Arctic sea "foaming" with methane?

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An article in The Independent reports on a new scientific discovery that massive amounts of a greenhouse gas are spewing into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic sea. Over at WorldChanging, Alex Steffen puts it into context, opening with the line that this discovery, if confirmed, "is really, really, really bad news." "An Arctic Sea 'Foaming' with Methane: What Now?" (WorldChanging), Exclusive: The Methane Timebomb (The Independent)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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starcadia

The Arctic Sea should be charged with battery.
kiint

here’s a slightly more balanced take on the subject, with less adjectives or “context”

http://tinyurl.com/5y5loh
dbarak

Well, it was nice knowing you all.

Checklist:

1. Food and fresh water stored away.

2. Secure and defensible housing arranged.

3. Tropical disease inoculations current.
Atomische

Reminds me of a novel by John Barnes (Mother of Storms).
Wigwam Jones

A) Sorry for the ‘asshat’ comment. I meant ‘sporty chapeau’, of course.

B) I didn’t ‘bring my boy Bush into it’, I was responding to the comments above mine that (sigh) once again claimed Bush broke the planet, and even more ludicrous, the claim that we might prevail upon him to ‘wake up and fix it’ in his last several months in office. I’m frankly not a George W. Bush fan, but I do take exception to the sporty chapeau brigade thinking that George Bush is to blame if their milk sours in the fridge. It’s funny, but it’s boring at the same time. What on earth will ya’ll do when you haven’t got him to blame everything on anymore?

C) Global warming is real. Whether or not humans did it is subject to debate, and that’s ok. What is funny is that if this methane release is what it appears to be, there really isn’t much we can to to reverse that now, so as I said before, either we’re fooked or we’re not fooked. No amount of hand-wringing or cutting back on driving is going to fix it now – if the ‘massive methane release’ bit is true.

And D) I say “Ya’ll” because I am from the south, though I live in the north now. Sorry, ya’ll.
trr

Padster123 @ #5,
Maybe the rich Democrats. Naah, I’m sure they don’t care either, unless there’s a camera in their face.
ChunkyMonkeyBrain

What are the possibilities that this could just be extra-active volcanoes on the sea floor?

…

time to start investing in particulate ejector systems!
padster123

Yeah, but who cares, as long as a few hundred very rich Republicans get even richer?

Right?
arnearne

Reminds me of the novel ‘The Swarm’ by Frank Schatzing.
Stefan Jones

Pfffft! This can all be solved with a capital gains tax cut. We all know that a vigorous, deregulated market will create enough capital to deal with any social or environmental problem.

Alternatively, we can sell the atmosphere to Halliburton. In exchange for their cleaning it up they can charge a user fee.

This will help solve our employment problems, since the firm will require agents to track down fare dodgers and apply exclusion devices to their windpipes.
Wigwam Jones

@ HMPF – Actually, I think you read me wrong. First, I *care*. Nowhere have I said I do not care. Not agreeing that I can do anything to fix the presumed impending disaster is not the same as not caring. Second, I did not assume that only those who have children care. I stated my own intentional lack of issue as my contribution to my carbon footprint – as it appears you have as well.

My conclusion was that I care, I have shown I care, and I don’t have any need to continue to prove I care by putting money, effort, and resources towards a solution to a problem that I do not agree is actually a solution.
trr

Ill Lich,
Andy Taylor was Andy Griffith’s character’s name in the Andy Griffith show. And Gomer Pyle was Jim Nabor’s character’s name, not an actors name. So he probably did mean Andy Taylor.
SamF

Quick! Someone call Al Gore! Only HE can save us now!
ill lich

The one thing I know is that, if this is true, STILL nobody will do anything about global warming.

But eventually governments WILL be “doing something” about global warming. . . they will be mobilizing armies to quell unrest and steal what remaining resources there are.

(Now let us all sing the old time country standard “All Good Times Are Past and Gone.”)
Wigwam Jones

A) Regardless of what anyone thinks, George W. Bush isn’t responsible for EVERYTHING bad that has ever happened. Get over it.

B) In any case, he will be out of office in a couple months. I don’t think he can ‘wake up and fix it’ by then. Just a thought.

C) Regardless of who did it and ran, this information either means 1) we’re fooked, or 2) we’re not fooked. Either way, not much we can do about it now.

D) So relax.

