Social Inertia - Bug or Feature?

Like a bird on wire

I have tried in my way

to be free 

L Cohen

Greetings

    What are we to make of humans?   In 1990, in Kyoto, the world agreed there was problem,.  Since then, CO2 emissions have increased 60 %.  In 2013 they were up over 2%.  

     Are humans rational? 

   Perhaps not.  This (somewhat academic) but highly readable article explores the ways in which psychological and sociological factors interfere with humans ability to address climate change.  Perhaps if we have a better understanding of the problem, We can better address it.

  

"One of the implicit assumptions made by scientists, and activists, has been that human decision making is fundamentally rational when in fact it is highly mediated by emotional and other non-rational factors. Simply putting the facts about climate change forward will not automatically produce the required decisions and behavioral changes. Instead, an individual may become overwhelmed by the sheer scale and complexity of the problem, leading to feelings of helplessness and psychological paralysis. To escape such feelings a person may simply deny or ignore the issue. Schumacher has even proposed that the ability to escape psychological discomfort and pain was a critical evolutionary strategy as human beings developed higher levels of intelligence and self-awareness1. He also posits that the ability to strategically manipulate reality is what has allowed humanity to continue to degrade the very environment upon which it depends for its survival. 

The author notes that even among scientists, presumably the most rational of humans, there is tremendous resistance to accepting data that is not consistent with the then-current paradigm

Even within the scientific realm it has been noted by some that acceptance of a new theory, especially if it undermines current theories, may have more to do with emotions and institutional politics, power, and prestige than reasoned argument⁸.

 See Also Richard Heinberg's  The Climate PR Puzzle where he offers some  ideas of how to change the common paradigm.   In the end, though, he wonders whether the resistance may have a  simple explanation.:

"All animals and plants deal with temporary energy subsidies in basically the same way: the pattern is easily visible in the behavior of songbirds visiting the feeder outside my office window. They eat the seed I’ve provided them until the feeder is empty. They don’t save some for later or discuss the possible impacts of their current rate of consumption. Yes, we humans have language and therefore the theoretical ability to comprehend the likely results of our current collective behavior and alter it accordingly. We exercise this ability in small ways, where the costs of behavior change are relatively trivial—enacting safety standards for new automobiles, for example. But where the costs of behavior change might include a significant loss of competitive advantage or an end to economic growth, we tend to act like finches.

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http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-11-18/social-inertia-in-the-face-of-climate-change



Social Inertia in the face of Climate Change

by Roger Boyd, originally published by Humanity's Test  | NOV 18, 2013

Why is it that human civilization has been unable to take the steps required to forestall the devastating consequences of climate change, which may even include societal collapse, when faced with a scientific consensus that it is a very real phenomenon and requires urgent action? Instead of taking such actions, human societies have continued on a suicidal path with no meaningful actions to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Quite the opposite, such emissions have continued to increase.

One of the implicit assumptions made by scientists, and activists, has been that human decision making is fundamentally rational when in fact it is highly mediated by emotional and other non-rational factors. Simply putting the facts about climate change forward will not automatically produce the required decisions and behavioral changes. Instead, an individual may become overwhelmed by the sheer scale and complexity of the problem, leading to feelings of helplessness and psychological paralysis. To escape such feelings a person may simply deny or ignore the issue. Schumacher has even proposed that the ability to escape psychological discomfort and pain was a critical evolutionary strategy as human beings developed higher levels of intelligence and self-awareness1. He also posits that the ability to strategically manipulate reality is what has allowed humanity to continue to degrade the very environment upon which it depends for its survival.

Individuals and groups construct a mental map of reality to be able to both understand and functionally operate within the world around them. As human society has become more complex the required complexity of this worldview has greatly increased, and the length of time to acquire it has expanded. A large number of social institutions, including the family, church, school, work-place and media channels are involved to differing degrees in providing worldviews which allow individuals to function adequately within modern complex societies. This socialization2 is critical to the ongoing functioning and cohesiveness of any human group, from small hunter-gatherer bands to a modern country with possibly hundreds of millions of citizens. Hound and Hou capture the scale of such efforts, “Indoctrination is, of course, present in every society. The permanence of the values which insure social stability could hardly be maintained unless schools, religious institutions, military organizations, and scores of other associations — both compulsory and voluntary — worked to implant in the minds the ethical norms and behaviour patterns of a social and political culture. The rigidity of such norms may vary from place to place, and there may be more or less uniformity in the messages issuing from agencies and organizations. Still, in any society, the area of consensus fostered by popular indoctrination needs to be substantial — particularly in times of internal and external crisis <author’s emphasis added>”3.

From a positivist viewpoint such socialization, resulting in shared worldviews, norms and values, can be seen as being required for society’s ongoing success. From a critical viewpoint it can also be seen as a tool of inertia and power. Worldviews which no longer match reality may create a great deal of inertia and resistance to required changes, placing the society at risk. Such resistance can stem from both individual psychological processes such as cognitive dissonance4, as well as from group and societal level processes. Also, as Foucault identified, the manipulation of the shared worldview, or hegemonic discourses, is a core source of modern power5. By controlling the conceptual framework within which society makes decisions the desired outcome can be pre-selected to some degree, and some issues removed from the public consciousness all together. The manipulation of the hegemonic discourses can be used to change and shape reality, as detailed by Fairclough with respect to ruling elites drive to implement a very specific type of globalization beneficial to themselves6. An important insight is that the process of socialization and the communication of ruling discourses is mediated by the individual in a two-way process, with the individual and sub-groups, actively manipulating and altering the messaging they receive to fit their own surroundings and experiences. The same message may be taken very differently by a group of wealthy prep-school children and a group of children from a poor working class background.

