Weather Channel — Vast methane plumes spotted bubbling up from the Arctic Ocean floor

An international team of scientists, who are studying the vast deposits of methane trapped on the floor of the Arctic Ocean, have captured their first look at plumes of this powerful greenhouse gas bubbling up through water. This discovery could lead to better forecasting, but it also has serious implications for Earth's climate in the years to come. 

Much of the science of global warming has been focused on the study of carbon dioxide (CO2) as the main culprit in the current trend of rising global temperatures and resulting climate disruption we're seeing today. This is only appropriate, since CO2 is, by far, the largest contributor to the problem - at least by total amount of gas that's added to the atmosphere on a yearly basis. However, methane (chemical formula CH4) is another greenhouse gas that's been 'on the radar' for climate scientists, because it is much better than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in our atmosphere. Over a 20 year span of time, kg for kg, methane traps over 85 times more heat than carbon dioxide. Over a 100 year period, that ratio drops, but even averaged over that long methane is still over 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2. Methane is only a small contributor to the overall climate change we're seeing now, but there are fears that this could change in the years to come...

The Weather Channel
Vast methane plumes spotted bubbling up from the Arctic Ocean floor
Scott Sutherland | Meteorologist, theweathernetwork.com

Michael Ricciardi — Swedish Engineers Invent ‘Nano Gas’ That ‘Instantly Neutralizes’ Carbon Pollution (via Planetsave)

Swedish Engineers Invent ‘Nano Gas’ That ‘Instantly Neutralizes’ Carbon Pollution (via Planetsave)

The old saying “fighting fire with fire” may be true or not depending upon the situation, but if someone told you the best way to fight (carbon-based) gas is with another gas, you might raise a skeptical eyebrow or two. But that’s exactly what…

---

Resilience — Not at that price: Why long-term forecasts for cheap oil and natural gas are baseless

Currently, there appears to be no new transformative on-the-shelf technology that will significantly reduce the cost of extracting oil and natural gas. And so, barring a deep economic depression, we can look forward to prices for oil and natural gas that are consistently above the cost of production and therefore far above the bizarrely low forecasts in the air today. In fact, we should expect costs to continue to escalate as we seek out resources that are ever more difficult to extract and refine.

Resilience
Not at that price: Why long-term forecasts for cheap oil and natural gas are baseless
Energy Bulletin

Regardless of how much new petroleum and natural gas is discovered, the price is going to be determined by the cost of recovery, which will establish the floor price for profitable production.

Moreover, as awareness of global warming and its consequences increases, negative externalities are going to be priced in, also raising the price of carbon-based energy. It looks like the Obama administration is preparing to address this in the second term.

Thomas Edison on energy sources

“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy--sun, wind and tide. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” — Thomas A. Edison

(Although this is widely quoted, I have not been able to find a citation of the original)

Nordhaus — Cost of delay due to climate denial

Read it at Climate Progress
Must-Read: Economist William Nordhaus Slams Global Warming Deniers, Explains Cost of Delay is $4 Trillion

by Joe Romm

Nordhaus: Suppose we were thinking about two policies. Policy A has a small investment in abatement of CO2 emissions. It costs relatively little (say $1 billion) but has substantial benefits (say $10 billion), for a net benefit of $9 billion. Now compare this with a very effective and larger investment, Policy B. This second investment costs more (say $10 billion) but has substantial benefits (say $50 billion), for a net benefit of $40 billion. B is preferable because it has higher net benefits ($40 billion for B as compared with $9 for A), but A has a higher benefit-cost ratio (a ratio of 10 for A as compared with 5 for B). This example shows why we should, in designing the most effective policies, look at benefits minus costs, not benefits divided by costs. [emphasis added]

Natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere

Another major study finds confirms natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere

A must-read new study by climatologist Ken Caldeira and tech guru Nathan Myhrvold (!) makes clear the world’s only plausible hope to avert catastrophic temperature rise this century is aggressive deployment of zero-carbon technologies and conservation.

The Institute of Physics news release explains:

… technologies that offer only modest reductions in greenhouse gases, such as the use of natural gas and perhaps carbon capture and storage, cannot substantially reduce climate risk in the next 100 years.

Delaying the rollout of the technologies is not an option however; the risks of environmental harm will be much greater in the second half of the century and beyond if we continue to rely on coal-based technologies.

Read it at Climate Progress

Bombshell: You Can’t Slow Projected Warming With Gas, You Need ‘Rapid and Massive Deployment’ of Zero-Carbon Power

By Joe Romm

Romm — Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere

The President will be touting natural gas in his State of the Union address tonight,according to sources.  Nothing wrong with touting gas — if you also tout a rising carbon price, which the president once did but no longer does.

Way back in June 2009, I pointed out the value of gas in the context of a climate bill with a rising CO2 price — see “Why unconventional natural gas makes the 2020 Waxman-Markey target so damn easy and cheap to meet.”  But the key point of that post was that you could put gas in existing, underutilized plants to replace existing coal power cheaply to meet the key 2020 target Obama.

Building lots of new gas plants doesn’t make much sense since we need to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next few decades if we’re to have any chance to avoid catastrophic global warming. We don’t want new gas plants to displace new renewables, like solar and wind,  which are going to be the  some of the biggest, sustainable job creating industries of the century.Late last year, some of the leading (center-right) economists in the country — Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus — concluded in a top economic journal that the total damages from natural gas generation exceed its value-added at a low-ball carbon price of $27 per ton! At a price of $65 a ton of carbon, the total damages from natural gas are more than double its value-added!

For the record, stabilizing at 550 ppm  atmospheric concentrations of CO2, which would likely still be catastrophic for humanity, would require a price of $330 a metric ton of carbon in 2030, the International Energy Agency (IEA) noted back in 2008.

Read it at Climate Progress

Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere — Absent a Serious Price for Global Warming Pollution

By Joe Romm