Methane Research Punches Hole in Kyoto
Posted by jennifer, January 12th, 2006 - under Uncategorized.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change
The Prime Minister John Howard seems to get all the breaks. There was Tampa a couple of federal elections ago, then the terrorists bomb plot uncovered the day he introduced the IR legislation into parliament and now, the week the Prime Minister gets to host the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, science journal Nature publishes a paper attacking “one of Kyoto’s conceptual cores“.
Under Kyoto, trees are good. Forests count as a sink for carbon, with carbon credits for trading being available to those who plant forests in accordance with Kyoto rules.
But carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas, there are a few others including methane. Methane is about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a warming gas.
The new study led by Frank Keppler of the Max Planck Institute in Germany has found living plants emit methane and calculates that all the world’s living vegetation (forests included!) could emit between 62 and 236 million tonne of methane per year. This is apparently equivalent to between 10 and 30 per cent of all annual global emissions.
The finding is being hailed as an explanation as to why methane emissions had been reducing – by about 20 million tones a year during the 1990s. And I had been sure methane emissions were going up and up, click here for related blog piece with graph of atmospheric methane levels.
The reason methane levels are now thought to have been reducing during the 1990s is because we apparently cut down 12 per cent of the world’s tropical forests during that decade, click here.
How have global methane emission being trending over the last 5 years?
How does planting a forest compare with defrosting a Siberian swamp – in terms of adding methane to the atmosphere?
What are the implications for Kyoto participants if forests are a source rather than a sink for greenhouse gases?
Australia, a Kyoto dissident, is nevertheless on target to meet its Kyoto targets because it has banned broad scale trees clearing. But hang-on, maybe it will now be OK to clear regrowth?
So many questions!
I had avoided the issue of carbon trading and targets in the piece I recently wrote for the Courier-Mail about the the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, click here. It looks like the rules might have to be rewritten now anyway.
Imagine trees emitting methane! Who said the science was settled?
JENNIFER, which scientists are trying to discount the plant methane “effect”? Pointing out that the findings are preliminary is not the same as discounting them.
As Phil pointed out above, “www.realclimate.org (RC) actually broke the news on methane immediately”. If anything, this shows that the professional scientists who are focused on anthropogenically forced climate chnage are openly engaging in objective and cautious science.
What specific action (or non-action) do you recommend instead?
Do not forget the albedo effects, clearing trees increases short wave albedo (surface is more refelctive), is 100 years of increased shortwave albedo > long wave absorbtion by the CO2 emitted by clearing in terms of energy absorbed by the earth system using a 100+ year integration period (say 200t of CO2 /ha emitted from a clearing event). Emitted CO2 into the atmosphere should be largely sunk (into the deep oceans/ carbonates) by 100 years as I understand it.