Psychological and Socio-Psychological Factors

There are a number of theories put forward for individuals, or small groups, being unable to accept new facts which undermine strongly held beliefs. Possibly the most influential theory in socio-psychology is that of Cognitive Dissonance put forward by Leon Festinger et al.4 in the 1950′s. This proposed that people will actively reject, or re-interpret, information that threatens deeply held beliefs. The greater invested the individual or group is in a given set of beliefs, and the more tightly integrated those beliefs are with their self-image, the more intense will be the process of rejection or reinterpretation. Later work has shed more light on the non-logical processes by which an individual subconsciously comes to believe, and continues to believe, that something is true, even in the face of contradictory facts. Burton7 notes some telling examples, such as a scientist rejecting scientific facts in favour of religious beliefs that he just “knows” to be true in the absence of any supporting facts, or spiritual feelings being triggered by electrical stimulation of specific brain areas. “Knowing what you know” becomes a process mediated by emotional and unconscious processes rather than one of conscious logical fact-driven analysis, as assumed in the rational decision making processes that underlie the scientific method. The concept ofrationalism, and thus also the concepts of rational choice and rational actor, which see conscious logical reasoning as the basis of valid knowledge, are seriously undermined by these findings. Even within the scientific realm it has been noted by some that acceptance of a new theory, especially if it undermines current theories, may have more to do with emotions and institutional politics, power, and prestige than reasoned argument8.

Political Psychology provides much criticism of the rational actor concept with Monroe9 providing a host of limitations, such as individual self-interest not always leading to collective political welfare; humans having a bounded capacity to perceive, recall, interpret, and calculate; different types of information carrying different weights for non-logical and time constraint reasons (e.g. masses of statistics on crime levels going down versus the coverage of a few horrific crimes); the existence of “analgesic cultures driven by frustration-instigated fixated behaviour”, rather than goal-oriented behaviour; widespread examples of altruistic behaviour rather than selfish rationalist behaviour, as with families that put their own lives at risk to hide Jewish families during the Second World War. Political Ecology also argues against a purely rationalist viewpoint of truth generation by identifying the value-laden assumptions, power relations, and intellectual arrogance underlying much scientific research. Examples are the assumption that such a thing as “un-touched (by humans) wilderness” exists or that the curtailing of natural forest fires is optimal10.

Out of Date Worldviews

The Sociological theory of socialization11 through family, school, work, and media posits that the individual internalizes the dominant belief systems of society to the point where norms and beliefs are taken to be truisms. If the world view that underlies such belief systems is no longer aligned closely enough with reality it will become a serious impediment to effective actions by individuals and society as whole given how effectively individuals and groups can defend strongly held beliefs against invalidating facts. With the spread of nation states, globalization, and global media companies pushing a standardized set of beliefs it has become easier and easier for one global narrative to overwhelm all others, especially among the decision making and cultural elite. The fields of Political Ecology and Ethno-biology support such a view of a dominant western world-view ignoring, and in many cases destroying, alternative world-views which may hold highly beneficial insights and knowledge. Such a view of a single belief-system overwhelming all others is also proposed by Michaels12, as he sees it “The governing pattern that a culture obeys is a master story – one narrative in society that takes over the others, shrinking diversity and forming a monoculture”

The first stage in the development of this monoculture was the ascendancy of agricultural and animal husbandry societies over traditional hunter-gatherer ones. From studying the surviving indigenous hunter-gatherer groups, anthropologists and ethno-biologists have noted fundamentally different assumptions about the relation of humanity to the surrounding natural environment between them and agriculturalists and herders. Traditional societies tend to have a worldview which treats them as being within nature, co-habiting with other animals that they consider to be fully sentient non-human persons, and surrounded by sacred places. The relationship between humans, and animals and plants, seems to be substantially affected by the ways in which they interact. As humans gain more control of their environment through herding and agriculture their worldview does seem to change towards a separation with nature. The latter becomes more and more a resource to utilize, rather than a nurturing body to be respected and held sacred. The movement from a hunter-gatherer existence to one of domesticating animals can be seen as a great watershed in human-animal relations, “Wild species that might earlier have been considered ancestors or embodiments of sacredness were increasingly classified as predators (on humans and their domestic livestock), quarry for human hunts, competitors for space and resources, vermin, or spectacles for observation as captives or in staged fights. The more sophisticated categories and conceptions and the expert knowledge of nature that went with them lived on in the groups that refused, sometimes down to the present day, to make use of the domestic species they had access to. But people living in domesticity generally looked down upon people living in pre-domesticity”13. These very different attitudes to animals can be seen in the traditional livestock raising communities of the Nuer14 and Sebei15 where the herd animals are treated as property. For agriculturalists, the land itself becomes a subordinate as a resource to be used for the benefit of humanity.

Agriculturalists and herders still lived in an organic relationship with nature though, with only a small subset of elites and specialist artisans not directly involved with the land, fauna, and flora to feed the population. Through to the sixteenth century the predominant images of nature were still as a nurturing mother, with the passage of the seasons and recurrent famines as a reminder of the overwhelming power of the natural world16. Hebrew and Western Christian teaching can be construed to support a position of dominance for humanity over nature17, but can also be seen to treat nature as a sacred entity provided by god, under the stewardship of humanity. “Nature is envisaged as one of the spheres in which God meets man personally and in which he is called upon to exercise responsibility”, and this relationship is echoed in other religions18. This is a very different view than hunter-gatherers have, but is still one that treats nature as sacred and requiring responsible guardianship.

