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Bob Murphy’s Bogus “Consensus” Argument on Climate Change

October 24th, 2019 No comments

Bob Murphy’s got a new climate change post, originally written for the Institute of Energy Research, now gracing the pages of The Mises Institute.

I made a few remarks, but my links seem to have triggered a spam filter, so I’m re-posting them here.

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what they actually found was that of the sampled papers on climate change, only one-third of them expressed a view about its causes, and then of that subset, 97% agreed that humans were at least one cause of climate change.

Thanks, Bob. That sounds like there are damned near ZERO climate scientists who argue that human activities (CO2, other GHGs, soot, particulates?) AREN’T a cause of climate change.

I co-authored a Cato study with climate scientists Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger, in which we strongly opposed a U.S. carbon tax. Yet both Michaels and Knappenberger would be climate scientists who were part of the “97% consensus” according to Cook et al. That is, Michaels and Knappenberger both agree that, other things equal, human activity that emits carbon dioxide will make the world warmer than it otherwise would be.

WOW. So EVEN the Cato guys (the ones who deceived Jerry Taylor into thinking CO2 does nothing, and who quit and started Niskanen when he realized he’d been lied to) AGREE that human-emitted CO2 (fossil-fuel emissions; that have increased global atmospheric levels by ~50%, and are also affecting ocean pH and vegetation) WILL MAKE THE WORLD WARMER? [Alarmists!] Do YOU agree with them too, Bob?

[From Leder’s New Republic piece:]

Deniers have managed to undermine how the public views climate science, which in turn makes voters less likely to support climate action.

Interesting that you don’t address this charge about rent-seeking/-defending behavior at all. Could it have something to do with who funds IER, which pays you? IER and its more honestly political sister group American Energy Alliance (which also pays you) are fossil fuel industry front groups; they were once funded in part by Exxon, until it decided (1) in 2008 to “discontinue[] contributions to [IER and] several public-policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion about how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner” and (2) to come out in 2009 in support of carbon taxes:

Your unwillingness to be straight up with your motives on this topic, especially at the Mises Institute, is disappointing — and doubly so, since you’ve made a noble appeal for truth-in-advertising, something foreign in the political discussion to which all AGW issues now seem to descend.

The sad result? Unfortunately at Mises Institute it’s pretty much exactly the debasement that you decry: “the reaction here is to guffaw at the hubris and creepy lack of doubt about how the world [works],” on the parts of scientists and other alarmists.

It’s too bad our leading Austrian thinkers won’t explain, much less live up to, their principles, but I DO thank you for showing more careful readers how strong you, Pat and Chip think the case is among scientists for concern about AGW. 

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I wonder if Bob’s posting at the right site? Or is this the kind of crap that the Mises Institute wants for traffic and that ‘Austrians’ these days lap up in order to avoid hard thinking about big-government crony capitalism?

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Some comments (2006) to Chris Mooney about anti-Malthusian Ron Bailey on doomsayers, extinctions and DDT

January 6th, 2015 No comments
Here are some comments that I sent to Chris C. Mooney in response to his June 2, 2006 blogpost, “Some Ron Bailey Writings.”

Chris, in addition to the comments I’ve already given, let me note the following:

1. On Club of Rome and the Malthusian issue generally, the doomsayers were right to perceive problems that are still with us, but they failed to understand how market supply and demand work to call forth new supplies and technologies. Now we use sand [glass fiber] instead of copper for our telecommunications. They were very wrong on commodity prices, but what were the consequences? We adapted, so it can hardly be said to be one of the “worst” abuses of science (in any case the projections were not an abuse of science, but mistaken modelling).

In the big picture, Club of Rome was exactly right about a point on which we are still struggling – like any other species, humanity is a part of its environment and we must be concerned about our impact on the environment. Without the proper feedback mechanisms – which are provided now soleyl by disease, war and properly functioning markets – we will expand up to the Earth’s carrying capacity, overshoot and crash, as we have from time to time in the past, as Jared Diamond points out (but Diamond doesn’t understand environmental problems as market-failure problems either).

Are all the feedback mechanisms working properly worldwide? There is still lots of misery and starvation in the third world, and where markets don’t work we have internecine slaughter like in Rwanda and constant instability in Haiti. Global ecosystems and environmental services are still at severe risk, and regional resources like Asian and South American tropical forests, tropical reefs and oceanic fisheries, and wild species everrywhere, precisely for reasons that Ron Bailey understands well – because markets do not work well where property rights – private or communal – are not clearly defined or not effectively enforced.

On this, I recommend that you take a look at Ron’s piece last year on the problems and solutions for New England fisheries: How to Save New England’s Fishing Villages – If only the fishers will allow it. The solution? Creation of private rights that allow a market to function; here, “Individual transferable quotas” (ITQs) that are exactly the same as taken for SO2 trading in California under the Clean Air Act and the GHG emissions permits now trading under Kyoto. These tragedy of the commons issues persist globally and must be addressed, unless we wish to see ineffectively owned resources destroyed.

It’s also worth pointing out that the Malthusians have been wrong only becuase our technological ingenuity has enabled us to wrest more and more from nature. Nature may be getting a break in the West, but it’s due not only to fossil fuels (and a AGW cost that is not being paid) but also because we’re sourcing more and more from the developing world – the oceans are being strip-mined, the Amazon being converted to soybeans and the Asian tropics to palm plantations, and the second/third worlds are definitely converting forests to food. Environmental services are not costed into the moder economy.

I also recommend you look at the Business Rountable’s policy paper on how to help the developing world improve their economies and prepare for climate change – in particular recommendations 2 (kleptocracy – “public” resources are not protected but exploited to line the pockets of elites) and 5 (lack of effective propertty rights) specifically point out that these institutional failures lie at the core of the third world’s problems.

http://www.businessroundtable.org/pdf/20040616000ClosingtheTechnologyGap.pdf

2. I think there is more recent information about one in seven of all bird species being threatened. Whatever the rate is, it is huge, and just like fisheries, it’s entirely due to the lack of effective property rights. The bright spots are where landowners have figured out that they can get a good income from using and protecting wild resources. We’re still fighting about whales, even though we have obvious solutions such as ITQs being applied to other fisheries in NZ and AK.

Ron can argue with you about the numbers of species, but he really can’t disagree that the loss of this genetic information is a disgrace many worse than the burning of the library of Alexandria, and certainly is a result of failed markets that should be fixed.

Since libertarians like Ron and others on the right actually know all about the problems of market failure, where is the big effort being made to fix these problems?

3. On DDT, I imagine you know that Tim Lambert at Deltoid already has all of the answers handy.

4. This isn’t one of your questions, but I think it is fair to note that the failures of the left relating to science have really been failures to understand the institutional reasons for problems and so failures to propose the right solutions. Those on the left who have been saying that we need to change human nature or abandon capitalism have been saying so because they simply don’t know otherwise how to “fix” capitalism’s flaws.

But as I imagine you know, the misuse of science the right, on the other hand, has been entirely intentional, cynical and venal, and designed to allow favored interests (rent-seekers) to continue to pay cheap for dear public resources (including using the atmosphere as a GHG dump), for the financial and partisan benefit of those running the government. See John Baden, a grandfather of libertarian, free-market environmentalism for his take on the corrupt Republicans: http://www.free-eco.org/articleDisplay.php?id=488.

Good luck!

Regards,

Tom

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Fun with Kevin Gutzman, or, Does Citizens United apply to state limitations on what “speech” their corporations can engage in?

November 6th, 2014 No comments

Historian and Constitutional scholar Kevin Guzman posted a comment on his Facebook wall on the Citizens United decision that I took a disliking to.

Here is his September 6, 2014 post and my responses (to him and his other commenters):

There’s a popular meme that “Corporations aren’t people.” The aim is to repeal the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United that Congress cannot under the Speech and Press Clauses of the First Amendment limit political advertising so stringently as it had been under the McCain-Feingold Act. The point of the meme is that only people are entitled to constitutional protections, and so Congress can do whatever it wants to corporations. Let’s follow the implications of the claim that “Corporations aren’t people.”

So you’re going to deny corporations constitutional rights. Does that mean the government will be able to search corporations’ property without warrants? Take their property without trial? Try them without counsel? Censor their publications? Punish them under ex post facto laws? House soldiers in their property during peacetime? Force them to pay to support churches?

At least as early as Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), the Supreme Court recognized that corporations do indeed have rights of individuals. To say that they didn’t would mean empowering government in new and dangerous ways. Besides, we all know that shareholders–corporations–are people. They’re not hamsters. They’re not sandwiches. They’re not automobiles. They’re people.

 

September 7 at 1:24am

Tokyo Tom Kevin, this is an interesting an important topic, which hasn’t been set up very well. 