E) Oh, and irony department – the asshats who are willing to believe any old report about the sea bed farting us to death with the flatulence of ancient organisms are the same asshats who refuse to believe that scientists intentionally colliding hadrons in an an experiment that they say “probably won’t” create a black hole and kill us all would ever, ever, do such a thing. The first absurdity is obviously true because, er, George Bush broke the planet, everyone knows that, and the second absurdity obviously isn’t true because scientists say it probably isn’t true. RIIIIIIGHT.

The level of asshattery is significantly higher than the methane level off the Klingon, er, Russian shore, methinks.

I live up north. Ya’ll can come visit when your yard turns to glass.
Chris S

This was a critical plot element in this mini-series.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/burnup/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1105836/

“Burn Up”, although produced for the BBC, was primarily a Canadian production.
CommanderCool

instead of reporting every bad thing that happens these people could be trying to do something about it. im a bit young to do anything dirastic but i turn off the lights take cold shower and wash my clothes in cold water i should be doing more and i will, but everyone on this planet knows that global warming is coming and is a problem so how about instead of giving us details about it you stop wasting you time and do something to fix it. Im not trying to be mean or anything all im trying to say is that its old news we have heard it before and something has to be done and if you really want to make a mark on the world then be a big part of the solution instead of just writing what has to be done about it. this is just my opinion so please no one be offended.
ill lich

#34 JAKE0748

“I mean I like Andy Taylor and Gomer Pyle. . . ”

Wait. . . Gomer Pyle was in Duran Duran TOO?!

(BTW– I believe you meant Andy GRIFFITH.)
Hmpf

Actually, drastically reducing our CO2 emissions is still a good idea, because CO2 will stay in the atmosphere a lot longer. Methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, but it also stays in the atmosphere for a much shorter time. So, reducing CO2 emissions may help the planet to get back to a – somewhat – moderate climate in the medium/long term (and, if there’s still humans around then, this will help *them*).

Also, we still don’t know where *exactly* the tipping point is. I don’t know about you guys, but to me, it seems more sensible to assume that we haven’t reached it yet, and to do our damnedest to *keep* from reaching it, instead of assuming that everything is lost (and thus making sure that everything *will* be lost). Is there really any rational argument that can be made for the ‘just give up and enjoy the fireworks’ approach? Cause the only ‘arguments’ I can see for that approach are based on (moral and actual) laziness and short-sighted egocentrism (“I just don’t want to be bothered with fighting for the future if the chances are so slim. It’s too much work.”)

I know it’s fashionable to assume the worst of everyone, but c’mon, folks, we *do* have the capability to reason, to create, to cooperate for a *reason*. *Culture* wasn’t an accident; it’s in our nature. Even the most primitive paleolithic tribal structure was an example of culture. We have *always* survived by cooperating. It’s cooperation of the highest order that’s necessary now.

Of course, we have an unfortunate tendency to draw lines between an ‘us’ (i.e. the people we cooperate with) and ‘them’ (i.e. the people we fight against/steal from/don’t care about), and that tendency is part of what has kept us from acting on many of the most urgent problems of our time. Even so, though: in the past several hundred years, we have consistently widened the circle of ‘us’: just a few centuries ago most of today’s nations did not exist, and in their places there were just lots of small kingdoms etc., frequently in conflict with each other – ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ – and yet nowadays, not only are those smaller entities united in much larger nations, but we are even moving towards even larger ‘unities’.

It *has* to be possible for us to learn to define ‘us’ as ‘everyone on this planet’ – and to start acting on that.
Antinous

Wigwam Jones,

We don’t usually refer to our fellow commenters as asshats here at BoingBoing.
neandrothal

This is clearly junk science propagated by an anti-Arctic Sea conspiracy.
PaulRedeker

Yes.

Haliburton can use an “atmospheric processor”

and when the xenomorphs come…..
ployntabs

We’re boned.
Jake0748

“I live up north. Ya’ll can come visit when your yard turns to glass.”

I live down south. Its ok with me when people say “Ya’ll”, but when you type it out, what exactly is it supposed to mean? I mean I like Andy Taylor and Gomer Pyle, really, but do you think that when they wrote a report or a letter, they actually typed out the word y’all?

It just seems to be the kind of word that someone who, upon reading something from a liberal (or anyone who disagrees), would say, “stop blaming George Bush”.
alowishus

So what you’re saying is that this isn’t the time to stop drinking?
Wigwam Jones

I do not understand why ‘we must do something’ when we do not have even a defined possibility of success.