The next major changes in the perceived relationship between humanity and nature came with the Enlightenment, and the resulting scientific and industrial revolutions. This replaced the previous organic view of nature, which had ethical constraints on the way in which nature could be treated, with a mechanical and instrumental view that treated nature as simply a resource to be utilized for the benefit of humanity. Locke was a major proponent of this anthropocentric and instrumental view of nature. Non-human animals that lack rationality, or are simply automatons as seen by Descartes19, are inferior to humans and live outside the realm of natural law20. Bacon took this view of animals as “the guiding principle of his new vision of science and practical knowledge”20. Locke also saw land not utilized by humans as waste, and the product of that land as predominantly coming from human labour rather than from nature itself, “land that is left wholly to nature and hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage or planting, is called, as it is, waste: and we shall find the benefit amount to little more than nothing”, and nine tenths of the products of the earth is, “on the account of labour” with only the remainder, “purely owing to nature”17. These beliefs were reinforced by advances in scientific knowledge “which drove the twin forces of industrialization and urbanization to further split humans from their environments”20, resulting in nature being perceived as “independent from human contact and interference” 21. This view of nature is repeated in one of the core parts of the modern ruling discourse, classical economics, where the economy is seen as being completely separate to a natural world which is treated as simply another input to the production process.

In the advanced industrial countries only a few per cent of the population is engaged directly with nature in the production of food, and such engagement is heavily mediated by machinery and science through the industrialization of agriculture. As more and more countries industrialize and urbanize a greater and greater percentage of mankind lives each day with little or no direct contact with unmodified nature, instead they live in artificially constructed environments. For example the percentage of China’s population living in urban environments rose from 13% to 40% between 1950 and 2005, and this is forecast to increase to 60% by 2030.22 Overall 52% of the world’s population is urban, forecast to increase to two thirds by 203023. Worthy sees such living arrangements as producing people that are ‘disassociated’, through time, distance, and disinformation, from the impacts of their actions upon the environment24. The modern consumer does not see the impacts of their discarded waste, the suffering of the animals that they eat, and the environmental destruction required to produce the products they consume.

In the post-World War 2 period the efficacy and inevitability of continued exponential economic growth has also became part of the ruling discourse, with the near absolute belief that this stems from human ingenuity and technology which can overcome any obstacles. Catton has likened the belief in technology to a “Cargo Cult” 25, and it has been embedded within neo-classical economics. The latter believes that due to technology resources are to all intents and purposes infinite, as human ingenuity will open up new resources and replace natural resources with human-created unnatural ones. Such beliefs underlie the views of some scientists and policy makers that earth’s climate can be geo-engineered to save humanity from climate change and allow it to continue with “business as usual”.

As long as the impact of human society upon the earth was limited such views could be held without endangering humanity as a whole, as the resulting despoilment and degradation produced only local impacts which did not degrade the environment on a global scale. Unfortunately, through the combination of scientific knowledge, industrialization and cheap energy from fossil fuels humanity has now grown to a size and capability which directly threatens the ability of the environment to sustain it. If the ruling discourses of society do not include an understanding of the dependency of mankind upon nature and the need to treat it with care and respect then society will stay on a path of self-destruction.

Interested Parties

Philosophy does not happen within a vacuum but rather reflects the socio-political environment within which it is developed and the position of those producing it. The ancient Greek philosophers were members of the small male aristocracy which excluded the vast majority of the population, such as women, serfs and slaves. Aristotle’s view of slavery as being part of the natural order of things, “the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life”26, can be seen as simply rationalizing a current reality. Locke’s views of un-worked land as available to acquisition by those that would develop it through their labour justified the taking of “wild” lands from indigenous peoples who were not seen as adding their labour to it, notwithstanding the fact that such lands has been actively managed by their inhabitants for many years27.

In modern industrial societies the manipulation and creation of ruling discourses has become the prevalent mode of social control. Foucault5 identified these “biophysical” control mechanisms as being necessary in predominantly democratic societies to allow the elites to control the conceptual structures and agendas used by citizens in the democratic process. In this way the population can be steered towards the answers that the elites want, and away from questions they do not wanted asked. The increased and more efficient control of the ruling discourse, especially through media channels dependent upon advertising revenues and the ongoing support of the state, by the powerful, is supported by many political and media theorists, such as Herman & Chomsky28, Cohen & Kent29, and Anderson & Strate30. The heavy dependence of politicians in many countries upon extensive private funding also places the state at the risk of manipulation by groups which have grown rich and powerful through the ongoing exploitation and degradation of nature, such as large corporations.

Such entities utilize their power to manipulate the ruling discourse in their favour, and not necessarily to the benefit of society as a whole. For instance, creating the impression of scientific disagreement about the causes of lung cancer and climate change31. Fairclough shows how language has been manipulated by elites to create a specific type of globalization beneficial to them6, with the underlying assumptions being that the neo-liberal model of globalization is the most beneficial and inevitably driven by “market forces” outside the control of any political actors. In the case of Romania he shows how manipulation of the ruling discourse was used to facilitate fundamental economic and social changes, but also that such messages are not passively received by their targets. Rather, they are filtered through the in place belief systems and social realities of individuals and groups. In addition, such discourses must have some linkage to external reality to remain believable. Such factors provide some insights into the way in which the current hegemonic worldviews, which are inconsistent with the survival of modern human civilization, can be overcome.

Overcoming Societal Inertia

Events which invalidate the hegemonic discourse can cause rapid changes in beliefs and actions. The invasion of Poland by Germany in 1939 shredded the belief that war with Germany was not inevitable and galvanized the British population in support of the war effort. Pearl Harbour provided the same galvanizing event which overwhelmed the isolationist tendencies in the United States. Within months consumer goods factories had been converted to produce the weapons and munitions of war, and millions of citizens had become part of the armed forces. Unfortunately climate change has not provided any such clear and unambiguous events, even worse natural climate fluctuations have tended to obfuscate the overall warming trend. For example, the flooding of New Orleans by a hurricane could be seen as a normal historical event, rather than a product of climate change.