First, I think you missed the gist of the Dartmouth case, which essentially said that NH couldn’t alter Dartmouth’s charter (which had been granted by the English Crown), because the corporate charter was a form of private contract that was protected from “impairment” by states under the Constitution. The case was brought by the Trustees of Dartmouth, and didn’t particularly “recognize that corporations do indeed have rights of individuals.” States responded by reserving greater powers when they create corporations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_College_v._Woodward
http://www.oyez.org/cases/1792-1850/1818/1818_0
http://www.americanbar.org/…/students_in…/dartmouth.html

 

September 7 at 1:32am

Tokyo Tom Hopefully, we’re all clear on the fact that corporations are created by governments, were traditionally considered as forms of contracts and property rights, and have special powers, rights and characteristics provided by state legislatures that render them quite different from real, live human beings?

Unfortunately, many on the Left and Right are confused about the origin, history and nature of corporations. As I said to some progressives:

“Sadly, it seems that most if not all of the progressives here want to deny what cannot be denied: that corporations exist only because they are made by acts of legislative power of Governments. They also want to deny that the special characteristics that Govt give to “corporations” are the very attributes that lead to harms to others/social ills that continually fuel more regulation of corporations by governments.

“It’s hard to discern why they have these views–perhaps, because they are so ingrained in seeing Govt as their sole savior in fighting against corporate Frankensteins–but they are clearly incorrect, as a legal and historical matter.
Be that as it may, as a matter of understanding and attacking the roots of our problems, it behooves progressives to investigate and understand how government and corporations shape the incentives and influence the behavior of the people who find themselves within them.

“Not only do corporations exist only because of Govt, but it is clear that the reasons why corporations play such negative roles in society and have corrupted Govt are their state-granted characteristics that would NOT exist in a “free market”. Sole proprietorships, partnerships, associations and co-operatives do NOT have#LimitedLiability, unlimited lives, unlimited purposes, and the businesses do not have legal entity status different from the owners.

http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/corporations…

 

September 7 at 1:47am

Tokyo Tom Corporations have continued to find the Federal government and Supreme Court their friend in escaping control by the states that created them; see this pre-Citizens United post about the perversion of the anti-discrimination (due process/equal protection) provisions of the 14th Amendment (that used “persons” to protect freed slaves and unnaturalized Chinese) to require various states to treat corporations made in other states the same as their own corporations:

http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/corpspeak…/

 

September 7 at 1:51am

Tokyo Tom Karl Pope’s thoughts after Citizens United are largely spot on, and explain the drive that Sen. Colburn is now sponsoring to convene a Constitutional Convention to consider amendments:

http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/carl-pope-sierra…/

 

  • Kevin Gutzman It’s impossible to remove money from politics. If you deny individuals the right to buy political ads, you’ve effectively elevated owners of media corporations to the status of Elite Class, as only they will be able to say what they want. On the other hand, the Tenth Amendment reserves power to regulate elections to the states; if they want to ban donations from out-of-state interests or individuals, they should be allowed to do so. Score another negative result for the Incorporation Doctrine.
  • Kevin Gutzman I think that all federal campaign regulation is unconstitutional, as nothing in the Constitution empowers Congress to regulate anything other than the “time, place, and manner” of elections. At the federal level, there’s no reason not to have a sunshine law requiring disclosure of all donations.
  • Tokyo Tom Good point, Savana — states can and should be able to condition any corporate license on things that the corporation cannot do in its own name, such as lobbying. 
    Such a conditioning of the grant of corporate charter would be Consitutional, and would NOT deprive any individual of his own rights to lobby (or to combine with other employees to do so).If we want to get crony capitalism and the runaway regulatory state under control, we should simply stop granting #LtdLiability to corporate shareholders, and restore shareholder responsibility to monitor risk management by executives and managers.

    http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/immodest…/

    Tokyo Tom Kevin, I didn’t realize that “deny[ing] individuals the right to buy political ads” was the premise here, but denying the “right” of state-made entities to buy political ads, make contributions etc.
    • Tokyo Tom From my own Constitutional analysis, corporations, as artificial things, don’t “speak” at all (just as a printing press doesn’t speak either); people speak. Unfortunately, corporations (including media corporations) HAVE become ways for people to mask WHO is speaking. I think it perfectly acceptable under state corporation law and under the 1st Ad to constrain certain types of corporate “speech”.

    • Kevin Gutzman Big money wins? Big money often loses. Google “Michael Huffington” or “Clayton Williams” and see what you find. Let people know who is doing the contributing.
      Note: I agree with Savana that foreign contributions should be illegal. In theory, they already are, although Bill Clinton took advantage of them, (in)famously.
    • Kevin Gutzman The idea that I should be forced to contribute to Hillary2016! thrills me about as much as being forced to help fund the Westboro Baptist Church.
      Tokyo Tom SCOTUS has the First Amendment wrong -this was intended to bind tie Feds, at a time when corporations were profoundly despised and considered property of their shareholders, with rights only grudgingly granted by states.
      Property doesn’t “speak,” even as every single shareholder and employee retains full personal speech rights.
      Kevin Gutzman “Groups of people are not people.” — ISIS
      Tokyo Tom Mark, without corporations, are people UNABLE to associate to conduct business together?
      Corporations are creations of governments. People are not. Nor are voluntary associations of people, as businesses/partnerships, co-ops, unions or churches.
      Tokyo Tom ISIS? “of course a few less than enlightened people are not seeing the distinction between an inactive band of musicians and a band of terrorists involved in current world affairs.”
    Kevin Gutzman Right, they’re sheep.
    Special sheep with all the constitutional rights of individuals that they are capable of exercising–as I enumerated in my original post. The only one they don’t have is, “coincidentally,” the one the Democratic Party doesn’t want them to have.
    From Dred Scott to present, that’s the way Democratic Party “constitutionalism” works.
    Tokyo Tom “Of course corporations have the same rights as people. A corporation is not a tangible thing. It is an abstract term describing a group of organized individuals/people.”Balderdash on a stick, that we are reminded of in the cases of BP and Fukushima. Show me any individuals without a government-made liability shield who could do the damage that corporations (and governments do). Where are the mass torts? The Superfund sites?

    Individuals, business partnerships and coops can all be kept in check (to a significantly greater degree) by others in the communities in which they live.

    http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/quot-biggest…/

    Kevin Gutzman Tokyo Tom, I got off at “Senator Joe Barton.”
    Tokyo Tom State-made corporations are the health of the massive regulatory state, which is likewise the health of the crony corporations. It’s a rachet, and racket.
    Are you a Bootlegger, or a Baptist?
    Tokyo Tom Let’s look more at BP as a “person”:|

    • Jim Hightower:
      “And now, its rap sheet grows almost daily. In fact, the Center for Public Integrity has revealed that the oil giant’s current catastrophic mess should come as no surprise, for it has a long and sorry record of causing calamities. In the last three years, the center says, an astonishing “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” came at BP facilities. These included 760 violations rated as “egregious” and “willful.” In contrast, the oil company with the second-worst record had only eight such citations.
      While its CEO, Tony Hayward, claims that its gulf blowout was simply a tragic accident that no one could’ve foreseen, internal corporate documents reveal that BP itself had been struggling for nearly a year with its inability to get this well under control. Also, it had been willfully violating its own safety policies and had flat out lied to regulators about its ability to cope with what’s delicately called a major “petroleum release” in the Gulf of Mexico.

      “What the hell did we do to deserve this?” Hayward asked shortly after his faulty well exploded. Excuse us, Tony, but you’re not the victim here — and this disaster is not the work of fate. Rather, the deadly gusher in the gulf is a direct product of BP’s reckless pursuit of profits. You waltzed around environmental protections, deliberately avoided installing relatively cheap safety equipment, and cavalierly lied about the likelihood of disaster and your ability to cope with it.