It would seem to me that when a hurricane is coming, it makes much more sense to make preparations for dealing with the hurricane than to all work together to try to make the hurricane not show up after all.

Global warming? Real. Man-made? Dunno – who cares? Whether it is or not, it makes more sense (to me) to start making plans to deal with its effects than to start frantically ‘doing something’ in the hopes that it will have some positive effect, with no scientific assurance of any such thing.

We humans are unique in our ability to adapt to our environments using artificial means. We’re good at that. Not so much at making the environment adapt to us. Play to your strengths, is my suggestion.
i_prefer_yeti

I’m still unclear on when I should start to panic.

Can someone devise a simple widget for my iphone that would automatically alert me to the precise moment of proper panicking?

Also, can someone explain why we need a K in panicking?

Many thanks
Robbo

Speaking of xenomorphs – I’m sure this all because Cheney and his cronies are actually lizard aliens in disguise, intent on altering our atmosphere to suit their comrades, our new overlords, and beneath what’s left of the arctic icecap there are alien terra-forming “factories” churning out all these gases. Personally I plan on weathering the current financial crises by investing in tin foil – folks are gonna need more of it for their hats. Mine’s a size 7 3/4!

Cheers.

P.S. Polar bear farts? Hmmm – naw.
Kay the Complainer

@13, I believe that was a plot point in a ’90s movie starring Keanu Reeves, and possibly Christopher Walken.

And 30, E) Your problem here is that you are equating the ramblings of two lone nutjobs with the consensus of thirty years of scientific research. And, just to clarify, the nutjobs are the two dudes who thought the LHC was going to destroy the world.

You don’t have to set great store by science, but you can’t uphold lone wackos as scientific heroes (saving the world from the LHC, OMG!) on one hand, then hand-wavingly dismiss the legions of scientists who warn of climate change (alarmist PC shills) on the other.

At least, not if you want to appear to be a rational human being.
alowishus

@I_PREFER_YETI :
DON’T PANIC
IWood

Seacows. I’ve been warning about their vast farting herds for years, but did anyone listen? Who’s laughing now, world!
Hmpf

>I do not understand why ‘we must do something’ when we do not have even a defined possibility of success.

Because we have a defined *impossibility* of survival if we don’t do something. Any chance, no matter how slim, *has* to be better than that, right? Imagine you have some fatal disease, terminal stage, and someone gives you a pill that will give you a five percent chance of surviving the disease. Sure, it isn’t *much* of a chance – but it’s a chance. Would you refuse it?

As for preparing to adapt to a changing climate: Sure. We need to do that, too. Especially as it’s impossible to *stop* global warming now; the only thing we still have any hope of influencing is the *amount* of warming. If it goes above a certain level, the entire biosphere will begin to die; as good as we are at inventing nifty technical solutions to our problems, we probably won’t be able to survive on a planet on which it isn’t possible anymore to produce food by anything resembling conventional means. Oh, sure, a small minority may survive, in protected habitats – but not civilisation as it exists now.

So, yes, of course we need to adapt to the four or so degrees of warming that are already guaranteed. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try very hard indeed to avoid six degrees. (And I really don’t see why this is so often painted as an ‘either or’ question, when it really is very obviously a case of ‘both of the above’.)
Scary_UK

So it wasn’t Cows burps all this time!

If there’s so much methane down there, surely we can tap it and use it for something?
Chas44

So… am I to understand that NATURE’S doing this to us? Ahh. “Massive amounts of greenhouse gas,” you say. I see. Well, is it again OK for me to rumble around town in my SUV without people calling me an eco-terrorist, seeing as how I and my vehicle had nothing to do with methane-burping ocean floor dynamics, nor sunspots, nor any other natural phenomenon that actually might be causing global warming? Can I at least have some fun while the oceans slowly rise over my front lawn, since there’s not a diddly-damn any of us can do about it?
Graham Anderson

I love the cool name someone came up for it – the “clathrate gun hypothesis” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis).

Maybe if all climate change evidence was discussed like it was a Dirty Harry script, Dubya might wake up from his slumbers in science class and do something about it…
verify

I don’t know why, but I can’t help but laugh. Where are we going and why are we in this hand basket?
Graham Anderson

Use it for something – like in the patent for clathrate mining? http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6209965.html
Secret_Life_of_Plants

Remember when, in January 2007, there was that strange odor in New York City?

