The day after winning the Pulitzer Prize, Nicholas Kristof of the NYTimes (sorry, it’s behind a firewall) resorts to horror movie scenarios to awaken law-makers to the risks of climate change.
It’s a dark and stormy night, and deep within the ocean the muddy bottom begins to stir.
Giant squids flee in horror as reservoirs of methane frozen at the bottom of the ocean begin to thaw, releasing bubbles that rise to the surface. Soon the ocean surface is churning and burping gas like a billion overfed infants, transforming the composition of our atmosphere.
That’s a scene from a new horror movie I’m envisioning, called "Killer Ocean."
I’m hoping it might play in the White House and Congress, because it depicts one of the more bizarre and frightening ways in which global warming could devastate our planet — what scientists have dubbed the "methane burp."
Since President Bush is complacent about conventional risks from climate change, such as the prospect that those of us in Manhattan will end up knee-deep in the Atlantic, let’s try fear-mongering.
Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. And thousands of gigatons of methane, equivalent to the total amount of coal in the world, lie deep within the oceans in the form of ice-like solids called methane hydrates.
The big question is whether global warming — temperatures have risen about one degree Fahrenheit over the last 30 years — will thaw some of these methane hydrates. If so, the methane might be released as a gargantuan oceanic burp. Once in the atmosphere, that methane would accelerate the greenhouse effect and warm the earth and raise sea levels even more.
"The juiciest disaster-movie scenario would be a release of enough methane to significantly change the atmospheric concentration," suggests the excellent discussion of methane hydrates by scholars at http://www.realclimate.org.
One reason for concern about a methane hydrate apocalypse is that something like it may have happened several times in the past. For example, 251 million years ago, there was a catastrophe known as the Permian extinction that came close to wiping out life on earth.
Nobody is sure what caused the Permian extinction, but one theory is that it was methane burps.
And as long as I’m fear-mongering, there was also a better understood warming 55 million years ago, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. That was a period when temperatures shot up by 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the tropics and by about 15 degrees in polar areas, and many scientists think it was caused by the melting of methane hydrates.
"The PETM event 55 million years ago is probably the most likely example of their impact, though there are smaller events dotted through the record," says Gavin Schmidt, a NASA expert on climate change. He emphasizes the uncertainties, but adds that since we are likely to enter a climate that hasn’t been seen for a few million years, it’s reasonable to worry about methane hydrates.
Hey, reason-based calls for action haven’t had much effect, even though (according to this poll from ABC/TV, Stanford University, and Time, fully 85% of the US population thinks that global warming is happening). Horror movie scenarios are worth a try.
Kit Stolz 