      “It wasn’t our accident,” the CEO later declared, as oil was spreading. Wow, Tony, in one four-word sentence, you told two lies. First, BP owns the well, and it is your mess. Second, the mess was not an “accident,” but the inevitable result of hubris and greed flowing straight from BP’s executive suite.
      “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” Hayward told the media, trying to sidestep the fact that BP’s mess was fast becoming America’s worst oil calamity. Indeed, Tony coolly explained that the amount of oil spewing from the well “is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” This flabbergasting comment came only two weeks before it was revealed that the amount of gushing oil was 19 times more than BP had been claiming.
      Eleven oil workers are dead, thousands of Gulf Coast people have had their livelihoods devastated and unfathomable damage is being done to the gulf ecology. Imagine how the authorities would be treating the offender if BP were a person. It would’ve been put behind bars long ago — if not on death row.
      [link above, past the Joe Barton part]

      And here’s a couple of fun video clips riffing on the nature of the unaccountability of corporate/BP execs (not to mention the absentee shareholders, “protected by limited liability” who are themselves “victims”):

      http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/satire-oil-spill…/
      http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/time-light-humor…/

      Tokyo Tom Corporations are “Special sheep with all the constitutional rights of individuals that they are capable of exercising,” Kevin?
      Hah. Try limited liability for one.
      http://archive.freecapitalists.org/…/speech-and…

      Tokyo Tom Corporations are the Health of the State. Is this why you and other good “conservatives” cheer them on, Kevin?
      http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=health+of+state
      Tokyo Tom Timothy, can I recommend you look at well-known Republican shareholder activist Robert Monks, and “drone corporations”?
      The most abusive crony corporations tend to be a low-performing bunch of listed firms, with no significant shareholder blocs:
      http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=drone+corporation

      Tokyo Tom Stacey, yes, my problem is with “corporatism” and how government-made corporations are the hand-maiden of both the snowballing state, crony capitalism, and confused people across the spectrum bewailing or defending “capitalism!” and “free markets”. is the natural result of governments creating Btw,
      1. BP is half Amoco, and ofc operates in the US through subsidiaries. Did you miss this in my quote? In the period just before 2010, “an astonishing “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” came at BP facilities. These included 760 violations rated as “egregious” and “willful.” In contrast, the oil company with the second-worst record had only eight such citations.”

      2. They “are sorry individuals, should they not have rights?”

      Which “they” are you talking about, and for what purposes? If you are talking about “speech”,” then in the case of BP, who is it who is speaking, and for whom? Who speaks for workers killed? Shareholders? Management? Who are the principals, and who are the agents?

      Every individual in BP/connected to BP retains personal rights to speak, and can form voluntary groups to do so if they wish–the doctrine Kevin is pushing is a socialist/collectivist one that DENIES individual accountability and and MASKS self-interest, thus forcing those who interact with or are affected by BP into a position where, since individual accountability is near-impossible, to seek government assistance in getting at least some collective responsibility, but little private redress — very little of whatever the government ends up collecting from BP will actually trickle down, and individuals will remain beholden to the government and to BP for risk management going forward, rather than having direct rights.

      See my above clips on BP cats and the Clarke and Dawe spoof for light takes on unaccountability and who speaks for whom.

      Kevin Gutzman Tom, you have got to be kidding. The reason Obama wants to muzzle corporations is so that he can take more of our money and give it to his constituents, invite more Guatemalans to come here and become his constituents, etc. He sees them as an obstacle, and so he wants to undo American legal precedent dating all the way back to the days when a ratifier of the Constitution was chief justice of the Supreme Court. And you say that I am the one who is pushing statism. Since the Revolution of 1937, there has never been a time when the Democratic Party stood for originalism in constitutional interpretation; they always argue for new, unknown doctrines that advance redistribution, secularization, etc. This new idea that corporations don’t have the rights of individuals is more of the same.
      Tokyo Tom The purpose of the First Amendment was to protect we the people from acts of the Federal government, NOT to protect state-created corporations from the governments and people who make them.The Federal government, this time through the Supreme Court, continues to play the role of helping elites, through state-created corporations, to destroy free markets and local representative government.

      I’m sorry to see so many deluded “conservative” cheerleaders for this.

      Tokyo Tom The answer to the following question is “NO”: [Does it make any sense to treat corporations as “persons”, given the differences in incentive structures?]
      http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/sense-treat…/
      • Kevin Gutzman Give me a break. The new argument that government can regulate corporate purchases of political advertizing is entirely about protecting incumbents from criticism. McCain said so, explicitly.
        Kevin Gutzman If you think advertizing against Obama is “destroying free markets,” we speak different languages.
      • Tokyo Tom Whip conflation now, Kevin. Try addressing my actual arguments.
      • Kevin Gutzman Show me where the Constitution gives Congress power to regulate purchases of political ads by corporations. You can’t, because it doesn’t. The argument that it does is based on the “reading” of the Commerce Clause invented by Klansman Black and his fellow FDR political hacks in the 1930s. It’s completely contrary to the 10th Amendment.
      • Tokyo Tom I’m not a fan of the Feds regulating anything, Kevin. But the states that make corporations sure as hell have a right to limit what they can do in exchange for very special privileges granted.
      • Tokyo Tom But I already addressed the First Ad several times upthread. Corporations are THINGS, not people. Things don’t “speak”, at least for Constitutional purposes.
      • Tokyo Tom My argument doesn’t refer to the absurd Commerce clause jurisprudence at all.
      • Tokyo Tom “The new argument that government can regulate corporate purchases of political advertizing is entirely about protecting incumbents from criticism.”
        I am sure that this IS the case now, but the argument against allowing corporations to speak (why does NYT get special treatment?) is 100+ years old — pretty sure I copied in a Teddy Roosevelt quote upthread.But you’re a HISTORIAN; you know this already.

        • Stacey York Morris States that “make” corporations? Huh?
        • Tokyo Tom Stacey, yes. Surely you’re aware of “corporation laws”, and checked out the Dartmouth case (rare exception of a one-off corporation made by King George). Corporations are creatures of governments — there are NO “free market” corporations.
        • Tokyo Tom The American Taliban is alive and well in “conservatives” who reflexively defend as “free markets” the corporatism that has always fuelled the “Progressive” movement.
          We have our own Sunni and Shia, battling over who gets to control the State:http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/state…/
          http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/dysfunction…/

          Stacey York Morris States don’t create corporations. They tax them but thats not creation. I’m a teeny corporation and trust me, the state did nothing. States don’t have the right to silence them one bit. They do court them but that’s because they bring jobs for their state and lots of tax money. States like Maryland and California blackmail and harass them to death. Charge them for infrastructure and tax them at the federal rate which is highest in world, so they may find a state that is more friendly, but that’s not “creating” them. King George wasn’t a capitalist.
          Tokyo Tom Stacey, unfortunately you’re sounding more like a liberal all the time, with the wrinkle that they deny that governments make corporations because it’s their view that the evil aspects of corporations are due to “capitalism” and “greed”, while with you it’s a desire to defend “free markets” from “greedy” and “grasping” GOVERNMENTS (did you NOT read the Sheldon Richman piece that you posted above)?Undeniably, corporations are made by governments; the fact that governments have, via a race to the bottom have “democratized” the process doesn’t change its nature. Rather, it simply masks the deep roots of corporatism and the reasons for the regulatory state.

          I explained this upthread already, with excerpts from this blog post:

          http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/…/corporations…/

          • Brett Sylvester ^ Funny how advocates of free markets can perfectly predict the property norms that would arise in the absence of a sate…
          • Tokyo Tom Brett, if you’re talking to me, I fail to see how you’re addressing anything I’ve said.
            Propertyrights continuously evolve in all societies, as technology, demand, mores and institutions change.So?

          • Tokyo Tom Jeff, focus. We’re only talking about the corporate form – which is undeniably a creature of governments and not free markets. Our Founding Fathers all knew this, and detested the Crown’s corporations/monopolies - does the original Tea Party not ring a bell?
            But you raise an important issue - the deep entanglement of government with business that flows from government creation of corporate forms is what underlies people bashing “business” and “capitalism” when they mean corporatism, as well as why they think governments have rights to micromanage business.
            • Kevin Gutzman I reference specific provisions of the Constitution, and Tom invokes proto-fascist Theodore Roosevelt. Non sequitur.
            • Kevin Gutzman I agree that states have a right to regulate corporate behavior. I oppose the Incorporation Doctrine.
              Kevin Gutzman Since a corporation’s holdings are the pooled property of its shareholders, yes, it has fiduciary responsibility for the property to which they have a natural right. That’s why in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), Chief Justice Marshall spoke of the shareholders’ rights in considering the College’s claims.
              • Kevin Gutzman Some corporate crimes lead to incarceration of officers, some don’t.
                The reasons there’s a move to deny that corporations have rights are two: 1) that some politicians don’t like being criticized, and so want to ban corporations from contributing to campaigns against them (as McCain said in explaining the McCain-Feingold Law); and 2) that there’s a general tendency for the Federal Government to deny all rights as they come to mind, and Citizens United brought this particular set to mind.
              • Tokyo Tom “I reference specific provisions of the Constitution, and Tom invokes proto-fascist Theodore Roosevelt. Non sequitur.”Hah. The historian can’t recall or research the history of his own thread.

                Kevin, you said “The new argument that government can regulate corporate purchases of political advertizing [sic] is entirely about protecting incumbents from criticism”; I didn’t disagree as to Dem motives now, but simply said “the argument against allowing corporations to speak (why does NYT get special treatment?) is 100+ years old” and referred to your proto-fascist Teddy Roosevelt.