I guess that was hydrogen sulfide released from the Hudson River Canyon.The warming ocean caused long-frozen methane hydrates on the ocean floor to begin thawing.

Methane is also locked in ice sheets and glaciers all over the world.

But don’t worry, we will all be dead from police and Blackwater minions bashing our heads in during the New-Depression-era food riots (worthless USD; sterile Monsanto seeds) before global warming ever has a chance to kill us.

It’s a wonderful thing! Suitable for a directory!
robwiss

@#36
Perhaps DON’T PANIC could be boingboing’s new motto
Wigwam Jones

@51 – HMPF

The rational response to the scenario you describe is not the one we face. We have no unusual threats to our survival from global warming – we face a slow, gradual, warming and flooding based on ice melt-off.

What you do describe has a real-life parallel, though – it is analogous to making up your mind that your cousin has a tiny chance of survival if he takes a special pill, and then forcing him to take it on the basis of your belief – which you think is fact, but your cousin disagrees. Your cousin might respond – as I tend to – take your own pill. Leave me alone.

In the long run, we will not survive at all. No matter how you define ‘long term’, there is a hard-stop built in to the system. In the longest term, the solar system has a lifespan. Shorter term, we have galactic events that happen with regularity that destroy planets and will most likely destroy ours in time. Even shorter than that, we have tectonic events with our name on them, which generally result in mass extinction. Shorter term than that, we have super calderas, rogue nations with nukes, and scheduled hadron collisions that “probably won’t” (which means they might) create durable black holes and kill us all.

We face extinction from a huge variety of threats, from the near immediate to the extreme long-term, some more viable than others, but at least one of them will be nearly certain to take us all out.

But I live in a 70-to-80 year frame of events that has a potential threat to people outside of my frame that someone suggests ‘fixing’ by taking my money out of my pocket, making my life significantly more difficult, and meanwhile, I have no children, so apres moi, le deluge, you know?

So…with respect, take your own pill. I don’t want your pill. I reject your right to force it down my throat.
Engine Here

I remember frozen methane deposits being blamed for the Bermuda Triangle disappearances.

Sudden thaw of methane on the ocean floor by tectonic movement would release quickly boiling methane upwards toward the surface, rendering the ocean a sea of bubbles, causing ships to lose their ballast and be swallowed hole, as well as the updrafts of lighter-than-air vapor in the atmosphere downing planes flying though it.

Ohh well. Time to buy soon-to-be waterfront property in the Berkshires.
LeavingHalfway

Re: “Ya’ll”[sic]

You All -> “Y’all”

The only unique second person plural the English (American anyway) language has. Best hold on to it.
catbeller

I may post a longer response to all these interesting comments later, but for now:

The methane trapped in the ocean’s floors would have stayed there, barring a massive increase in the mean temperature. We’ve provided that massive increase, and now, as scientists have told us plainly for decades, the methane in the ocean’s floors, the methane trapped under the Siberian taiga, Alaska’s permafrost, and the Canadian north will release in colossal and practically endless quantity. We provided a tiny push that unleashed a dump truck. And no, electric cars and more insulation won’t save us. This was the tipping point scientists have been crying about for the last ten years. Remember, this year? One scientist stated flatly that we need to stop all – ALL – greenhouse gas emissions just to maybe perhaps mitigate the disaster. We won’t, and now we face the worst possible scenario. Full bore positive feedback loop, in which the warming increases methane release which kills CO2 recycling which increases CO2 which increase warming which releases more methane from the aforementioned sources. This isn’t rocket science. There are enormous quantities, oil reserve-sized quantities, or even larger, of methane trapped in a sort of gaseous diffusion in the dirt of the arctic and the floors of the oceans. People don’t understand this, and blame Al Gore for being annoying and alarmist. Science, which Al Gore understands, is a steel wall into which human stupidity will ram itself at the speed of light. This will not end the world, but it will make it a permanent Disaster Capitalism bonanza. Believe it that this will make a lot of people rich, and kill a good portion of the human race. Not mutually exclusive outcomes.
Jake0748

“You all”, or even just plain “you”, works just fine for me.

Besides, its not always used as a second person plural. Many times it is used to refer to an individual, as in, “Why don’t y’all come over for a beer after work”.

