The Analysis of Sea Levels.

[FleshJeb]

On 10/19/2021 at 10:24 AM, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

European satellites show massive methane leaks 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSL1N2DZ0KI

Just a meta-comment about the execrable state of science reporting, and nothing to do with the original subject:

The article makes it extremely challenging to compare numbers directly, and to put them in a meaningful context. I had to keep tacking units on to get the dimensional analysis to work out. Bad numbers make me RATIONALLY angry because you can't make a meaningful assessment of policy decisions with bad numbers. So heeeere we gooo....

"...one leak was spewing out 93 tonnes of methane every hour, meaning the daily emissions from the leakage were equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide pumped out in a year by 15,000 cars in the United States."
Holy mixed-units, Batman!
93 ton/hr * 24 hr/day = 2232 ton/day = 15000 cars/yr/day
2232 ton/day * 365 day/yr = 814680 ton/yr = 15000 cars/yr/day * 365 days = 5,475,000 cars/yr = 6.72 cars/ton

"...another leak nearby was gushing at a rate of 17 tonnes an hour"
17 ton / 93 ton * 5475000 cars/yr = 1,000,806 cars/year
So the major leaks on the Yamal line are the equivalent of 6.5M cars.

"found another major leak [Turkmenistan]...142,000 tonnes of methane in the 12 months..."
142000 ton/yr * 6.72 cars/ton = 954,300 cars/year
 “That one emission that we found together represents about one million cars taken off the road per year,”
OK, looks like I got the magnitude correct.

Gazprom estimated that about 0.29% of the 679 billion cubic metres of gas it moved through its pipeline network escaped as methane emissions in 2019. Yamal [The 93 ton/hr and 17 ton/hr leaks] has an annual capacity of about 33 billion cubic metres.
Waitaminute! How many cubic meters per ton? We can't make a comparison without knowing the basis. So, I did a deep dive and found out a few things:

• Natural gas transmission uses normalized values for volume, but it's very different per company.
• Gazprom's website glossary lists: Gas cubic meter = Cubic meter of natural gas as measured at a pressure of one atmosphere and 20 °C
• Natural gas composition is about 95% methane, so we'll just use that for the molar mass = 16.04 g/mol

A little PV=nRT and some unit conversion later, and 6.79*10^11 m^3 = 4.53*10^8 tons. This is 1500 m^3/ton = 223 m^3/car.
0.29% leakage * 4.53*10^8 tons = 1.3M tons leakage = 8.8M cars for Gazprom as a whole.

The Yamal line is only about 5% (33/679) of Gazprom's total volume, but it's  74% (6.5/8.8) of the leakage?!? No disrespect to our Russian friends, but Gazprom is full of crap. From the graphs in the article, it looks like Gazprom is underreporting by a factor of 4-5x.

The last graph in the article says that Russia actually leaks a total of 12.36 M tons of methane (although this is oil and gas industry as a whole, not just pipelines) = 83 M cars. This is 15.2% of estimated global methane emissions, so 546 M cars worth of methane leakage worldwide.

What the heck is cars per year anyway? Since they specified US cars, we'll use US data and make a rough estimate based on the best info I could find:

• The US Federal Highway Administration said people drove an average of 13476 miles in 2021.
• The US Department of Energy said we drove a total of 3.23 Trillion miles in 2019.
• This means the US has the equivalent of 240 M cars on the road. (Yes, it's kind of a spurious comparison, but the order of magnitude should be correct.)

It looks like methane leakage is pretty darn significant. And it ONLY took me 2.5 hours of research to put it in some semblance of context.

The article author's Twitter states that she is, "Reuters energy/corporate oil/climate correspondent"
Well, she needs to do a better flarping job.

@sevenperforce You like to educate people, and you have a social media presence. Do you feel like yelling at a reporter?
https://twitter.com/NasrallaShadia

 

[DDE]

1 hour ago, FleshJeb said:

The Yamal line is only about 5% (33/679) of Gazprom's total volume, but it's  74% (6.5/8.8) of the leakage?!? No disrespect to our Russian friends, but Gazprom is full of crap. From the graphs in the article, it looks like Gazprom is underreporting by a factor of 4-5x.

Gazprom gets fined at slightly less than $2/ton of methane leaked.

Theoretically.

https://versia.ru/rosprirodnadzor-usilivaet-gromkoe-molchanie-gazproma-po-povodu-utechki-metana-v-tatarstane

[FleshJeb]

17 minutes ago, DDE said:

Gazprom gets fined at slightly less than $2/ton of methane leaked.