              • Tokyo Tom “I agree that states have a right to regulate corporate behavior. I oppose the Incorporation Doctrine.”Glad we agree on the first point; on the second, with the exception of Citizens United (on the First Amendment), much of the history of extending Constitutional rights to corporate “persons” has been of “Incorporation” — viz., making the Bill of Rights applicable to state and local governments through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Corporations now have fourth amendment safeguards against unreasonable regulatory searches; fifth amendment double jeopardy and liberty rights; and sixth and seventh amendment entitlements to trial by jury.

                You oppose these extensions to state-made corporations, presumably, Kevin?

                Then you also OPPOSE the Supreme Court’s SUMMARY extension of its new First Amendment doctrine to the STATES via the 14th Ad “Incorporation” doctrine, in the 2012 Montana case, American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock?

                If you are, then I commend you — other than your failure to point it out to people on this thread.

                http://thehill.com/…/234515-supreme-court-reaffirms…

              • Tokyo Tom Brett: “You’re claiming that society would necessarily not be ordered in a certain wayin the absence of a state, when there’s no reason that it couldn’t be.”No, I’m not; I’m just saying that corporations are made by governments and have rights granted by governments, and observing that these are rights that you and I don’t have — owners of unincorporated businesses don’t have limited liability to persons who they may injure, we die, etc.

                As Marshall said in Dartmouth: “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it either expressly or as incidental to its very existence.”

              • Tokyo Tom “in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), Chief Justice Marshall spoke of the shareholders’ rights in considering the College’s claims.”

                You speak with great authority of matters that Marshall doesn’t address in his opinion. His chief point is to determine that the grant of Dartmouth’s charter was a CONTRACT among the Crown, the founders (donors) and Trustees — not a trust with fiduciary obligations:
                “This is plainly a contract to which the donors, the Trustees, and the Crown (to whose rights and obligations New Hampshire succeeds) were the original parties. It is a contract made on a valuable consideration. It is a contract for the security and disposition of property. It is a contract on the faith of which real and personal estate has been conveyed to the corporation. It is, then, a contract within the letter of the Constitution, and within its spirit also ….”
                http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17/518…

              • Tokyo Tom “The 14th Amendment applies to Americans.”
                Due Process and Equal Protection apply to “persons” (there were plenty of non-naturalized Chinese, and the Amendment also had to clarify state and federal citizenship), which is how railroad and other corporations have been able to escape the states and capture the feds.
              • Tokyo Tom “The reasons there’s a move to deny that corporations have rights are two:”And then there are those who want to breathe real meaning back into “federalism” and states rights, and to end the conflation of corporation=business and crony capitalism=capitalism. 

                The key to regaining control over our lives from Big Brother and Big Corporations isn’t the Federal government, but by reining in corporations/revising corporation laws state-by-state.

              • Tokyo Tom HEY THREAD FOLLOWERS —

                Kevin indicated above that, because he opposes the 14th Amendment “Incorporation Doctrine,” he “agree[s] that states have a right to regulate corporate behavior.”
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My Profile

August 28th, 2013 No comments

Below is my old profile, from when this blog was hosted at The Ludwig von Mises Institute.  Now, I consider myself more of an anarcho-pragmatist.

I was raised Red in a Blue state where people didn’t question each other’s patriotism, knew that the Dems were more hawkish than the Republicans, and that outside the navel of the city there was a marvelous world that both beckoned and often rained on you. Those scars still linger.

I confess to being an idealistic paleocon/libertarian who loves the country of the majestic purple mountains and fruited plains that stretches between two shining seas. The best way to protect that country is to remember that we will be happier if we rely on ourselves and each other rather than on government. Unfortunately, this requires eternal suspicion about the use of government, insistence on transparency and accountability, and vigilance to safeguard all checks and balances, in the hopes of minimizing both governmental power and the opportunity of insiders to misuse it and to broker benefits to powerful special interests.

Caveat: I suppose I am rather beyond the pale (though a nice pale ale would do fine, thank you) because I don’t believe that the best initial reaction to environmental issues is to curse “enviros” as being “misanthropes” who hate mankind and are itching for most of us to die. Rather, I share their concern for the health of our home and note that there are real and critical issues relating to the lack of clear and enforceable property rights to any number of important resources – including the atmosphere and oceans. While I prefer where possible to strengthen property rights and tort law protections against pollution, rather than trying to have federal regulation for everything, I also realize that for certain cases our shared tool of government may serve productive or even essential purposes.

PS: I live and work in Tokyo as a lawyer. PPS: Those of you who have not yet joined The Austrian Network cannot see my email posted to the left, so please note that I can be reached at my Gmail account under the username “TokyoTomSr”.

http://archive.freecapitalists.org/members/TokyoTom/default.aspx

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IF the Planet's First-Ever Human-Precipitated Mass-Extinction is Underway, So What? || A dialogue between Libertarians

January 31st, 2013 No comments

I just stumbled across an old post and comment thread, that I thought some might find worth pondering, so am cross-posting it here.

*   *   *

Planet’s First-Ever Mass-Extinction Precipitated by Humans

Should we be alarmed at the current massive die-offs being noted in the animal and plant kingdoms? After all, new species arise and old species die off all the time. Its just nature taking its course, right? Not necessarily. What’s different about this die-off is that this is the only such event precipitated by a biotic agent: humans.

read more | digg story

9 Comments:

Blogger James Rothfeld said…

Wrong. One of the largest extinctions in the history of our earth was when oxygen from photosynthetic life forms began to reach levels that were toxic for anaerobic life forms. Granted, the victims were mostly bacteria and some other simple life forms, but – extinction is extinction.

So, humans are not the first biotic agent to lead to massive extinctions.

4/23/2009 01:43:00 AM
Blogger TokyoTom said…

James, thanks for honoring me with a visit and comment.

Of course, I mainly blog at LVMI – http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/ – and I`m not really quite sure what I did that caused this post (which is the intro to a longer piece that I didn`t write) to go up, but in any case I appreciate the engagement.

You have a valid point about the great switch from anaerobic to aerobic life, which many people seem to forget about, but:

– obviously the main comparison is which other great extinction events (caused by meteors/ volcanic/ climate events) that affected complex vertebrate and other life, not archaea or bacteria;

– the event you speak of actually CONTRIBUTED to the development of more complex life;

– there is plenty of anaerobic life still around and being discovered (even in rocks miles down), and we really have very little idea as to whether the switch to aerobic life caused any kind of massive loss of anaerobic species; and

– what we are now doing to the oceans – via “dead zones” resulting from fertilizer run-off and further changes expected from warming and pH changes will result in areas not “dead”, but occupied by less complex anaerobic bacterial communities.

4/23/2009 03:20:00 AM
Blogger James Rothfeld said…

Now you are weaseling out, Tom! You did not specify that you were only referring to complex vertebrae, but only seemed to talk about extinctions in general. I think this is arbitrary and obfuscates the point: the point is that extinctions are caused by all kinds of events, and at the time of the event, they are not horrible for most life forms (horrible being a function of going extinct).

The argument that the aerobic extinction contributed to more complex life forms does not really get us anywhere, since there is no reason to assume that higher life could not emerge out of anaerobic life. What can be said is that the aerobic extinction contribute to the emergence of complex aerobic life, but that’s simply proving the assumption, or whatever logical fallacy we are dealing with here. The likely reason anaerobic life is rather simple these days is that it is forced to live in rather confined environs, including the gut of aerobic life.

The world’s oceans seem to have passed through a number of anoxic events, and those life forms that made it through the malaise probably did quite nicely as competition was greatly reduced. I’m sure life as such will make it quite nicely through the next one as well. Whether we humans will make it through it remains to be seen, though I am actually quite optimistic (pessimistic??) that they will. In smaller numbers, but nonetheless.

I think it is too early to judge whether or not the current extinction will in fact be a disaster. I am in fact not even convinced we are really going through a particularly dramatic extinction – the claim about dozens or even hundreds of species going extinct is based on some pretty speculative reasoning.

As far as I know, there have only been about 300 or so documented extinctions in the last few centuries. I also don’t think the the extinction of species limited to very small local habitats should really be counted: if the only place you can find a particular animal is a small island or a specific mountain, I suggest the species is done for no matter what.

I also don’t think that anybody has yet established a relationship between species extinction and human survival (and don’t start with the buffalos – the populations at First Contact were human artifacts).

But, back to the dead-zones in the oceans: I am amused that few ecologists have yet made the link between agricultural subsidies and fertilizer run-off. The link is so blatant and in your face, this oversight is almost telling.

In any case, I came by your blog because that’s where clicking on your name at Crash Landing gets me.

Best,

JR

4/23/2009 06:32:00 AM
Blogger TokyoTom said…

James, I was not weaselling out, but expanding on a point that you also acknowledged: “Granted, the victims were mostly bacteria and some other simple life forms.”

