Methane time bomb ticking louder

At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, a Russian scientist who has spent the last 15 years tracking the release of methane from Siberia was asked if a huge surge he and his team detected this summer constituted “a global emergency.”

Igor Semiletov did not say no, and did not challenge the premise of the question.

Yet his struggle with the question was evident. I tracked him down later, and I asked if he felt he was the wrong person to be answering such a huge question. He admitted his discomfort, but insisted:
I am the person responsible for this research, and I think we have to tell people that something is happening now with the subsea permafrost.

Semiletov points out that geologists estimate that the amount of methane stored beneath the Siberian shelf to be on the order of 2,000 gigatons. (Keep in mind that methane is a greenhouse gas 20-times more potent than CO2, and that total carbon emissions today are in the range of eight gigatons a year.) Semiletov thinks that if just 1 percent of the ESAS methane is released, it will push total atmospheric methane up to 6 parts per million, and he cites researchers such as David Archer in arguing that this would push us past the point of no return toward runaway global warming.

Similetov added: We are aware that our results showing that the permafrost is no longer an impermeable barrier to methane release have not been duplicated by other researchers at this time. But it is high time to warn people.

He stopped for an instant and smiled, before adding, “We can do nothing about it, of course.”

Grist