Theoretically.

https://versia.ru/rosprirodnadzor-usilivaet-gromkoe-molchanie-gazproma-po-povodu-utechki-metana-v-tatarstane

Thanks for the link, it’s very informative (after apple translate got done with it).

By my math above, that 2.7M m^3 leak totaled 1800 tons, which isn’t that much on the yearly scale. Still, a possible $3600 fine is cheap. Way, way less than any CO2-equivalent carbon tax.

They’re equating it to 40000 cars, which is 67.5 m^3/car (compared to my 223 estimate).

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

9 hours ago, FleshJeb said:

looks like methane leakage is pretty darn significant. And it ONLY took me 2.5 hours of research to put it in some semblance of context.

I love people whose brains work like yours does! 

Wish I could give you a ton of upvotes.  Very KSPF post; both informative and entertaining! 

[FleshJeb]

7 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I love people whose brains work like yours does! 

Wish I could give you a ton of upvotes.  Very KSPF post; both informative and entertaining! 

People who have a moderately unhealthy obsession with providing an appropriate level of accuracy and context?  I'm in good company here. 

I realized about halfway through the writeup that it was analogous to, and somewhat inspired by, your critique of not having a consistent "zero" to measure global temperature change...so I'm blaming (i.e. thanking) you... 

In fairness to the reporter, I checked out some of her other pieces, and they're much better structured. I think this is a case of a rush job, and not indicative of general incompetence, or as I first feared, intentional obfuscation.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

4 hours ago, FleshJeb said:

I'm blaming... you

It's maddening stuff, ain't it!

Important topics deserve straight talk.  The durned thing is: there is so much advocacy... and yet I'm a believer in truth wins out.

I think we could get people to stop peeing in our own wells, if we stop saying the pee is radioactive acid.  It's gross enough as is.

 

Edited October 23, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[StrandedonEarth]

58 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I think we could get people to stop peeing in our own wells, if we stop saying the pee is radioactive acid.  It's gross enough as is.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, StrandedonEarth said:

'Tis True!

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

In another of the, things that make you go "hmmm" - the great Pacific Garbage Patch.   Great Pacific Garbage Patch | National Geographic Society

Quote

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific trash vortex,... is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean.   Marine debris is litter that ends up in oceans  

80 percent of plastic in the ocean is estimated to come from land-based sources, with the remaining 20 percent coming from boats and other marine sources.

 I've read this above part before: most of the plastic is supposed to be from terrestrial sources.  There are a variety of proposals to clean up this muck... and here's a report on one of them:

This amazing effort to clean up the ocean actually worked! (msn.com)

The problem is - when you look at what they're harvesting, it looks primarily like marine junk (as in crap sailors heave overboard or that gets washed off the decks of ships) - rather than land based stuff like detergent and soda bottles, baggies and other things used by average consumers.  Mind you, this is an impression from reading articles and looking at the harvest from one video - but the muck they dump on the deck of the clean-up ship looks predominantly like marine-use plastics, storage containers and fuel/oil barrels.

So the question is: if the garbage is primarily marine garbage - how in the world do you regulate that?  Ships operating in international waters are unlikely to be fined or held accountable for polluting, especially since they'd also have to self-report before getting regulated.   

[SunlitZelkova]

3 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

things that make you go "hmmm

I do think these things exist and I am grateful that people point them out, but I don’t think this is the case this time around. Just because one video shows things a certain way does not mean it accurately represents every single clean up op.

3 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

So the question is: if the garbage is primarily marine garbage - how in the world do you regulate that?  Ships operating in international waters are unlikely to be fined or held accountable for polluting, especially since they'd also have to self-report before getting regulated.   

The aspect of whether it is primarily from one source or another aside, I think the only good way to solve this is through education. It doesn’t matter if there are economic incentives or laws or whatever- this probably will not be truly solved unless those responsible for littering change their ways, just as with terrestrial littering. Better waste facilities at ports would be a good supplement to that though.

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

the great Pacific Garbage Patch

 

5 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

when you look at what they're harvesting, it looks primarily like marine junk (as in crap sailors heave overboard or that gets washed off the decks of ships) - rather than land based stuff like detergent and soda bottles, baggies and other things used by average consumers. 