The fact that remains that if there is a wave of extinctions underway as a result of the rise of opportunistic and technological man (with various man-related extinctions starting millenia ago), this is clearly different from prior catastrophic extinctions, which resulted from external physical impacts on the planet. That`s the comparison being made, and reference to the initial shift to oxic life forms is interesting, but irrelevant.

“there have only been about 300 or so documented extinctions in the last few centuries. “

This of course tells us little, since even now we have no comprehensive catalog of life.

“I also don’t think the the extinction of species limited to very small local habitats should really be counted: if the only place you can find a particular animal is a small island or a specific mountain, I suggest the species is done for no matter what.”

I fear you are right as to the “no matter what”, but your conclusion that the extinction of localized species “shouldn`t count” is a value judgment. Good Austrians will recognize that others have equally valid preferences. Biologists and others familiar with the dimishing diversity of life express a deep sense of loss.

4/23/2009 11:50:00 AM
Blogger James Rothfeld said…

Tom – I was just teasing about the weaseling in any case. What I am trying to get at is your last point: whether or not any of this is good or bad is in the eye of the beholder. Every activity has externalities – whether good or bad depends on the judgment of those affected, physically or otherwise, including emotionally.

So, yes, localized species extinction is certainly not good for the species affected or those who care about them. Maybe the world would be a better place with dodos and woolly mammoth in it, but maybe not. Who can tell?

I’m sure nomads think settled societies with their strict geographic borders stink, but farmers have little sympathy for dirty herders and their stomping herds.

Will the world be worse off if the only life forms to survive are those that serve human needs? Aesthetically, I would say no, but then again, those who will live in such a world will hardly miss what they have never known.

I don’t lose sleep because there are no more Aurochs, even though I think they were really amazing animals. I also don’t miss the dinosaurs, though other might differ.

In the end, it’s all a question of preference – and who am I to say that my preferences are any more worthwhile than those of others.

Here’s another question I was wondering about, by the way, and it’s serious – if a change in technology would bring about economic ruin for a particular region and its population, simply because it would make their only product useless, would the inventor/users of this technology have to compensate the people who were damaged? Would the users of word processing software have to compensate print employees for lost jobs? Would users of the internet have to compensate newspaper workers for lost jobs? I’m not being funny, it’s an important question that is directly relevant for the question of property rights in the context of environmental change. I am sure you see the relevance. I have no real answer to this (except gut opinion). Any thoughts?

4/24/2009 05:48:00 AM
Blogger TokyoTom said…

“Maybe the world would be a better place with dodos and woolly mammoth in it, but maybe not. Who can tell?”

I agree completely that this is a question of human judgment. However, we should acknowledge that we are bumping some species off the planet and squeezing others drastically (and many to a completely unknown degree).

“Will the world be worse off if the only life forms to survive are those that serve human needs?”

Are you confident that the species that don`t survive don`t serve human needs? Many we simply have no clue about, while others, such as whales, dodos, passenger pigeons, Steller sea cows and numerous crashed/crashing fisheries have been extinguished and are threatened not because of lack of utility, but simply because nobody owned them.

How much more shall we destroy, for want of investment in property rights/commons management?

” would say no, but then again, those who will live in such a world will hardly miss what they have never known.”

Only partly true, as some of the world that we have been losing has been and will be documented.

“would the inventor/users of this technology have to compensate the people who were damaged?”

Not in a libertarian order. But I fail to see the relevance to “environmental” problems, either those that involve activities that damage the persons or property of others, or damage resources that are communally owned or are owned under regimes that fail to protect the resources. Care to clarify?

5/19/2009 01:04:00 PM
Blogger James Rothfeld said…

My basic point is that every action has effects at least one person would perceive as injurious to their well-being, and would prefer that it rather not happen. If we were to refrain from all such actions, we would probably lose the freedom to act at all. Fundamentally, I want to argue that a ‘negative externality’ that cannot be dealt within a libertarian order has to be simply accepted as a given along the lines of ‘shit happens’.
If we cannot find a non-libertarian solution to an environmental problem, than so be it. That’s my only point. Nothing more, nothing less. Which is why I agree that in a libertarian order it’s your tough luck that you lose your job because somebody else is smarter. It also means that if, for example, people using a specific aquifer cannot agree on a libertarian solution to its management simply have to suck it up. Or that if I live on a nice piece of land with a pretty view, and my neighbor erects an ugly building with garish design elements spoiling my aesthetic enjoyment, I’ll have to suck it up – unless the two of us can agree on a solution.
I think some environmental problems have no libertarian solution. I don’t know which they are, but maybe we simply have to accept that.
For example, there may be no libertarian solution to fighting asteroids about to hit our planet. Maybe we could collectively deal with it, but maybe not enough people can be bothered – or believe in it – and so the few who care simply have to deal with the fact that they will die, well-knowing that a solution was at hand.

To repeat the point: in my hierarchy of needs, freedom comes before security. If the price of freedom is to live in a world that will experience dramatic changes in climate, and if the only way to avoid is were to give up my personal freedom – then I’ll accept the dramatic changes in climate.

That’s my only point.

5/20/2009 09:55:00 AM
Blogger TokyoTom said…

Thanks for the clarifications, James.

I`m not so far away from you, but come to different conclusions: where there are obvious commons problems, those who care about the problem should obviously work to resolve them.

This includes libertarians who are personally most interested in individual freedom, freedom that is imperilled by the state-heavy “solutions” that often underlie the problem (to the benefit of entrenched insiders) in the first place.

Far from leaving the field of battle to others, libertarian ought to be proactively trying to mediate, lest what they value most highly be trampled.

5/20/2009 10:51:00 AM
Blogger James Rothfeld said…

Seems we ran out of disagreements 🙂

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Interesting new research shows that THE key to disaster recovery is the strength of the local community ('social capital'), NOT Government action

June 12th, 2011 No comments

Daniel P. Aldrich is an up-and-coming political scientist who got interested in disaster recovery when New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina a few months after he had moved there with his family.

He has also spent quite a bit of time living and studying in Japan; I ran across him recently in connection with my reading and blogging on post-earthquake, post-tsunami and post-Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster Japan; he’s mentioned prominently in the NYT article excerpted in my preceding post.

According to his bio at Purdue University, Aldrich:

received his Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from Harvard University, an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and his B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Daniel has focused on the ways in which state agencies interact with contentious civil society over the siting of controversial facilities such as nuclear power plants, airports, and dams. His current research investigates how neighborhoods and communities recover from disasters. He has published a number of peer-reviewed articles along with research for general audiences. His research has been funded by grants from the Abe Foundation, IIE Fulbright Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Reischauer Institute at Harvard University, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Harvard’s Center for European Studies. He has been a visiting scholar at the Japanese Ministry of Finance, the Institute for Social Science at Tokyo University, Harvard University, the Tata Institute for Social Science in Mumbai, the Institut d’etudes politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), and the East West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. He has spent more than three years conducting fieldwork in Japan, India and France.

His research and writing on disasters and resilience is very interesting and speaks to the importance of strong communities of the type that governments and their corprate agents frequently do their best to seek to erode. Here is his own description and set of links to that work:

Externalities of Strong Social Capital: Post Tsunami Recovery in Southeast Asia forthcoming in Journal of Civil Society

 

Much research has implied that social capital functions as an unqualified “public good,” enhancing governance, economic performance, and quality of life (Coleman 1988; Cohen and Arato 1992; Putnam 1993; Cohen and Rogers 1995). Scholars of disaster (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004; Adger et al. 2005; Dynes 2005; Tatsuki 2008) have extended this concept to posit that social capital provides nonexcludable benefits to whole communities after major crises. Using qualitative methods to analyze data from villages in Tamil Nadu, India following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, this paper demonstrates that high levels of social capital simultaneously provided strong benefits and equally strong negative externalities, especially to those already on the periphery of society. In these villages, high levels of social capital reduced barriers to collective action for members of the uur panchayats (hamlet councils) and parish councils, speeding up their recovery and connecting them to aid organizations, but at the same time reinforced obstacles to recovery for women, Dalits, migrants, and Muslims. These localized findings have important implications for academic studies of social capital and policy formation for future disasters and recovery schemes.

Social Science Perspectives on Disasters in Perspectives on Politics

In this extended review, I discuss three recent books on disaster: Governing after Crisis: The Politics of Investigation, Accountability, and Learning edited by Arjen Boin, Allan McConnell, and Paul ‘T Hart, Learning from Catastrophes: Strategies for Reaction and Response , edited by Howard Kunreuther and Micheel Useem, and The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters by Charles Perrow. All three books invoke the market and state as core forces at work in mitigation and disaster recovery, overlooking the critical role of social capital.

