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Ticking Arctic Carbon Bomb May Be Bigger Than Expected
sciencehabit writes "Scientists are expressing fresh concerns about the carbon locked in the Arctic's vast expanse of frozen soil. New field studies quantify the amount of soil carbon at 1.9 trillion metric tons, suggesting that previous estimates underestimated the climate risk if this carbon is liberated. Meanwhile, a new analysis of laboratory experiments that simulate carbon release by thawed soil is bolstering worries that continued carbon emissions could unleash a massive Arctic carbon wallop."
You confuse "global warming proponents" (by which I assume you mean lobbyist and such who are trying to convince the world that global warming is real) with "climate researchers".
The latter have reached an overwhelming consensus that anthrogenic global warming is real, and to deny that that is a "reasoned scienctific view" is right up there with denying evolution or the germ theory of disease, saying they're all just political movements.
It is true that there are some in the political area who have cried wolf or who have oversold things. But to deny the utter and overwhelming reality of the results of vast quantities of climate scientists (including some who came in skeptical when they started, but realized that, hey, the data say what the data say) is simply wrong.
I will "keep that in mind" as I point out that during the Paleogene, when the average global temperature was the same or higher as during the Cretaceous, mammals flourished and came to dominate. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was indeed very good for mammals. Were it not for that time period, Plesiadapis would probably not have come to be so successful, and humans today would not exist as a result.
Methane has a short lifetime because it turns INTO carbon dioxide. Burning it makes that happen a lot faster.
It's preferable to leave the methane in the clathrate or underground, but if it is coming out and you can't stop it, then it's better to oxidize it right away.
The global warming discussion started a VERY long time ago. Concern over emissions and pollution have been an issue for as long as I can remember... so just over 40 years. Things could have been done... should have been done. Not much has actually been done.
What stupid things have been done? Like "taxing" polution. Seriously. And the rate of taxation was lower than the cost of fixing the problem so guess which way business went? And what was done with the money? It went back into the "enconomy" and by that I mean the major players who are also major polluters.
Taxing was a stupid idea. Making them ineligible for government contracts would have been the way to go.
Those tankers contain, what, a half-dozen tons of CO2? Probably less than that; the truck can only carry a few dozen tons and the containers themselves far outweigh the mass of the CO2.
The worldwide CO2 output is on the order of 30 BILLION tons of CO2. All the soda bottlers in the entire world don't add up to a rounding error.
There, you have an answer. Which you could probably have figured out all by yourself, but I'm sure you enjoy the fact that anonymity means you can ask this all over in the next CO2 thread and pretending nobody ever gives you an answer.
By the definition that cryologists and climate scientists use an ice age is any period when there are significant ice sheets on the Earth. Like Antarctica and Greenland. Within the ice age there are cycles of glacials when the continental ice sheets advance and interglacials when they retreat. /pedant
But in the popular vernacular ice age refers to a glacial cycle so it's an easy mistake to make.