Its just a peeve of mine. Take no notice. I’m crabby today, s’all.
catbeller

Bush (and to another generation, Palin) is the standard bearer, the king, the leader of the Know-nothings who have hamstrung any sane response we could have made to this ultimate disaster. He and his, well, cult, have attempted to “fix” science and scientists to produce “balanced” viewpoints, which is the same as “promoting lies”. He’s sliced science to ribbons, spent us into literal bankruptcy, and wants government out of anything not involving shooting people. He and his ilk have pinned us all, the entire world, to the ground while the dam breaks and the wall of water comes foaming down the valley. As the water hits, he’ll blame it on liberal government spending and swear to Jesus it isn’t really happening anyway.
Hmpf

I recommend you do some research on the effects of the levels of warming predicted by the – very conservative, because it does not take tipping points into account at all so far – latest IPCC report. Believe me, the risk *is* existential. Not in the next ten or twenty years, but quite possibly before the end of the century, and maybe quite a bit before that, i.e. within my lifetime (don’t know how old you are, but I’m 32, and don’t plan to die before I’m 85 or so).

It’s true, of course, that we in the ‘developed world’ will probably be able to survive the longest. Long before we will start starving, there will be billions dead in the developing world. This, of course, need not concern us, eh? They’re always starving anyway.

And who cares about future generations, if ensuring their survival costs *my* money, hm?

Well. As I stated above, my definition of ‘reasonable’ includes a concern for the future, and for people other than myself in the present as well. I know this is not the currently most popular idea of reason, which instead seems to be ‘every person will and should maximise their own profit in any given situation, no matter the cost to others’. It does, however, seem to me to be a more humane definition of reason, and one that is far more likely to result in a world worth living in, and so I will stick with it.
Hmpf

Uhm, the previous comment was a reply to Wigwam_Jones. Sorry, should have made that clear in the comment itself.
Rick.

I would like more “wonderful things” and less “scary as hell things” on Boing Boing, please. :(
Daemon

I recall something similar with huge areas of permafrost covered swamp in russia.

#12: the K provides aesthetic balance.
mdh

Invest in Tequila futures.
ill lich

The crux of the problem with the Global Warming Debate is that (thanks to political talking points) neither side will ever reach any agreement until the water’s at our knees, and even then we’ll hear stuff like “well, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Consider this, working to stop global warming is like an insurance policy– I HOPE I won’t have to use it, but it’s safer to have it, a “better safe than sorry” situation. Dick Cheney insists that “if there’s even a 1% chance that a hostile country is about to obtain nuclear weapons, we must attack”, but the GOP won’t apply that same logic to what would be the far greater threat of global warming: instead of one or two cities being nuked, we’re talking about every seaboard city on Earth being flooded, plus droughts and mass extinctions (a terrorist would kill his own mother to get a weapon like that). And even if you deny global warming is real, working to stop carbon emissions isn’t a BAD thing– we’re talking about cleaning up the air we breathe every day– since when is “cleaning” a bad thing?.

(BTW– I just realized my goof on “Andy Griffith” above– yes Andy “Taylor” was his character’s name– I saw that and immediately thought of the guy from Duran Duran. “D’OH!”)
Chorske

#30
Wigwam Jones.

Wow, I just met my complete and total philosophical opposite. We need to stay far apart or we’ll collide and annihilate each other.

I love the people who ignore scientific advice, first because it’s ideologically inconvenient, next because it’s technically incovenient, and last because it’s TOO LATE.
jphilby

Oh well … since they’re handing all the retirement funds to the banks, the world might as well end soon.
imipak

@Kiint, #1 — thanks for that link (which is to a Guardian article.) I actually bought the Indie yesterday on the strength of the cover article but didn’t find the time to actually read it yet… which I think says something about Indie front page lead stories in general.

@Chas 44, #37: if significant releases of methane hydrates ARE underway (‘significant’ meaning ‘enough in themselves to increase global temperatures an appreciable amount’) then by all means enjoy your SUV; it means you’ve got a decade or two before TEOCAWKI, and a runaway feedback loop has been kicked off by human emissions. (The climate’s a rock at the top of a hill; humans have provided just enough impetus to start it rolling.) That’s a big IF, of course. I think I’ll wait for a peer-reviewed paper.
raistlinwolf

#52″We have no unusual threats to our survival from global warming – we face a slow, gradual, warming and flooding based on ice melt-off.”