The 1930’s depression can be taken as another model, where it took a period of time for the depth of the crisis to create an opening for new models of the world, resulting in the compromise of a more mixed economy with significant government support for the welfare of the average citizen. The 1970’s were a period where elites successfully shredded this consensus, and turned back the “crisis of democracy”32, through extensive investments in neo-liberal think tanks and other means of changing societal beliefs. With the inability of the resulting neo-liberal model to produce the shared prosperity that was promised for it, the increasing gap between reality and the neo-liberal discourse has greatly degraded its effectiveness.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, with its message of the 1% against the other 99% of society brought this mismatch to the fore, and for a while forced its discussion into the mainstream. The strength of the resulting threat to the ruling elites can be seen in the eventual aggressive moves to suppress the movement, once the possibility of co-option had been seen as non-viable. A joining of such forces as the Occupy movement with ecological groups could prove to be very powerful combination, with a joint message that the way in which society works has to be changed to provide both equitable economic and social outcomes and a viable future for modern societies. A number of organizations have also been set up by ecological groups and scientists to help change the ruling discourse, such as 350.org33 and the Arctic Methane Emergency Group34. The acceptance of the need for action on climate change also seems to be slowly entering the consciousness of the elites, with more and more examples of new stories and other commentary on the urgency of the situation. A good example is that of a paper covering the effect of a large atmospheric methane release from the arctic in the journal Nature35. Although covered in a critical fashion by much of the media coverage, it was at least covered by them when previously it may have been simply ignored.

The climate itself does seem to be providing some less ambiguous messages, in the shape of an increasing number of abnormal climate events, such as the late season massive hurricane which took a sudden left turn to hit New York and the surrounding areas, the “weird” unseasonal weather in 2013 across the northern hemisphere creating a cold European spring and heat waves in Alaska, and ongoing droughts and wildfires. In the case of arctic warming changing northern hemisphere weather patterns the public seems to have intuitively grasped and accepted the idea, even as scientists still debate it36. An interesting finding though, is that the level of acceptance was affected by the amount of abnormality in the current weather experienced by the individual. The more extreme the weather experienced, either hot or cold, the more acceptance of the arctic warming premise.

The ruling discourse is a culturally created artefact and is thus open to change from within society and to invalidation by external reality. Both of these factors are becoming stronger in the push to steer society towards systems of belief more aligned with the needs of humanity’s long term survival. A race is taking place between the required changes to society’s ruling discourse and the movement of the earth’s climate to a point of abrupt non-linear changes and self-sustaining warming driven by natural positive feedbacks.

References

1. Schumacker, John F. (1995), The Corruption of Reality, Prometheus Books

2. Grusek, Joan E. & Hastings, Paul D. (2006), Handbook of Socialization: Theory and Research, The Guilford Press

3. Houn, Franklin & Hou Fu-Wu (1961), To Change A Nation: Propaganda and Indoctrination in Communist China, Free Press of Glencoe

4. Festinger, Leon et al. (1956), When Prophecy Fails, Harper-Torchbooks

5. Foucault, Michel (1984), The Foucault Reader, Pantheon

6. Fairclough, Norman (2006), Language and Globalization, Routledge

7. Burtin, Robert (2008), On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, St. Martin’s Press

8. Kuhn, Thomas (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press

9. Monroe, Kristen Renwick (1995), Psychology and Rational Actor Theory, Political Psychology Vol. 16, No. 1, Special Issue: Political Ecology & Political Psychology, March 1995, pp. 1-21q

10. Peet, Richard et al. (2011), Global Political Ecology, Routledge

11. Grusek, Joan E. & Hastings, Paul. D. (2006), Handbook of Socialization: Theory and Research, The Guildford Press

12. Michael, F.S. (2011), Monoculture, How One Story Is Changing Everything, Red Clover Press

13. Bulliet, Richard W. (2005), Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships, Columbia University Press

14. Evans-Prichard, E. E. (1940), The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People, Oxford University Press

15. Goldschmidt, Walter (1976), Culture and Behavior of the Sebei: A Sudy of Continuity and Adaptation, University of California Press

16. Ball, Andrew et. Al. (2007), The SAGE Handbook of Environment & Society, SAGE Publications

17. Kay, Jeanne (1989), Human Dominion over Nature in the Hebrew Bible”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 79, No. 2 (Jun., 1989), pp. 214-232

18. Tucker, Mary Ellen & Grim, John A. (1994), Worldviews & Ecology, Orbis

19. Cottingham, John (1978), ‘A Brute to the Brutes?’: Descartes’ Treatment of Animals, Philosophy 53 1978 pp. 551-559.

20. Montuschi, E. (2010). Order of man, order of nature: Francis Bacon’s idea of a ‘dominion’ over nature, The Governance of Nature Conference London School of Economics October 2010

21. Vinning, Joanne et. Al. (2008), The Distinction between Humans and Nature: Human Perceptions of Connectedness to Nature and Elements of the Natural and Unnatural, Human Ecology review, Vol. 15, No 1, 2008

22. n/a (2009), Percentage of global population living in cities, by continent, The Guardian. Accessed athttp://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/aug/18/percentage-population-living-cities

23. n/a (2013), Urban Development: Sector Results Profile, The World Bank. Accessed at http://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2013/04/14/urban-development-results-profile

24. Worthy, Kenneth (2013), Invisible Nature: Healing the Destructive Divide Between People and the Environment, Prometheus

25. Catton, William R. (1982), Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, University of Illinois Press.

26. n/a (2013), Philosophers Justifying Slavery, British Broadcasting Company. Accessed at www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/slavery/ethics/philosophers_1.shtml

27. Forsyth, Timothy (2002), Critical Political Ecology, Routledge

28. Herman, Edward & Chomsky, Noam (1988), Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon

29. Kohen, Elliott & Kent, Arthur (2005), Media Incorporated, Prometheus Books

30. Andersen, Robin & Strate, Lance (2000), Critical Studies in Media Commercialism, Oxford University Press

31. Hogan, James & Littlemore, Richard (2009), Climate Cover Up: The Crusade To Deny Global Warming, Greystone Books

32. Crozier, Micheal, Huntingdon, Samual & Watanuki, Joji (1975), The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, The Trilateral Commission

33. 350.org web site, Accessed at http://350.org/

34. A.M.E.G. web site. Accessed at http://www.ameg.me/

35. Whiteman, Gail, Hope, Chris & Wadhams, Peter (2013), Vast cost of Arctic change, Nature Vol 499, 25th July 2013, pp. 401-403.

