Commenting on the possible causes of the recent return of the upward trend in methane concentration after its 10-yr pause, Dlugokencky, in a paper published in 2009, pretty much ruled out a significant contribution from the Arctic:

Near-zero CH4 [methane] growth in the Arctic during 2008 suggests we have not yet activated strong climate feedbacks from permafrost and CH4 hydrates [contained in the Arctic Ocean seabed].

Apparently, Dlugokencky’s way of thinking hasn’t changed much in the intervening two years even in light of the continued growth of atmospheric methane concentrations (Figure 1). Just a few days ago he told Andy Revkin that:

[B]ased on what we see in the atmosphere, there is no evidence of substantial increases in methane emissions from the Arctic in the past 20 years.

So despite a warming Arctic, the feared large methane release has not been manifest. Which fits very nicely into the new results from Dmitrenko and colleagues. They find that the methane observed to be bubbling up from the Arctic seafloor off the coast of Siberia to be the ongoing and long-term response to the flooding of the seabed there that occurred some 8,000 years ago and not a response to recent warming in the region. Dmitrenko et al. write:

The CH4 [methane] supersaturation, recently reported from the eastern Siberian shelf, is believed to be the result of the degradation of subsea permafrost that is due to the long-lasting warming initiated by permafrost submergence about 8000 years ago rather than from those triggered by recent Arctic climate changes.

The new Dmitrenko result pretty much throws cold water on the “shocking” news that has been making its way through the global media in recent days that reports from a recent survey of the Siberian Arctic Shelf indicate that vast quantities of methane are bubbling to the surface of the ocean and that this is “stok[ing] new global warming fears.”

References:

Dlugokencky, E. J., et al., 2009. Observational constraints on recent increases in the atmospheric CH4 burden. Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L18803, doi:10.1029/2009GL039780.

Dmitrenko, I.A., et al., 2011. Recent changes in the shelf hydrography in the Siberian Arctic: Potential for subsea permafrost instability. Journal of Geophysical Research, 116, C10027, doi:10.1029/2001JC007218.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2011/12/16/methane-time-bomb-in-arctic-seas-apocalypse-not/

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/climate-change/news/article.cfm?c_id=26&objectid=10773421

Methane Time Bomb in Arctic Seas – Apocalypse Not
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

A very important research effort has been under way during recent summers in the warming, increasingly ice-free shallows off Russia’s Siberian coast. There, an international array of scientists has been investigating widening areas of open water that are disgorging millions of tons of methane each year.

Given that methane, molecule for molecule, has at least 20 times the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide, it’s important to get a handle on whether these are new releases, the first foretaste of some great outburst from thawing sea-bed stores of the gas, or simply a longstanding phenomenon newly observed.

If you read the Independent of Britain, you’d certainly be thinking the worst. The newspaper has led the charge in fomenting worry over the gas emissions, with portentous, and remarkably similar, stories in 2008 and this week.

If you read geophysical journals and survey scientists tracking past and future methane emissions, you get an entirely different picture:

>>>>>>>>>>>>

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/methane-time-bomb-in-arctic-seas-apocalypse-not/

Links to the paper.

Arctic Monthly Temperature Plots

Some of the arctic stations have long-term temperature records. Here we plotted monthly mean temperature records from the three arctic stations: Barrow(Alaska), Eureka(Canada), and Tiksi(Russia). The data goes as far back as 1945, 1947, and 1933 respectively. The data comes from the Integrated Surface Hourly Global dataset (National Climate Data Center). Using this dataset, we calculated daily average temperature data first. Then in turn, we calculated monthly mean temperature data. If there were more than five days of missing data, we counted that month missing.

In order to decipher the temperature trend for each station, further sophisticated analysis is necessary. -i.e. Calculations might involve finding seasonal, annual, or even decadal mean.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/arctic/plots/temperature.html

I tried to download some recent data (to 2008) but it’s such a mission I gave up. If methane really is a warmer and the adjacent fountains have any effect, it should show up in this record eventually.

Tiksi data is here:-

http://iasoa.org/iasoa/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=296&Itemid=171

Files are compressed in bzip2 format. 7-zip or gnu bzip2 should uncompress the text files – good luck.

It’s quite close to the main road to Hanmer I think

http://www.aridgetoofar.org.nz/Pictures.htm

I think the bird mincing company are planting some natives to increase wildlife in the area as some kind of fig leaf to the objectors.

Climate variability in the region of Tiksi Hydrometeorological Observatory

A. Makshtas1, V. Dmitriev1, N. Ivanov1, S. Shutilin1

http://ipy-osc.no/abstract/379736

Correlation Between Cloud Cover Trends and Surface Temperature Trends: A Comparison Between Barrow, Alaska and Tiksi, Russia

L. Matrosova1, T. Uttal2, A. Makshtas3 and N. Ivanov3

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/annualconference/previous/2011/abs.php?refnum=71-110415-B

“These two stations have unusually long meteorological records”

“……….in Tiksi, trends between 1935 and 2007 range from -0.02 °C/year to +0.02 °C/year (warming in January, February, May, June, July and cooling in March, April, August, September, October, November).

http://www.epa.gov/methane/pdfs/Methane-and-Nitrous-Oxide-Emissions-From-Natural-Sources.pdf

Including (summarised)

“The current release from permafrost is less than 1Tg/year versus 127.6Tg/year from tropical swamps.”

“A [doomsday] scenario of loosing 60-90% of permafrost by 2100 would see CH4 emmissions rising to 5-30Tg/year before falling back to previous levels.”

A significant point here is that the major naturally occuring global source is bacteria production in wetlands. This process best takes place between 27 & 32C. Permafrost release is almost exclusively release of anciently produced CH4.

That is not to say that the arctic would not be a nice place to visit in summer if someone else is paying.