But the "patch" is not an island of bottles, it's just an area of higher concentration of invisible plastic particles.
So, any junk they gather is unrelated to the Patch.

Anyway, it's a time to state the obvious: the ocean will be more and more plastic-rich (especially if use the "green hydrogen" powered by coastal plastic installations, lol), so it's just a part of the inevitable change of biosphere coming by the end of the century.
So, it's a task for the oceanic life to evolutionally adapt to the new normality and turn the junk into resource to compete for.

Fishes shouls learn to grow plastic scales.

Octopuses are already okay with plastic cups (we can see this in video).

[SunlitZelkova]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Anyway, it's a time to state the obvious: the ocean will be more and more plastic-rich (especially if use the "green hydrogen" powered by coastal plastic installations, lol), so it's just a part of the inevitable change of biosphere coming by the end of the century.
So, it's a task for the oceanic life to evolutionally adapt to the new normality and turn the junk into resource to compete for.

It’s not just marine life that is affected though, mainly because of micro plastics.

Humans will no longer be able to consume seafood without raising the risk of serious health issues. The water will also become dangerous- no playing (surfing/swimming/falling in by accident/whatever) or really going near the shore at all without raising the risk of serious health issues. Of course this will lead to problems on the land as well, when organisms that feed on sea life start ingesting the contaminated prey, and then as it goes around the food web, eventually most land organisms will be affected as well.

Also, the risk of famine and conflict will increase as regions that depend on marine life for food supply and income are forced to stop, lest they continue consumption and start dying in their 20s.

Of course this won’t be a problem for most of the people reading this post but it will be for future generations.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

this won’t be a problem for most of the people reading this post but it will be for future generations.

Don't be so sure:

phthalates, BPA etc are often artificial hormones and endocrine disruptors.

Toxic chemicals linked to infertility found in Big Macs and Taco Bell burritos (msn.com)

Quote

these chemicals are considered endocrine disruptors—chemicals that interfere with normal hormone function, even contributing to weight gain. Flame retardants may interfere with brain development in fetuses and children; other compounds that cling to plastics can cause cancer or birth defects. A basic tenet of toxicology holds that the dose makes the poison, but many of these chemicals—BPA and its close relatives, for example—appear to impair lab animals at levels some governments consider safe for humans.

We Know Plastic Is Harming Marine Life. What About Us? (nationalgeographic.com)

EDIT: all this stuff is why I am pollution focused rather than needing the speculative horror of catastrophic global warming.  (Slow climate change is something we can adapt to quite readily, but stupidly poisoning ourselves because its convenient and cost effective is... stupid).

[Rakaydos]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

(Slow climate change is something we can adapt to quite readily, but stupidly poisoning ourselves because its convenient and cost effective is... stupid).

Slow is relative. A major city like, say, miami  has about half a million people. Just building half a million new apartments, somewhere out of the flood zone, is going to be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars- and that doesnt even count infrastructure, like sewer mains, power lines and internet connections, or services, like schools, commercial districts, and office space, if you build it a place not already choked with existing construction. That's not the sort of thing that can appear overnight. Having to abandon all the existing infrastructiure we built in what is now the "wrong" places is what makes things difficult.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

3 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

Slow is relative. A major city like, say, miami  has about half a million people. Just building half a million new apartments, somewhere out of the flood zone, is going to be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars- and that doesnt even count infrastructure, like sewer mains, power lines and internet connections, or services, like schools, commercial districts, and office space, if you build it a place not already choked with existing construction. That's not the sort of thing that can appear overnight. Having to abandon all the existing infrastructiure we built in what is now the "wrong" places is what makes things difficult.

At what pace do you reasonably expect sea level rise?  

[Rakaydos]

5 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

At what pace do you reasonably expect sea level rise?  

Average sea level, in this case, matter less than storm surge and hurricane count and strength. The global average sea level might only be rising a few MM per decade off ice melt, but a hurricane can locally raise the sea level meters at a time, with waves on top of that.

[kerbiloid]

What's the formula of

deltaHeightOfStormWave, m (deltaOceanLevel, mm) 

dependence?

Is it exponential ?

Or, say, some historical chart.

On the other hand.
If the ocean level gets lower by a meter, the storm waves would disappear at all?

How about the 12kya ocean level raise, by 120 m?
Were there no storm waves before, or should we suffer from Gargantuan tsunami now?

Edited October 27, 2021 by kerbiloid

[Rakaydos]

44 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

What's the formula of

deltaHeightOfStormWave, m (deltaOceanLevel, mm) 

dependence?