36. Mooney, Chris (2013), Huge Majority Thinks Arctic Warming Will Mess With the Weather, Mother Jones. Accessed at http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/07/arctic-weather-jet-stream-polling

Me, or your lying eyes?

Walk with me, talk with me
Walk with me, talk with me
Natalia, Natalia, Natalia

 Van Morrison 

Greetings

          Is Abrupt Climate Change due to methane releases from the Arctic something we should be concerned about?     Not according to the IPCC.     Yet, according to this article :  Climate change crisis intensifies: 'Methane levels are going through the roof,  recent readings are very high.

The latest levels published today have recorded methane readings "well over 2600 ppb at multiple altitudes, as illustrated by the image." (see slideshow to the left of this article)

What is considered a "normal" release of methane? According to Dr. James Hansen, an American adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, 1250 ppb is a livable level. To put that into perspective, the current number of methane being released is twice that level.

       I generally like to go with IPCC.  However, they have been known to be very conservative.         

       I get the impression it all comes down t Dr Natalia Sahkhova,  who is up there studying where no one else is.   She's getting some disturbing readings. And no one really has a good explanation.  They don't fit with the models.   So they either don't accept the measuerments, or chalk it up to some local anomaly

Here's what Prof Peter Wadhams says:  in response to criticism of his paper in Nature, which relied on Sahkova's data

"In support of its skepticism about methane emissions the article quoted authors who wrote before the enormous retreat of summer Arctic sea ice and its oceanographic effects became so evident. The mechanism which is causing the observed mass of rising methane plumes in the East Siberian Sea is itself unprecedented and the scientists who dismissed the idea of extensive methane release in earlier research were simply not aware of the new mechanism that is causing it.

"What is happening is that the summer sea ice now retreats so far, and for so long each summer, that there is a substantial ice-free season over the Siberian shelf, sufficient for solar irradiance to warm the surface water by a significant amount – up to 7C according to satellite data. That warming extends the 50 m or so to the seabed because we are dealing with only a polar surface water layer here (over the shelves the Arctic Ocean structure is one-layer rather than three layers)  and the surface warming is mixed down by wave-induced mixing because the extensive open water permits large fetches.  So long as some ice persisted on the shelf, the water mass was held to about 0C in summer because any further heat content in the water column was used for melting the ice underside. But once the ice disappears, as it has done, the temperature of the water can rise significantly, and the heat content reaching the seabed can melt the frozen sediments at a rate that was never before possible.

- See more at: here

    Here's a couple of articles for your consideration.  Here's a  Video : Last Hours  ( h/t LarryT)

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The methane emergency-denying IPCC

Never mind the evidence - the problem does not exist, says the science-by- committee IPCC

Just do NOT tell them the monster exists

The Arctic Methane Monster

Arctic, News,

7 October, 2013

As discussed in a previous post, the IPCC appears to be acting as if there was a carbon budget to divide among countries, whereas in reality there is a huge carbon debt to our children, while the situation could become catastropic any time soon.

Indeed, carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas and the Arctic methane monster is threatening to disrupt the cosy lifetyle of those who want to keep selling parts of such non-existing carbon budgets.

So, who do you think the IPCC has been listening to, to reach a conclusion after six years of analysis? Experts or snake oil sellers? The cartoon may give you a hint, but why don't you make up your own mind by going over the IPCC statements and comments below.

Abrupt Climate Change

The IPCC recently issued AR5 documents that included a discussion of Abrupt Climate Change.

from: IPCC AR5 Working Group 1 Technical Summary (final draft)

The IPCC gives some examples:

Yes, methane release from clathrates sounds scary.

If there is little consensus on the likelyhood, then surely some experts do believe it is likely. Yet, the IPCC somehow reaches the following conclusion, and does so with high confidence:

Unlikely? What was the basis for this IPCC conclusion? 


This seems like a conclusion that can only have been reached after a robust analysis of all the evidence. So, how did the IPCC reach this conclusion, given that it did so with such high confidence?

Let's have a look. The above conclusion is preceeded by this statement:

OK, that means clathrates will increasingly become destablilized. The IPCC then adds an argument why this would not result in abrupt climate change this century. 

Sure, but that's just one rather insignificant negative feedback, compared to the many more significant positive feedbacks, such as melting causing isostatic rebound that can contribute to the occurrence of earthquakes and landslides, in turn triggering methane release. Yet, without even mentioning these positive feedbacks, the paragraph then jumps to the following conclusion:

If these initial estimates are not insignificant and if it's all rather difficult to formally assess, how then is it possible that the IPCC reached its end-conclusion with such high confidence? Moreover, was there any basis for these "initial estimates"? Perhaps there's more elsewhere in the IPCC documents. Here's another paragraph that preceeded the above.

All this expresses is low confidence in existing modeling and lack of understanding of the various processes. Again, how then is it possible that the IPCC reached its conclusion with such high confidence?

How much methane is currently released from hydrates?

