an undergrad and use it in their own research.
phil_davis - April 4, 2011 at 1:24 pm
I encourage readers to consult the FASEB article before commenting and avoiding the cut-and-paste response typical of online discussions (e.g. stevanharnad). Our research reveals that providing free access to the scientific literature has real benefits outside the research community, although it may not translate into more citations. These results make theoretical and practical sense. And while they may contradict a history of studies that may state the contrary, readers should weigh the evidence based on the strength of the methodologies and not simply on whether they support or contradict a particular political view.
11134078 - April 4, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Should I happen to live long enough to get down to the large-scale work I had hoped to do in retirement and so far have been kept from by illness, I shall have read an enormous amount of stuff that will not be cited because it has gone into my head as background. And yet it may be far more important for the somewhat indirect influence it will have had on me than the directly and immediately relevant, and therefore cited, material.
cybrarian_ca - April 4, 2011 at 1:38 pm
I’m a big proponent of open access, but I see one potential problem with Mr. Davis’s work. Yes, access to these paid subscription journals is less likely to be a problem for researchers affiliated with academe – especially research universities. But one of the big benefits of open access is that the research can be shared with those who cannot afford increasingly expensive scholarly journals. I’m an academic librarian in a mid-sized college that isn’t quite a research university, but has some strong research programs – and my collections budget has dropped by 15% this year alone. Another 15% is funded by very unstable means, and I fear losing that funding. How long will I have decent collections? Well, I’m not happy with them now in some areas, and it’s getting worse. And I’m in the US. I was also involved for some time with a project called Bioline, which digitizes and distributes research journals from developing countries. There are several projects that make expensive research available to institutions in countries that are very poor. But overall, access is difficult, and it’s becoming more and more difficult even in wealthy countries. Library budgets are contracting, while costs rise.
phil_davis - April 4, 2011 at 2:16 pm
As a former science librarian, I sympathize with your position. I was involved in three consecutive journal cancellation projects before returning to graduate school.
Yet, promoting open access publishing on the basis of declining library budgets may miss the real reason to support open access publishing. As I report, freely-accessible articles reach a far larger audience of potential readers than subscription-access publishing. It is not necessary to hold steadfast to a conjecture that open access necessarily results in greater citation impact. The real beneficiaries of open access may be those who read, but not necessarily contribute to, the scholarly literature.
jabberwocky12 - April 5, 2011 at 12:30 am
This is one study, and one study only. For a balanced overview, see a literature review of many studies at: http://www.istl.org/10-winter/article2.html The weight of the evidence shows a citation advantage of OA.
BTW – one of those studies quoted in the literature review is one by Mr Davis himself. And it shows a citation advantage.