Is it exponential ?

Or, say, some historical chart.

On the other hand.
If the ocean level gets lower by a meter, the storm waves would disappear at all?

How about the 12kya ocean level raise, by 120 m?
Were there no storm waves before, or should we suffer from Gargantuan tsunami now?

Independant factors. Hurricane strength is rising dramatically just off existing climate change.

[kerbiloid]

9 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

Hurricane strength is rising dramatically just off existing climate change.

y=y(x)

... ?

We can see that the ocean raised by 120 m, and this didn't cause any unusual hurricanes.

All Mediterranean is about this.

Beringia, Oceania, etc ...

[Rakaydos]

2 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

y=y(x)

... ?

We can see that the ocean raised by 120 m, and this didn't cause any unusual hurricanes.

Welcome to chaotic systems. If it were easy to model, the weather man would never be wrong. But the changes in hurricane strength is well documented at this point.

[kerbiloid]

2 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

Welcome to chaotic systems.

Thanks.

So, how could it be that +120 m didn't cause anything, but 5 cm more will turn the Earth into a planet of storms?

I didn't see the documented. Did you?

The Australian coral reefs appeared just 10kya. Also nothing terrible.

P.S.
Chaotic systems are unpredictable, lol. That's why they are called chaotic.

So, how can somebody predict that the chaotic system will go storming if add 5 cm, rather than 500 m ?

P.P.S.
The Ice Age. The 1..2 km thick mountains of ice disappeared from two subcontinents (Eu. and Am.) and several seas. Nothing had blown away the leaves from the jungles.

***

So, the 5 cm is a pure homeopathy.

[Rakaydos]

You still havnt addressed the existing strengthened storms. A model is considered useful when it reflects what is actually happening.

[StrandedonEarth]

7 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

how can somebody predict that the chaotic system will go storming if add 5 cm, rather than 500 m ?

It’s not the sea level rise that strengthens the storms. It’s the warmer water that adds more  energy to the storms. 

It’s conceivable that if all the ice melted and the sea levels rose dramatically, the average water temperature could be the same or lower, so the storms may not be more powerful. 

I would think that animal life is less affected by severe weather than human pollution. Animals that survive storms will have plenty of windfall and victims to eat, but humans tend to  destroy the habitat and poison the food and water supplies that animals need to survive. It’s the humans that find storms such a huge problem, interrupting our lives and all that. The nerve!

[kerbiloid]

13 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

It’s not the sea level rise that strengthens the storms. It’s the warmer water that adds more  energy to the storms. 

The post-Ice Age ice melting was definitely a series of temperature changes, too.

So, why expect what didn't happen at much greater climatic catastrophes?

14 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

You still havnt addressed the existing strengthened storms. A model is considered useful when it reflects what is actually happening.

Why expect that their strengthening/weakening isn't cyclic?

The models describe their correlation based on a 100 year long history.
The climate changes were taking from centuries to millenia.

Edited October 27, 2021 by kerbiloid

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

13 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

addressed the existing strengthened storms

Frequency of stronger storms is, indeed, up these last years.  Number of storms, not so much - but yes, larger storms.

These, while destructive, are point-events.  Both in time and space.  The storm that hits Houston does not affect Miami.  The one that hits Miami, leaves New York high and dry.  But to say that Miami will be subsumed by rising seas in any reasonable time-span is exceedingly unlikely.

This is a different argument from why I'm wanting a less polluted world; the ubiquity of plastics means that we are running a completely uncontrolled experiment on ourselves with no way to opt out.

Or - to put it in a different frame: we stopped using DDT because, despite its being fantastic at killing the bugs that were eating our crops and giving us diseases, it was getting into the food chain and killing off top predators, like raptors (California Condor, Bald Eagle, etc.).  Yet we are dumping tons and tons of crap into the water (bottom of the food chain) and all those plankton (see article I referenced) scooping up microplastics are then being eaten by the things we eat.  Guess what happens when all that endocrine and hormonal stuff hits us -- because that's about all we can do is guess, given the experiment is uncontrolled.

Our kids and their kids won't appreciate us keeping this up, just because a bag of chips is cheaper and easier than a glass jar of chips.

21 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

the humans that find storms such a huge problem, interrupting our lives and all that. The nerve!

IKR - what will we do when 10 days of power-outage means we lose touch with the Kardashians!