Separate and Unequal: Post-Tsunami Aid Distribution in Southern India published in Social Science Quarterly

Objective. Disasters are a regular occurrence throughout the world. Whether all eligible victims of a catastrophe receive similar amounts of aid from governments and donors following a crisis remains an open question. Methods. I use data on 62 similarly damaged inland fishing villages in five districts of southeastern India following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to measure the causal influence of caste, location, wealth, and bridging social capital on the receipt of aid. Using two-limit tobit and negative binomial models, I investigate the factors that influence the time spent in refugee camps, receipt of an initial aid packet, and receipt of 4,000 rupees. Results. Caste, family status, and wealth proved to be powerful predictors of beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries during the aid process. Conclusion. While many scholars and practitioners envision aid distribution as primarily a technocratic process, this research shows that discrimination and financial resources strongly affect the flow of disaster aid.

The Power of People: Social Capital’s Role in Recovery from the 1995 Kobe Earthquake forthcoming in Natural Hazards

Despite the regularity of disasters, social science has only begun to generate replicable knowledge about the factors which facilitate post-crisis recovery. Building on the broad variation in recovery rates within disaster-affected cities, I investigate the ability of Kobe’s nine wards to repopulate after the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan. This article uses case studies of neighborhoods in Kobe alongside new time-series, cross-sectional data set to test five variables thought to influence recovery along with the relatively untested factor of social capital. Controlling for damage, population density, economic conditions, inequality and other variables thought important in past research, social capital proves to be the strongest and most robust predictor of population recovery after catastrophe. This has important implications both for public policies focused on reconstruction and for social science more generally.

Fixing Recovery: Social Capital in Post-Crisis Resilience in The Journal of Homeland Security June 2010

Disasters remain among the most critical events which impact residents and their neighborhoods; they have killed far more individuals than high salience issues such as terrorism. Unfortunately, disaster recovery programs run by the United States and foreign governments have not been updated to reflect a new understanding of the essential nature of social capital and networks. I call for a re-orientation of disaster preparedness and recovery programs at all levels away from the standard fixes focused on physical infrastructure towards ones targeting social infrastructure. The reservoirs of social capital and the trust (or lack thereof) between citizens in disaster-affected communities can help us understand why some neighborhoods in cities like Kobe, Japan, Tamil Nadu, India, and New Orleans, Louisiana displayed resilience while others stagnated. Social capital – the engine for recovery – can be deepened both through local initiatives and interventions from foreign agencies.

Aldrich Presentation on 25 March 2010 BUILDING RESILIENCE conference

Despite the clear and present danger from disasters, social scientists have yet to provide strong, quantitative evidence about which factors influence the pace of recovery. Using data from four megadisasters over the 20th and 21st century – the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina – Aldrich argues that social infrastructure is the critical factor in recovery.

The Crucial Role of Civil Society in Disaster Recovery and Japan’s Preparedness for Emergencies in Japan aktuell 3/28

This article is concerned with the empirical puzzle of why certain neighborhoods and localities recover more quickly than others following disasters. It illuminates four mainstream theories of rehabilitation and resilience, and then investigates a neglected factor, namely the role of social networks and civil society. Initial analyses underscore the important role of trust and connectivity among local residents in the process of rebuilding. After examining the role of civil society in Japan’s preparedness for emergencies, the article concludes with some policy recommendations for governments and nongovernmental actors involved in disaster relief.

This paper, entitled the The Need for Comparative Research, was prepared for a conference at the Jamsetji Tata Centre for Disaster Management in February 2008, and sets out some initial ideas which have motivated this project.

Some of Aldrich’s newspaper articles are linked here.

I expect I’ll be commenting further on his work.

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More on the "methane gun"

May 6th, 2011 No comments

This is the End blog, March 30, 2011: “It is High Time to Warn People”: Igor Semiletov and the Methane Time-Bomb (Feedback, Part 2) (emphasis added)

What Arrhenius didn’t have data on were the wild cards.  Two such factors are embedded carbon dioxide and methane – greenhouse gases locked by ice into glaciers, the sea-floor, Arctic permafrost and undersea shelves.

As glaciers retreat, and sea-ice disappears—and permafrost melts— both of these gases enter the atmosphere. This in turn raises temperature, which in turn melts permafrost and glaciers more quickly. This is not your parents’ feedback, not Jimi on a Marshall amp. This is bad feedback. An Earth-size headache

The amount of carbon dioxide trapped in the world’s thawing tundra and northern taiga landscapes is estimated at 1.5 trillion tons, more than twice what is currently in the atmosphere. As for methane, it’s a greenhouse gas 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide in trapping solar heat in the short term (over a twenty-year period it’s 72 times as potent).

Igor Semiletov and Natalia Shakhova, two Russian scientists with the International Arctic Research Center, have studied the increasing release of methane from a submerged land mass known as the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS). As temperatures rise in the Arctic and sea-ice disappears, the global warming picture is quickly changing.

“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans,” said Shakhova in aNational Science Foundation (NSF) press release. “Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.” The amount of methane stored in the shelf is estimated at 2,000 gigatons, equal to 250 years of carbon emissions at our current industrial levels of output.

If just one percent of ESAS methane escapes its crystal prison, Semiletov suggested at a geophysical conference in 2008, it might push total methane to 6 parts per million. Some researchers consider this is a tipping point towards ‘runaway climate change.’ If that term doesn’t summon up an image, you can take NASA scientist James Hansen’s suggestion of an “ice-free state” where the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt entirely, raising global sea level by over 200 feet.

“It is high time to warn people,” Semiletov told the conference attendees, but then took a pause, and offered an apologetic smile before adding: “We can do nothing about it, of course.”

The usually staid NSF recently backed up Semiletov in a press release. “Permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is starting to leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”

This idea of a methane “time bomb” is the global warming equivalent of Dr. Strangelove’s Doomsday Machine, that apotheosis of Mutual Assured Destruction that once initiated, can’t be turned off. Even Kennedy and Khrushchev could come to detente during the Cuban Missile Crisis and agree to take their fingers off their red buttons. But you can’t reason with a frozen gas bubble.

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Hmm: Two independent satellite studies show that ice sheets are melting faster than expected by IPCC, and accelerating

May 6th, 2011 No comments

1.  See this March 8, 2011 Washington Post article:

The vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than previously thought, and that melting is accelerating, according to a new report that verifies 18 years of melting via two independent techniques.

Left unchecked, the extra water dumped into the oceans could push average global sea level 6 inches higher by 2050, the report finds. That would mark the ice sheets as the largest contributors to sea level rise, outstripping melting from Earth’s two other huge, frozen reservoirs, mountain glaciers and polar ice caps.

The new estimate of ice sheet melting – and the subsequent rise in sea level – outstrips more modest figures offered by the International Panel on Climate Change in 2007, the last time that international body published a comprehensive assessment of the ice sheets.

Combined, the two ice sheets dumped 475 gigatonnes of ice (which then melted) into the ocean each year. (A gigatonne is one billion metric tons.) Averaged over the 18 years of the study, the ice sheets lost a combined 36 gigatonnes more each year than they had the year before.

A 2006 study found that the melting of mountain glaciers and the polar ice caps was also accelerating, but at a rate about three times slower than that of the ice sheets

2.   See also this more detailed blog post at Things Break: Greenland and Antarctica ice sheet decay update.

3.  But does this mean rapid sea-level rises?  One can’t say for sure, regarding what hasn’t yet melted. But sea levels continue to rise, as confirmed at this skeptical “Watts’ Up With That?” post on May 4, 2011.

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Callahan and Richman have asserted the efficacy of moral suasion in getting people and organizations to change climate behavior; here are two people's efforts to persuade, post-tornado

May 6th, 2011 No comments

I discussed Callahan and Richman at some length previously.

Since I hope they are right, I bring you some comments I recently ran across:

1. Peter H. Gleick, A Cost of Denying Climate Change: Accelerating Climate Disruptions, Death, and Destruction, Huffington Post, April 28, 2011. Gleick is a Water and climate scientist; President of the Pacific Institute, and a MacArthur Fellow.

While I agree with much of what he says, I would note that his headline is off – given the thermal inertia of the oceans, the warming and climate change phenomena were are experiencing now are largely a result of CO2 emissions and other radiative forcings decades ago, and not a consequence of inaction over the last decade. Those consequences will be felt, but LATER. (I post his piece in its entirety, with his permission; emphasis added.)

Violent tornadoes throughout the southeastern U.S. must be a front-page reminder that no matter how successful climate deniers are in confusing the public or delaying action on climate change in Congress or globally, the science is clear: Our climate is worsening.

More extreme and violent climate is a direct consequence of human-caused climate change (whether or not we can determine if these particular tornado outbreaks were caused or worsened by climate change). There is a reason it isn’t called global warming anymore. Higher temperatures are only one — and not the most worrisome — of the consequences of a changing climate.

