From researching methane, global atmospheric values were rather stable until 2007 then began to rise, why? That year was the great drop in Arctic sea-ice extent yet the permafrost and seabed clathrates hadn’t become very voluminous so we are left with fracking as the cause.

Since a decade’s worth of emissions are released when a well head goes in that means to make that release up the difference in forcing caused by the CO2 reductions versus other fossil fuels plays catch up before matching the effect of the methane to warming. This truth is shown by radiative forcing which has gained 30% since 1990 with no slow-downs.

Then, freshly released methane is more effective at forcing, about 100-times more than CO2, this ages over the first decade down to about 40-times more forcing and after some decades to the molecular 23-times more potent thereafter. This means there is a thermal gain far beyond the relative reduction of the CO2 abatement effect in the popular press and claimed by industry.

So this does fit into why methane is not a “transition” fuel as it has not a positive reduction in forcing and that is the ultimate measure. For this conclusion please reference this page which shows since 2007 the rise in methane and estimate total forcing for the 4-major and 15-minor greenhouse gases: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.html

Now consider the fact that the Arctic methane has begun to accelerate emitted volume and this will add continuously until either the deposits are depleted or the seabed and land permafrost are refrozen. These deposits are now exponentially growing in size and emission volume with centimeter-wide seabed vents now a kilometer across in the just the past two years, so much that methane releases are measurable above the sea-ice in winter due to the ocean water now only cooling to 0C when it requires -2C to freeze the seabed and “cap” the clathrate deposits.

The other exceptional condition is that these deposits hold over 1,000-gigatons over millions of square kilometers and today’s atmosphere contains about 5-Gt, so they can clearly be a problem to warming. Then, add to that ice-cores from Greenland have shown large jumps in global temperatures of 10-14C in very short time-frames, as little as 40-years. This can be from earthquakes destabilizing some of the deposits, or, it could be from a warming and perforation of the seabed to such an extent a rapid release happens. Either way the condition is runaway greenhousing and what we do with CO2 is meaningless at some time from now.

What’s the safety factor here with fracking, why are we doing it with alternatives that basically only need better large-scale, high capacity battery arrays and multi-megawatthour arrays in containers are available today?

Until the 1900’s methane varied between 400-900 ppb, today it’s about 1,800-ppb with summer plumes running well above 2k-ppb in the Arctic that don’t disperse and sit in the stratosphere acting as heat blankets to further heat the land which is also releasing both CH4 & CO2, and, to stop the Arctic methane likely the only solution is to maintain the sea-ice extent at traditional coverage in late summer so the ocean doesn’t heat and isn’t allowed to mix by protection from the wind.

Today the sea-ice is effectively gone because the purpose is to allow the ocean to cool to -2C in winter, that’s the functional need so to do that requires a radical drop in CO2 or runaway greenhousing will happen and what’s the game to not want a safety factor on such an important condition?