On this, the IPCC says:

OK, so things could become scary. And sure, there are no large abrupt releases taking place now, but that doesn't mean there's not going to be any in future. In case of gradual processes, it makes sense to base projections on historic releases. In case of abrupt releases, however, current releases should not be the basis for reaching a conclusion with high confidence.

So, was the work of Dr. Natalia Shakhova perhaps used as the basis for these estimates? Read on!


How much methane is stored under the Arctic Ocean?



How much methane is present in sediments under the seabed of the Arctic Ocean, in the form of free gas and hydrates? On this, the IPCC says in FAQ6:

That doesn't seem to reflect the estimates of Dr. Natalia Shakhova. The total 
amount of methane currently in the atmosphere is about 5 Gt. Saying that more than 50 Gt of methane could be stored in hydrates the Arctic seems deceptive and appears to be seriously downplaying a very dangerous situation.

Natalia Shakhova et al. in 2010 estimated the accumulated potential for the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) region alone (image on the right) as follows:

• organic carbon in permafrost of about 500 Gt
• about 1000 Gt in hydrate deposits
• about 700 Gt in free gas beneath the gas hydrate stability zone.

Back in 2008, Natalia Shakhova et al. considered release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage as highly possible for abrupt release at any time. Did the IPCC perhaps misread the figures, mistaking the part of the methane that is ready for abrupt release for the total amount of methane in the Arctic?


How long could it take for large amounts of methane to reach the atmosphere?

How long could it take for large amounts to reach the atmosphere? On this, the IPCC says in FAQ6, in the same and the next paragraph:

Below, a screenshot from an interview of John Mason with Natalia Shakhova, published at:http://www.skepticalscience.com/arctic-methane-outgassing-e-siberian-shelf-part2.html

In conclusion, Dr Natalia Shakhova also rejects the idea that methane release from hydrates always takes place gradually, over a long time. Especially in the Arctic, there's a huge danger of abrupt release, given the accelerated warming that takes place in the Arctic, given the huge amounts of methane stored in sediments in the form of free gas and methane, given the presence of a tectonic fault line, etc, etc.


Once released, methane won't get broken down easily in the Arctic Ocean, as this requires the presence of bacteria that can oxidize the methane, as well as free oxygen in the water. Once depleted, oxygen isn't quickly replenished in the Arctic Ocean. Lack of bacteria and depletion of oxygen in the waters of the Arctic Ocean could prevent oxidation of methane rising up in the waters, as described at:http://methane-hydrates.blogspot.com/2012/03/large-areas-of-open-ocean-starved-of.html


In the Arctic, low temperatures mean there are less bacteria that need more time to break down the methane. In other places, currents may bring bacteria back to the location of the methane plume repeatedly. In the Arctic, many currents are long, so once bacteria have flow away from the location of the plume, they could be driven out of the Arctic Ocean or may return only after a long time, i.e. too long to survive in Arctic waters which are cold and often ice-covered, so a lot of time little or no sunshine penetrates the waters.


In the Arctic, the danger is much larger that methane releases will overwhelm the capacity of bacteria to break it down in the water. In case of large abrupt releases in the Arctic, the danger is that much of the methane will reach the atmosphere unaffected and remain there for a long time, due to the Jet Stream and the low levels of hydroxyl in the Arctic atmosphere, as further described at:http://methane-hydrates.blogspot.com/2013/04/methane-hydrates.html


BTW, how did all this methane manage to reach the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean? 


Methane levels over the Arcic Ocean appear to be rising, as illustrated by the combination of images below, showing methane levels over five years (2009 on the left, to 2013 on the right), each time for the same period (January 21-31) - images by Dr. Leonid Yurganov.

[ Click on image to enlarge - from: Dramatic increase in methane in the Arctic in January 2013 ]

If the IPCC was right, how then was it possible methane levels to rise so sharply and abruptly. How was it possible for large amounts of methane to be present over the deep waters of the Arctic Ocean, as discussed at:http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/10/methane-over-deep-waters-of-arctic-ocean.html

[ How did this methane get there? - click on image to enlarge - see also: Methane over deep waters of Arctic Ocean ]

There is a wealth of evidence from scientists such as Igor Semiletov and Natalia Shakhova who have - year after year - been taking measurements in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, complete with first-hand reports that methane plumes have been detected.





"We've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed," Dr Semiletov said, "We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale - I think on a scale not seen before. Some of the plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere - the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal."  -  Vast methane 'plumes' seen in Arctic ocean as sea ice retreats, by Steve Connor in The Independent, December 13, 2011.



The image below shows a cluster of methane plumes, over one km in diameter, that appeared in the Laptev Sea end September 2011. The image is part of a paper on the unfolding "Methane Catastrophe".

Of course, we all wished that we're wrong about this terrifying Arctic methane threat, but the precautionary principle demands a thorough investigation of observations that appear to be at odds with wishful thinking, especially when the stakes are so high. So, IPCC, where's the evidence?

Related

- Arctic Methane Monsterhttp://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/09/arctic-methane-monster.html

- Methane over deep waters of Arctic Oceanhttp://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/10/methane-over-deep-waters-of-arctic-ocean.html

- Methane hydrate mythshttp://methane-hydrates.blogspot.com/p/myths.html

- Methane hydrateshttp://methane-hydrates.blogspot.com/2013/04/methane-hydrates.html

- Methane release caused by earthquakes http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/09/methane-release-caused-by-earthquakes.html

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How much should you worry about an Arctic methane bomb?

By Chris Mooney

It was a stunning figure: $60 trillion.