Climate science tells us unambiguously that we are changing the climate and trapping more energy on the planet. Trapping more energy will cause more extreme events and worsen extreme events that would otherwise happen.

In the climate community, we call this “loading the dice.” Rolling loaded dice weighted toward more extreme and energetic weather means more death and destruction. And it is only going to get worse and worse, faster and faster, the longer our politicians dither and delay and deny. Climate deniers who have stymied action in Congress and confused the public — like the tobacco industry did before them — need to be held accountable for their systematic misrepresentation of the science, their misuse and falsification of data, and their trickery.

The conservative (and economically driven) insurance industry understands the reality of data and observations: Munich Re (one of the world’s leading reinsurers) has said:

“The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change. The view that weather extremes are more frequent and intense due to global warming coincides with the current state of scientific knowledge.”

The extreme nature of the ongoing severe weather is well described by Jeff Masters on his Weather Blog. The 3-day total of preliminary tornado reports from this week’s outbreak is nearing 300, close to the 323 preliminary tornado reports logged during the massive April 14 – 16 tornado outbreak. That outbreak has 155 confirmed tornadoes so far, making it the largest April tornado outbreak on record.

Of course, tornado outbreaks have occurred before. In 1974 and 1965, collections of tornados killed hundreds of people. But according to NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center, it is unprecedented to have two such massive tornado outbreaks occur so close together. Loading the dice. At least 11 of these tornadoes were killer tornadoes; deaths occurred in six states. (Wikipedia maintains an excellent and growing compilation of historical tornado outbreaks for those interested, and raw data can be obtained from NOAA.) Only two other tornado outbreaks have had as many as 150 twisters — the May 2004 outbreak (385), and the May 2003 outbreak (401).

And it is not just the devastating tornadoes: parts of the Mississippi River are about to experience record flooding. As spring rain joins with winter snowmelt, a massive pulse of floodwater is moving south. As it joins with the record water levels coming out of the Ohio River it is expected to create the highest flood heights ever recorded on the Mississippi, according to the latest forecasts from the National Weather Service.

Yet while we call this a “1-in-a-100 year” flood event, that term is losing its meaning. The August 1993 flood event was a “1-in-a-500 year” event. Yet in June 2008 there was another such event. Now, three years later, we see another massive flood on the Mississippi, and record floods elsewhere. Loading the dice. As FEMA’s director, Craig Fugate, noted in December, “The term ‘100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year.” And that was last year.

The science community knows that we’re affecting the climate; in turn, that will affect the weather; and that, in turn, will affect humans: with death, injury, and destruction. There is a cost to tackling climate change, but there is a real, growing, and far larger cost of continuing to deny it.

 

2.  Lou Grinzo has an edgier reaction to Peter Gelick at his blog, also on April 28. Grinzo is Writer and editor of the blog, The Cost of Energy, 2004-present. He was a software programmer, designer, tester, IBM, 1980-1989; is a programmer, writer, editor, and consultant, 1989-present. In addition, he is author of Zen of Windows 95 Programming, Columnist and Contributing Editor, Windows Magazine, Columnist, features author, and Reviews Editor, Linux Magazine and Editor, LinuxProgramming.com.

I don’t agree entirely with Grinzo, as I think much proposed climate policy has been counterproductive, inefficient and/or unprincipled. But I can sympathize with where he’s coming from, even as I think that his anger is more productive channelled into different approaches – such as at freeing energy markets specifically or reining in corporate statism arising from the grant of limited liaibility more generally.

Peter, whom I know somewhat from an e-mail group we both belong to, is far too decent a person to put the ragged and rusty edge on this issue that it deserves. Not being so burdened by politeness, I’ll do it.

Did you enjoy what happened yesterday in the US South, when blissful reality was shredded by the brute force physics of our atmosphere and hundreds of people died horrible deaths, many hundreds more were injured, and millions were terrified because they just happened to live too close this climatic ground zero? Did you like watching houses and businesses and possessions being ground into so many tons of rubble? Did you?

No, of course you didn’t enjoy it, because it was a sickening nightmare from which none of us could awake. What reasonable human being could have liked it? That unremarkable observation leads inexorably and directly to one question: If you’re not fighting as hard as you can to keep such situations — and hurricanes and crushing heat waves and floods and droughts and inundated coasts thanks to sea level rise — from happening much more often and with much more devastating effects in the coming decades, then you’re failing miserably as a responsible adult and member of society. You’re nothing more than the equivalent of an underage drunk driver who endangers everyone around him because he’s too selfish to stop doing what he wants in order to serve his own best interests as well as those of others around him.

You’re telling the world that rather than do your part you want to keep flying to vacation spots, keep driving your much larger than needed/less fuel efficient vehicle, keep running your home electronics for many hours a week when no one is even using them, keep refusing to change your bloody light bulbs because you claim you “don’t like the light from those new ones”, etc. The timing is different, the individual acts are different, but the lack of maturity, the toxic mix of ignorance and arrogance, and the utter insanity of such destructive behavior are the same.

So make sure the next time there’s a heat wave in Russia that kills tens of thousands of people, or a devastating flood in Pakistan, or tornadoes or hurricanes ripping up parts of the US or some other unlucky spot, or another country violently slips closer to or into being a failed state and suddenly becomes newsworthy, that you switch your immense screen TV from the latest reality show or NASCAR event for a few moments to watch the highlights on the news. It’s the least you could do.

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Have we already pulled the trigger on the methane gun? As Arctic warms, surprisingly large and uncontrollable releases of methane (much more potent than CO2) are growing from massive shallow seabed deposits and permafrost

May 6th, 2011 No comments

1.  Wikipedia, Clathrate gun hypothesis (emphasis added):

The clathrate gun hypothesis is the popular name given to the hypothesis that rises in sea temperatures (and/or falls in sea level) can trigger the sudden release of methane from methane clathrate compounds buried in seabeds and permafrost which, because the methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas, leads to further temperature rise and further methane clathrate destabilization – in effect initiating a runaway process as irreversible, once started, as the firing of a gun. …

 

2.  Skeptical Science, Wakening the Kraken, April 23, 2011:

a major study in Science that found the vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores appeared to be destabilizing and venting.  The normally staid National Science Foundation issued a press release warning “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”

Now there is a new Geophysical Research Letters study on a paleoclimate analog that may be relevant to humanity today, “Methane and environmental change during the Paleocene‐Eocene thermal maximum (PETM): Modeling the PETM onset as a two‐stage event.” …

We know that in the past there have been sudden changes in global warming associated with releases of greenhouse gases.  These rapid, massive releases were characterised by unusualdeficiency in carbon isotope 13 (∂13C ) and massive extinction of animals, most recently at the time of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), about 55.8 million years ago. …

The description of Stage 2:  Very rapid and massive release of carbon deficient in ∂13C, does put one in mind of the Methane Gun hypothesis. It postulates that methane clathrate at shallow depth begins melting and through the feed-back process accelerate atmospheric and oceanic warming, melting even larger and deeper clathrate deposits.  The result:  A relatively sudden massive venting of methane – the firing of the Methane Gun.  Recent discovery by Davy et al (2010) of kilometer-wide (ten 8-11 kilometer and about 1,000 1-kilometer-wide features) eruption craters on the Chatham Rise seafloor off New Zealand adds further ammunition to the Methane Gun hypothesis.

It has been known for many years that methane is being emitted from Siberian swamplands hitherto covered by permafrost, trapping an estimated 1,000 billion tons of methane.  Permafrost on land is now seasonally melting and with each season melting it at greater depth, ensuring that each year methane venting from this source increases.

Methane clathrate has accumulated over the East Siberian continental shelf where it is covered by sediment and seawater up to 50 meters deep.  An estimated 1,400 billion tons of methane is stored in these deposits.  By comparison, total human greenhouse gas emissions (including CO2) since 1750 amount to some 350 billion tons.

Significant methane release can occur when on-shore permafrost is thawed by a warmer atmosphere (unlikely to occur in significance on less than a century timescale) and undersea clathrate at relatively shallow depths is melted by warming water.  This is now occurring. In both cases, methane gas bubbles to the surface with little or no oxidation, entering the atmosphere as CH4 – a powerful greenhouse gas which increases local, then Arctic atmospheric and ocean temperature, resulting in progressively deeper and larger deposits of clathrate melting.

Methane released from deeper deposits such as those found off Svalbard has to pass through a much higher water column (>300 meters) before reaching the surface.  As it does so, it oxidises to CO2, dissolving in seawater or reaching the atmosphere as CO2 which causes far slower warming, but can nevertheless contribute to ocean acidification.