If I understand the process correctly – this methane is an ice only where the pressure and temperature are delicately balanced. So all of this icy freshwater melting into the ocean is going to destabilize ocean currents that have become established, causing methane ice sheets every bit as big as the ice caps to release methane. Maybe not all of it, where there is considerable pressure and the sea floor isn’t being heated by anything, but the effect will be more warming followed by more melting..
I don’t think it’s going to as slow as we would like.

Oh yeah, hi everybody. First post.
Wigwam Jones

Consider this, working to stop global warming is like an insurance policy– I HOPE I won’t have to use it, but it’s safer to have it, a “better safe than sorry” situation.

But it’s not like an insurance policy. It’s more like paying a protection racket, i.e., extortion. We (the taxpayers) pay and you promise that maybe nothing bad will happen, even if nothing bad was going to happen anyway, but maybe something bad will happen because nothing could have stopped it anyway. But we have to pay anyway.

The problem is not YOU buying insurance. You buy it or not buy it, as you feel is best. The problem is you insisting that I have to buy some too. I don’t want any, thanks.

Dick Cheney insists that “if there’s even a 1% chance that a hostile country is about to obtain nuclear weapons, we must attack”, but the GOP won’t apply that same logic to what would be the far greater threat of global warming: instead of one or two cities being nuked, we’re talking about every seaboard city on Earth being flooded, plus droughts and mass extinctions (a terrorist would kill his own mother to get a weapon like that).

Dick Cheney never said that – do some research into the so-called ‘One Percent Doctrine’ please. But I’m not a Republican anyway – I still don’t want to pay for the insurance you insist I need.

And no, a terrorist would not want a weapon like that – it doesn’t work all at once. If terrorists had that much patience, they’d sell us all cigarettes and cheap processed white sugar.

And even if you deny global warming is real, working to stop carbon emissions isn’t a BAD thing– we’re talking about cleaning up the air we breathe every day– since when is “cleaning” a bad thing?.

I don’t deny global warming is real, but yes, trying to stop carbon emissions is a ‘bad thing’ if our efforts are unlikely to produce the desired results. That’s hand-wringing and wishful thinking, and while you’re free to engage in it to your heart’s content, the problem is that you want to take my money to throw at a problem that I don’t agree will fix it.

I live in fear of the next inevitable statement, “If it saves JUST ONE LIFE, it will have been worth it.” It is this that makes me wake up in the night, shivering in fear. The world is full of so many people who are so ready to spend all MY money to fix problems that they think we have, hoping to obtain solutions they think might work.

And I skewer the left as well as the right with that petard, however you may choose to interpret it. Too many people with hands ready to dip into my pockets to fix the problems that haunt their own dreams.

Spend your own money, please. Leave me and my money alone. I don’t wish to be part of your plan to fix the world, primarily because I am not convinced it will do any such thing.
thievedrelic

best solution to problems. burn the problems. if i learned anything from salem…
can we just set the methane on fire?
= co2.

interestingly enough, this would create a quite biblical burning pillar of flame (giddiness)
Wigwam Jones

To all: Sorry to have rocked your philosophical boats, so to speak. In no particular order:

* The methane problem – if it is as (pardon the pun) explosive as some of you are saying – we face near-certain annihilation and nothing we can do now will stop it. I don’t see what good it does to wring hands over it.

* Barring that, I did read the final report on global warming, cover to cover and with appendixes – not many can honestly say they have, that thing is huge. 8 degree warming? Yes, up to that, by the year 3000, as I recall.

* To those who have stated that I ignore scientific advice – on the contrary, I read it with interest and do my best to understand what it means. But I am also a student (amateur, I admit) of history. There is always one scientific study or another predicting widespread death and destruction Real Soon Now. Does not mean this one isn’t the ‘real one’ but neither does it mean that it is. Listening to scientific advice is not the same as believing everything a person wearing a lab smock says.

* Ideologically inconvenient? I don’t have an ideology where it involves issues of human extinction – I’m against it. What ideology would you suppose I support?

* Too late? Well, if it is, it is. That is a valid question, and if the answer is yes, it is too late to avert disaster (as some in this thread have claimed with regard to the methane problem), then it seems to me to be quite logical to make plans to deal with the effects instead of spending vast sums of money, time, and human intellect to try to hold back the unstoppable.

