Cost of Arctic methane release could be “size of global economy”: experts

Sustainability at Erasmus University, and Cambridge’s Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics, who has been studying the disappearance of Arctic ice for forty years.

The three academics, who co-authored Nature “Comment” article, built the projections on previous fieldwork in the region by Dr. Natalia Shakhova and colleagues from the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska, described by Wadhams as “the only people with the geological knowledge to make estimates about methane emission in this area.”

The PAGE09 model was then employed to translate the extra methane emissions from the East Siberian Sea into global impacts by considering the huge range of environmental changes they might cause — from increasing global temperature and sea levels to consequent flooding, public health and extreme weather.

The model was run 10,000 times to assess the range of risks and provide robust results. The team insists that both the scientific predictions and economic modeling are far from worst-case scenarios, and that the figures represent the mean result from “the whole range of available science and economics”.

“That’s how the model works, how it was used for Stern and by the EPA, it’s the only way I’ll allow it to be used,” said Hope. “The model has to be run with broad ranges for the inputs, it’s not justifiable otherwise.”

“This is the first calculation of its kind that we know of,” he adds, “and we welcome anyone who wants to take this forward and build on it so we can have a discussion - but we don’t have long to discuss it! This is so big and if it happens it could happen fast; people need to wake up to the possible reality we face.”

“This is a warning to the world borne out of many decades of research on all our parts, including forty years of ice thinning measurements from UK submarines,” said Wadhams, “it is a considered statement with enormous implications.”

The release notes that the research also explored the impact of a number of later, longer-lasting or smaller pulses of methane, and the authors write that, in all these cases, the economic cost for physical changes to the Arctic is “steep”, with developing nations bearing 80 percent of the cost through extreme weather, poorer health and damaged agriculture.

The authors write that global economic institutions and world leaders should “kick-start investment in rigorous economic modeling” and consider the changing Arctic landscape as an “economic time-bomb” far outweighing any “short-term gains from shipping and extraction.”

— Read more in Gail Whiteman et al., “Vast costs of Arctic change,” Nature 499 (25 July 2013): 401-3