A new global warming offender: Dam drawdowns
http://www.petridishnews.com/news/a-new-global-warming-offender-dam-drawdowns/
I wonder how this changes the proportion of CO2 to methane that otherwise would have happened without the dam. The vast majority of biological material is recycled, most of it on an annual basis, and what leads to the annual variation in measured CO2 levels:
(from Wikipedia)
However, if the bulk of the material is converted to CO2 (as opposed to methane) when it isn’t underwater, then creating dams and the cycling that most dams undergo (most dams are designed with two purposes: first to reduce storm surges and second to generate power or supply irrigation water which in most cases leads to substantial changes in water level over the course of a year) could dramatically shift the proportion to methane. Methane (as the author points out) is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, so while the carbon amount might be identical the ability to trap heat is much different. Methane is also lighter than air (CO2 is heavier) (you can make a methane balloon if you like) and thus would be expected to rise high in the stratosphere and could interact with the ozone layer (I don’t know if this has been scientifically measured, but I throw it out for consideration) and create very high ice crystals (methane having four hydrogen atoms per carbon atom, thus reactions with ozone yields water) which could actually result in a cooling effect by reflecting light before it can reach the surface.
I don’t dispute that humans are impacting our planet, nor do I dispute that humans are having negative impacts on the global ecosystem. I just want to have rational discussions on the best course of action to address these issues without being condemned for being a ‘denialist’ simply because I am not convinced that burning fossil fuels is the major contributor to the changes in the ecosystem. I am also very far from convinced that the only possible remediation effort is to destroy our global civilization by insisting on eliminating fossil fuel usage. I am particularly opposed to the focus on eliminating fossil fuel usage because I believe that the damage to the global ecosystem is not going to be reduced by the slightest amount by eliminating fossil fuel usage, so we will have destroyed our civilization for nothing.
Not that we won’t have the civilization destroying potential when we finally exhaust fossil fuels if there is nothing to pick up the slack. However, according to my calculations, biofuels have the potential to pick up the slack, but not until transportation fuels start to have a wholesale (pre-tax) price of around $10 a gallon. I expect we are going to hit that long before we run out of fossil fuels and I am aiming to be poised to take advantage of that.