A significant release of methane due to melting of the vast deposits trapped by permafrost and clathrate in the Arctic would result in massive loss of oxygen, particularly in the Arctic ocean but also in the atmosphere.  Resulting hypoxic conditions would cause large extinctions, especially of water breathing animals, which is what we find at the PETM.

Shakhova et al (2010) reports that the continental shelf of East Central Siberia (ECS), with an area of over 2 million km2, is emitting more methane than all other ocean sources combined.  She calculates that methane venting from the ECS is now in the order of 8 million tons per annum and increasing.  This equates to ~200 million tons/annum of CO2, more than the combined CO2 emissions of Scandinavia and the Benelux countries in 2007.  This methane is likely sourced from non-hydrate methane previously kept in place by thin and now melting permafrost at the sea bed, melting clathrates, or some combination of both.

Release of ECS methane is already contributing to Arctic amplification resulting in temperature increase exceeding twice the global average.  The rate of release from the tundra alone is predicted to reach 1.5 billion tons of carbon per annum before 2030, contributing to accelerated climate change, perhaps resulting in sustained decadal doubling of ice loss causing collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet (Hansen et al, 2011).  This would result in a possible sea level rise of ~5 meters before 2100, according to Hansen et al.

Evidence supports the theory that sudden and massive releases of greenhouse gases, including methane, caused decade-scale climate changes – with consequent species extinctions – culminating in the Holocene Thermal Optimum.

In summary, immense quantities of methane clathrate have been identified in the Arctic.  Were a fraction of these to melt, the result would be massive release of carbon, initially as CH4 causing deeper clathrate to melt and oxidise, adding CO2 to the atmosphere.  Were this to occur, it would greatly worsen global warming.

While natural global warming during the ice ages was initiated by increased solar radiation caused by cyclic changes to Earth’s orbital parameters, there is no evident mechanism for correcting Anthropogenic Global Warming over the next several centuries.  The latter has already begun producing methane and CO2 in the Arctic, starting a feedback process which may lead to uncontrollable, very dangerous global warming, akin to that which occurred at the PETM.

This extremis we ignore – to our peril.

– Agnostic & Daniel Bailey

3.  Joe Romm, Climate Progress, April 25, 2011

Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle (see “NSIDC bombshell: Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100“).

It is worth noting that no climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra. Indeed the NSIDC/NOAA study I wrote about in February on methane release by the land-based permafrost itself doesn’t even incorporate the carbon released by the permafrost carbon feedback into its warming model!

4.  Doc alert: Siberian methane (Jan 14, 2011)

 5. Joe Romm, Climate Progress, Paleoclimate data suggests CO2 “may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models”, January 13, 2011

Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle.  The permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane.  Methane is  is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!  The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“).  Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below).  No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.

6.  Joe Romm, Climate Progress, Science stunner: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and ventingScience: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting:  NSF issues world a wake-up call: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.” March 4, 2010

Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle. Research published in Friday’s journal Science finds a key “lid” on “the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir” near Eastern Siberia “is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH4 [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere.”

 … the situation in the ESAS is far, far more dicey, as NSF explains:

 

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, in addition to holding large stores of frozen methane, is more of a concern because it is so shallow. In deep water, methane gas oxidizes into carbon dioxide before it reaches the surface. In the shallows of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane simply doesn’t have enough time to oxidize, which means more of it escapes into the atmosphere. That, combined with the sheer amount of methane in the region, could add a previously uncalculated variable to climate models.

“The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times,” Shakhova said. “The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict.”

And we also know that a key trigger for accelerated warming in the Arctic region is the loss of sea ice.

A 2008 study by leading tundra experts found “Accelerated Arctic land warming and permafrost degradation during rapid sea ice loss.” The lead author is David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), whom I interviewed for my book and interviewed again via e-mail in 2008. The study’s ominous conclusion:

We find that simulated western Arctic land warming trends during rapid sea ice loss are 3.5 times greater than secular 21st century climate-change trends. The accelerated warming signal penetrates up to 1500 km inland….

In other words, a continuation of the recent trend in sea ice loss may triple Arctic warming, causing large emissions in carbon dioxide and methane from the tundra this century.

Oh, and the Arctic warming could lead to another feedback according to a 2008 Science article:  “Continuation of current trends in shrub and tree expansion could further amplify this atmospheric heating 2-7 times.”  The point is that if you convert a white landscape to a boreal forest, the surface suddenly starts collecting a lot more solar energy (see “Tundra 3: Forests and fires foster feedbacks“).

 

 

“Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already,” she said. “If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.”

NSF explains:

“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans,” said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center. “Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.”

 

 

 

Shakhova notes that the Earth’s geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters (164 feet) or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth’s history. During the Earth’s coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the Earth warms and sea level rises, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.

“It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen,” Shakhova said. “Nobody considered this huge area.”

The hardest of the hard core climate geeks (and we all know who we are) probably recognize the name Natalia Shakhova. She’s a Research Assistant Professor working with the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and is probably best know to people of our ilk for her work involving Siberian methane deposits. She gave a presentation at a US Dept. of Defense symposium and workshop last November, and it (and others from the event) are online.

Dr. Shakhova’s presentation is titled “Methane Release from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) and the Potential for Abrupt Climate Changes”, and you can download it in PDF format from the event’s site.

Based on that title and the things I write about here (and by “write about” you can substitute “obsess over”, if you’re feeling a need for unflinching accuracy), you’ve probably figured out that this is yet another unsettling collection of data about methane. A couple of tidbits to show that such a conclusion would be accurate, even without the benefit of context (emphasis in the original):

[Slide 34]

Interpretation of acoustical data recorded with deployed multibeam sonar allowed moderate quantification of bottom fluxes as high as 44 g/m2/d (Leifer et al., in preparation). Prorating these numbers to the areas of hot spots (210×103 km2) adds 3.5Gt to annual methane release from the ESAS. This is enough to trigger abrupt climate change (Archer, 2005).

[Slide 38, one bullet taken from the conclusion]

Considering the significance of the ESAS methane reservoir and enhancing mechanism of its destabilization, this region should be considered the most potential in terms of possible climate change caused by abrupt release of methane.

Methane (CH4) deserves attention it is such a highly potent greenhouse gas — 25-33 times more powerful than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year time-horizon, but as much as 100 time more potent over 20 years, according to the latest research!

Last year I reported on a major study in Science that found the vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores appeared to be destabilizing and venting.  The normally staid National Science Foundation issued a press release warning “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.” …

Most deposits of methane clathrate are in sediments too deep to respond rapidly, and modelling by Archer (2007) suggests the methane forcing should remain a minor component of the overall greenhouse effect.[10] Clathrate deposits destabilize from the deepest part of their stability zone, which is typically hundreds of metres below the seabed. A sustained increase in sea temperature will warm its way through the sediment eventually, and cause the deepest, most marginal clathrate to start to break down; but it will typically take of the order of a thousand years or more for the temperature signal to get through.[10]

One exception, however, may be in clathrates associated with the Arctic ocean, where clathrates can exist in shallower water stabilized by lower temperatures rather than higher pressures; these may potentially be marginally stable much closer to the surface of the sea-bed, stabilized by a frozen ‘lid’ of permafrost preventing methane escape. Recent research carried out in 2008 in the Siberian Arctic has shown millions of tons of methane being released, apparently through perforations in the seabed permafrost,[11] with concentrations in some regions reaching up to 100 times normal.[12][13] The excess methane has been detected in localized hotspots in the outfall of the Lena River and the border between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea. Some melting may be the result of geological heating, but more thawing is believed to be due to the greatly increased volumes of meltwater being discharged from the Siberian rivers flowing north.[14] Current methane release has previously been estimated at 0.5 Mt per year.[15]Shakhova et al. (2008) estimate that not less than 1,400 Gt of carbon is presently locked up as methane and methane hydrates under the Arctic submarine permafrost, and 5–10% of that area is subject to puncturing by open taliks. They conclude that “release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time”. That would increase the methane content of the planet’s atmosphere by a factor of twelve,[16][17] equivalent in greenhouse effect to a doubling in the current level of CO2.

In 2008 the United States Department of Energy National Laboratory system[18] and the United States Geological Survey’s Climate Change Science Program both identified potential clathrate destabilization in the Arctic as one of four most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change, which have been singled out for priority research. The USCCSP released a report in late December 2008 estimating the gravity of this risk.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova’s research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.

Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane.  Methane is  is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!

The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“).  Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below).  No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.

The new Science study, led by University of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Centre and the Russian Academy of Sciences, is “Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf” (subs. req’d).  The must-read National Science Foundation press release (click here), warns “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”  The NSF is normally a very staid organization.  If they are worried, everybody should be.

It is increasingly clear that if the world strays significantly above 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide for any length of time, we will find it unimaginably difficult to stop short of 800 to 1000 ppm. …

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