As to my debt to the future, consider this. I am in my late 40′s, my wife is somewhat older. We have no children and will have none. This was a conscious decision on our part. It means that we do not have 2.3 more oxygen tarts sucking up resources, which would have by now started making their own little resource-suckers, and so on.

In less than 50 years, we will have offset more carbon than you (waving a vague but ominous finger at ya’ll) ever will.

So make your plans, but exclude me out. I gave at the gene pool.

andygates

In the immortal words of the Invisible Man: Oh, crap.

dragonfrog

@ Engine Here

I have to admit I read “teutonic movement” in your post, and pictured many elderly Germans rolling over in bed and tooting.

Ugly Canuck

This sucks…no wait it blows.

buboes_in_diplopia

Now we can no longer blame the carnivores for global warming.

freebeets

jesus, why hast thoust forsaken us?

padster123

Why is it so easy to demand that $700,000,000,000 is spent on baling out some idiotic banking companies, and propping up a broken financial system that is based on debt – while it’s next to impossible to demand that ANY significant money is spent on mitigating disastrous climate change.

I know which I see as the greater threat, and where I’d want that $70bn spent.

gollux

Let’s just go up there with a really big Zippo Lighter. Flaming Earth Farts…

Seriously, we’re ducked…

matts118

Yes it’s true, the methane is ridiculously potent as a greenhouse gas. We have reached a tipping point, due to the human activities, which is now further exaggerating the problem. There is a good site here http://www.global-warming-truth.com/global-warming/ which explains more, basically the fastest way to curb global warming is by eating a vegetarian diet.

codesuidae

I’m set, I’ve got a bunch of big boxes of charcoal, several gallons of oil, a hand-crank popper and 50 lbs of popcorn.

Bring it on, I’m going to set on my deck, eat popcorn and watch the show.

Also, check my Ebay auction, I’ve got a number of extra cases of Nihilism up for sale if you want to get in on the action.

Hmpf

Seems to me as if the only truly reasonable reaction to this is, for each of us, to turn our lives around so as to reduce our personal emissions *as much as possible*, *right now* – and start to get politically active so as to get society to adopt that course, as well.

Of course, that’s for a definition of ‘reasonable’ which is based on two assumptions:

1.) The survival of civilisation/humans/life on earth is a priority that overrides individual desires for unnecessary luxuries. (I’m not equating the three things separated by slashes in the previous sentence, btw – I’m just listing them in the order of likelihood of their being threatened.)

2.) In a complex system which we do not fully understand, we should not be too ready to declare that ‘it’s over’ and ‘we’re screwed’. As long as there are factors that aren’t understood, there is hope. This means that giving up now is unreasonable, because only by giving up (and, by implication, continuing our lives the ‘business as usual’ way as long as it’s still possible) do we condemn ourselves with *absolute* certainty.

Hmpf

Interesting assumption, that all of us who care must have children. It’s always struck me as somewhat strange that people seem to think that the only way people can care about anyone beyond themselves (or more specifically, about something as abstract as the future) is for them to have children… Can’t say that’s true for me. The opposite, rather: I won’t have children, partly *because* I care. I am fairly passionate about the human species making it through another millennium or ten; always have been (why would I read science fiction if I didn’t want us to have a future?) It’s always seemed fairly obvious to me that one way to help us achieve that is to reduce consumption of resources, i.e. to avoid adding to the resources-using population.

Maggie Leber

Would it be as scary if the headline were “Arctic sea “foaming” with Natural Gas”?

Ugly Canuck

Chas 44, Wigwam : You guys had to bring your boy Bush into it, eh?
This is a predicted effect of global warming…nature is responding to our activities, specifically the inefficient burning of fuels and the attendant release of CO2…we (including Bush) know that global warming is incredibly dangerous and that humanity’s response will be THE issue of this Century, and the next as well.
That you guys want nothing to change (except get the price of oil gas & coal down so you can burn more) is disgusting and immoral.

Ugly Canuck

Padster, that’s 700 billion, not 70.

theMage

To all the tokhes chapeaus:

1) Compared to the last half-billion years, we are in the cold side of average for this planet.

2) Even if you believe CO2 is the prime cause of warming, again, low side of average.

3) Why does everyone forget about scientific equilibrium? More CO2-> more plants to suck it up.

4) I would be fine if you could guarantee it would only cost $700 Billion to clean up. And as long as you are at it, get me a new beachfront mansion in Hawaii for $100. Both equally possible.

Apologies to those actually born with ass-shaped heads