Such could be the cost, according to a recent commentary [PDF] in the journal Nature, of “the release of methane from thawing permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea, off northern Russia … a figure comparable to the size of the world economy in 2012.” More specifically, the paper described a scenario in which rapid Arctic warming and sea ice retreat lead to a pulse of undersea methane being released into the atmosphere. How much methane? The paper modeled a release of 50 gigatons of this hard-hitting greenhouse gas (a gigaton is equal to a billion metric tons) between 2015 and 2025. This, in turn, would trigger still more warming and gargantuan damage and adaptation costs.

The $60 trillion figure went everywhere, and no wonder. It’s jaw-dropping. To provide some perspective, 50 gigatons is 10 times as much methane as currently exists in the atmosphere. Atmospheric methane levels have more than doubled since the industrial revolution, but this would amount to a much sharper increase in a dramatically shorter time frame.

According to the Nature commentary, that methane “is likely to be emitted as the seabed warms, either steadily over 50 years or suddenly.” Such are the scientific assumptions behind the paper’s economic analysis. But are those assumptions realistic — and could that much methane really be released suddenly from the Arctic?

A number of prominent scientists and methane experts interviewed for this article voiced strong skepticism about the Nature paper. “The scenario they used is so unlikely as to be completely pointless talking about,” says Gavin Schmidt, a noted climate researcher at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

Schmidt is hardly the only skeptic. “I don’t have any problem with 50 gigatons, but they’ve got the time scale all wrong,” adds David Archer, a geoscientist and expert on methane at the University of Chicago. “I would envision something like that coming out, you know, over the centuries.”

Still, the Nature paper is the most prominent airing yet of concerns that a climate catastrophe could be brought on by the release of Arctic methane that is currently frozen in subsea deposits — concerns that seem to be mounting in lockstep with the dramatic warming of the Arctic. That’s why it’s important to put these fears into context and try to determine just how much weight they ought to be accorded.

Methane on ice

Let’s start with some basics on methane — CH₄ — a greenhouse gas that reaches the atmosphere from sources as diverse as wetlands, gas drilling, and cow burps. Compared with carbon dioxide, methane is kind of like the boxer who punches himself out in the early rounds, whereas carbon dioxide goes the distance and wins by TKO. Pound for pound, methane causes some 25 times as much global warming[PDF] as carbon dioxide does. But it only remains in the atmosphere for about nine years, on average, before chemical processes break it down. Carbon dioxide, in contrast, has a far longer atmospheric residence time.

What this means is that methane is most worrisome if a lot of it gets into the atmosphere over a relatively short time period — precisely the scenario contemplated by the Nature paper. So could that happen?

The answer depends on a complicated and uncertainty-laden issue — the stability of frozen deposits of subsea methane in the Arctic region. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine something harder to study: We’re talking about deposits residing not only beneath one of the world’s most remote and inaccessible oceans, but also beneath the sea floor itself.

Much of the world’s methane is concentrated in the form of so-called gas “hydrates,” icelike solids that form from methane and water at cold temperatures and high pressures, e.g., deep beneath the ocean floor. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the total global carbon content of such methane hydrates is estimated to equal some 1,800 gigatons (to be sure, there is considerable uncertainty about this estimate).

U.S. Geological SurveyCross-section showing the location of methane hydrates, which are most vulnerable to dissolution in regions 2 and 3.

One thousand eight hundred gigatons would create a climate catastrophe if it were all to be suddenly released, but the vast majority of subsea methane is under deep water, and quite stable. Only a relatively small fraction of global methane hydrates are at issue in the Nature paper, and this methane is in a very peculiar situation: It is frozen in the subsea permafrost of relatively shallow continental shelves in the Arctic region. This frozen sediment was once coastline, but was submerged as oceans rose following the last Ice Age. And now, it is being bathed in warmer waters due to the warming of the Arctic.

So how much should we worry that these particular methane hydrates might melt, releasing gas that would then travel through both sediment and seawater to reach the atmosphere? That’s where the scientific debate begins — over both how much methane falls into this category, and how vulnerable it is to the warming that is now gripping the Arctic region.

Peering beneath the East Siberian Sea

The methane disaster concerns gained major prominence with a2010 paper in Science by University of Alaska-Fairbanks researcher Natalia Shakhova and her colleagues, who examined methane emissions in a very remote area of the Arctic, the East Siberian Sea north of Russia. The continental shelf underlying this ocean is more than 2 million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles) in size, and its subsea permafrost lies only about 50 meters below the sea surface. Traveling to the remote region in Russian ice-breakers, Shakhova’s team sampled water content and air content at the sea surface repeatedly, over a series of years. They found high concentrations of methane in the water — “50 percent of surface waters are supersaturated with methane,” the paper reported — and some of the gas was also venting from the water into the atmosphere.

Wikimedia Commons

Although the Science paper did not contain the figure, it seems clear that Shakhova is the source for the idea that a 50-gigaton release of methane could occur in a short time frame. Or as she put it in a2008 abstract [PDF], “[W]e consider release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage as highly possible for abrupt release at any time,” adding that this could lead to “catastrophic greenhouse warming.” The Nature paper cited another 2010 paperby Shakhova and her colleagues in the journal Doklady Earth Sciences, which uses the 50-gigaton figure in discussing possible methane emission scenarios.

Shakhova did not respond to several requests for comment for this article; her automatic email response said she was out doing fieldwork. But Peter Wadhams, the Cambridge physicist who is a coauthor of the Nature paper, said that his work relied on that of Shakhova and her team because “they’ve done the most work there, working there every year, doing field observations … we would rather base it on the estimates of the people actually working there, rather than the people who aren’t working there.” Here is a video of Shakhova discussing her research:

The trouble is that at this point, many other scientists don’t accept that work — or rather, don’t agree about its implications. None seem to dispute the actual measurements taken by Shakhova and her team, but as soon as the Science paper came out, a group of researchers questioned the idea that there was any cause for alarm. “A newly discovered [methane] source is not necessarily a changing source, much less a source that is changing in response to Arctic warming,” they wrote. The implication is that perhaps methane has always been in the water at such levels, without methane hydrates having been disturbed — rather, the methane may be from another source. According to one 2011 study, for instance, the observed methane probably came not from hydrates, but simply from “the permafrost’s still adjusting to its new aquatic conditions, even after 8,000 years.” The hydrates, in contrast, are thought to be much deeper below the sea surface, due to basic physical constraints on their formation and stability. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “in permafrost areas, methane hydrate is not stable until about 225 m [738 feet] depth.”

