2 greenhouse gases on the rise worry scientists

It’s still early and the data are far from conclusive, but scientists say they are concerned that what they are seeing could be the start of the release of the Arctic methane.

After almost eight years of stability, atmospheric methane levels — measured every 40 minutes by monitors near remote coastal cliffs — suddenly started rising in 2006. The amount of methane in the air has jumped by nearly 28 million tons from June 2006 to October 2007. There is now more than 5.6 billion tons of methane in the air.
“If it’s sustained, it’s bad news,” said MIT atmospheric scientist Ron Prinn, lead author of the methane study, which will be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters Oct. 31. “This is a heads up. We’re seeing smoke. It remains to be seen whether this is the fire we’re really worried about.

“Whenever methane increases, you are accelerating climate change,” he said.

Its recent increase coincides with anecdotal evidence of more methane being released in the shallow parts of the Arctic Ocean. A scientific survey in late summer found methane levels in the east Siberian Sea up to 10,000 times higher than normal, said Orjan Gustafsson, an environmental scientist at Stockholm University who has just returned from the six-week survey.

Prinn’s data are consistent with the early results of “whole fields of methane bubbles” that Gustafsson said he found last month.

The highest methane level increases were seen in monitoring stations in Alert, Canada, which with recent anecdotal evidence points to plants in permafrost thawing and decaying.

Stanford University environmental scientist Stephen Schneider cautioned that the recent increase is new and that “it is pretty hard to be very confident of any trend or big story yet on methane.”

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