Indeed, according to Ed Dlugokencky, who monitors global atmospheric methane levels at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “so far, there has not been a significant increase in methane emissions in the Arctic.” In other words, if methane is really starting to vent into the air in large quantities, Dlugokencky says he isn’t seeing it.

A debate over hydrate depth

And that’s just the first reason that many scientists are skeptical. According to Carolyn Ruppel, who heads the Gas Hydrates Project at the U.S. Geological Survey, there just isn’t that much vulnerable methane in submerged permafrost to begin with. “We think very little hydrate on this planet is associated with permafrost, either subsea or terrestrial,” she says. Inspired in part by the Shakhova research, the USGS undertook to study the continental shelves of the Beaufort Sea, off Alaska and Canada. “We set out to test this idea that all of the Arctic shelves were going to have high methane emissions,” she says. “And at least for the U.S. Beaufort shelf, we’re not seeing them.”

Ruppel acknowledges that due to Arctic warming, more methane is going to be released, much of it from permafrost on land. But, she continues, “I would say one of the least likely sources is methane gas hydrates. You are limited by the laws of physics,” she adds — noting that the beginning of the zone of stability for these hydrates is some 220 meters (722 feet) deep. That’s a recurrent refrain among skeptics — they say hydrates just can’t form above a certain depth, and warming can’t penetrate such a depth very quickly. “You’ve got to go from the sea floor of 50 meters depth, down to 200 meters where the hydrate is,” explains the University of Chicago’s David Archer. “So that just takes a long time.”

Moreover, even if subsea permafrost methane hydrates do thaw, the liberated gas still has to travel through layers of sediment just to get to the ocean floor. So how does that happen? “That’s kind of mysterious,” says Archer. Perhaps there will be open pathways for gas in some places, but perhaps there won’t. Archer also notes that there have been undersea explosions or landslides that release methane in bursts, but “those kinds of things seem like they would be relatively small compared to 50 gigatons, and they would happen sporadically in time over centuries; not everything blows up in a few years.”

Nonetheless, imagine that methane gas from melted hydrate makes it to the sea floor. It now exists as bubbles with, say, 50 meters (164 feet) to go before they reach the sea surface. Most of the bubbles won’t make it, say scientists: They’ll be dissolved in seawater, and then the methane will be broken down by microorganisms over a period of months. “If methane is in the ocean water column, most of it doesn’t get out,” explains Bill Reeburgh, a professor of earth system science at the University of California-Irvine who has spent his career studying methane. “Most of it is oxidized” by bacteria, which turn it into carbon dioxide and water, Reeburgh continues. “So all these stories about seeps, people seem to think the bubbles go straight to the atmosphere, and they don’t.”

In other words, while the waters of the East Siberian Sea may be full of dissolved methane, for many scientists that doesn’t prove that hydrates have been disturbed, or that the Arctic is starting to vent large amounts of methane from below the sea floor into the atmosphere. Not yet, anyway.

Nonetheless, Cambridge’s Peter Wadhams takes a different view. Of the critics, he says that “it comes to not believing that these scientists who are actually working there know what they’re talking about, which I would say is kind of insulting to them.” Wadhams also says that there is a new mechanism for methane hydrate release that the critics aren’t considering. The retreat of Arctic sea ice, he suggests, is allowing very intense warming of the waters above continental shelves. He adds that there are certain hydrates “detectable at 20 meters [66 feet]” below the sea floor, far shallower than normal. Wadhams calls these hydrates “Ice Age relics” that formed under very different conditions. Shakhova, too, has referred in the past to hydrates occurring at 20 meters depth, saying they have been “sampled in Siberia.”

Other scientists remain skeptical. David Archer says his simulations “never see hydrate stability” above 250 meters (820 feet).

So should you worry?

What is clear about this story, then, is that one group of scientists has articulated a set of concerns that a number of others just do not accept at this point. And no doubt this problem is exacerbated by the realities of methane hydrate research — it is extremely difficult (and costly) to take a scientific expedition to the East Siberian Sea, or for that matter, to conduct Arctic research in general. In this case, it appears that one research team, the one actually working in this area, has developed views distant from those of many other researchers.

So what should you do — and what should you think? Bear in mind that there are many good reasons to be skeptical of a methane disaster — it is hardly a matter of scientific consensus that this is a real concern. And that stands in stark contrast to the issue of climate change in general, an issue on which scientists are overwhelmingly aligned (and where the solution remains incredibly obvious: cutting carbon emissions).

As global warming proceeds, it is also important to step back and acknowledge that with the unprecedented warming of the Arctic, it would be surprising if there weren’t surprises. When we bring on warming this fast, we risk unpredictable consequences, whether with regard to methane or something else.

“It’s weird for me to be saying, ‘Oh, it could never happen.’ It’s always the wrong side of things when you’re talking about nature,” says David Archer of the Arctic methane catastrophe scenario. “But,” he adds, “nobody’s come up with a defendable way of it happening all at once.”

This story was produced by Mother Jones as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Chris Mooney is a science and political journalist, blogger, podcaster, experienced trainer of scientists in the art of communication, and the host of Climate Desk Live.