Slashdot Mirror
How Much Should You Worry About an Arctic Methane Bomb?
barlevg sends this excerpt from an article at MotherJones:
"It was a stunning figure: $60 trillion. Such could be the cost, according to a recent commentary in Nature, of 'the release of methane from thawing permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea, off northern Russia... a figure comparable to the size of the world economy in 2012.' More specifically, the paper described a scenario in which rapid Arctic warming and sea ice retreat lead to a pulse of undersea methane being released into the atmosphere. How much methane? The paper modeled a release of 50 gigatons of this hard-hitting greenhouse gas (a gigaton is equal to a billion metric tons) between 2015 and 2025. This, in turn, would trigger still more warming and gargantuan damage and adaptation costs. ... According to the Nature commentary, that methane 'is likely to be emitted as the seabed warms, either steadily over 50 years or suddenly.' Such are the scientific assumptions behind the paper's economic analysis. But are those assumptions realistic—and could that much methane really be released suddenly from the Arctic? A number of prominent scientists and methane experts interviewed for this article voiced strong skepticism about the Nature paper.'"
I supposed the 15-year pause in global warming has prompted alarmists to come up with even more extreme catastrophes.
Instead of the Arctic, let's work with the Antarctic, to get opposite results. Less methane, and more good news all round., leaving the cows to rejoice at still being Number One methane producer.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I think we should actually understand the natural cycles and integrate ourselves so we are not fighting against it all the time.
The whole point of climate change is that it is not natural that we put large quantities of CO2 into the air.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The most likely candidate for the last seabed warming of this potential magnitude was about 55 million years ago during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. That period did coincide with a lot of extinctions.
The Earth *IS* the center of the universe, just like everywhere else is.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Nasa http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
(And just so you dont have to read that long complicated article here is a link to a nice picture)
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif
But don't let real science get in the way of your research via Wikipedia.
Exactly.
When was the last seabed warming, and how devastating to life on earth was it?
Over the history of earth, there were much warmer periods with far smaller ice caps.
Do those periods correspond with huge species die off?
Or was it exactly to opposite?
How many mega-cities were right by the seashore during those previous times?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Global warming my ass. It's fucking cold and raining here in Wyoming.
If a cool spell disproves global warming, does a warm spell prove it? Or do you prefer to focus on the details that you think support your beliefs?
Ask people who spent June in Phoenix or Las Vegas how they liked the weather this year.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"Some places will get hotter, some will actually get cooler, some will get more precipitation and others will get less, over time this will shape the world we live in and our own food sources."
Isn't that the way it's always been?
Yes, but generally these changes have been gradual. We're seeing significant changes in the start of seasons, insect life cycles, migration of birds, etc. over a short time span.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Just Atlantis
To be fair, all he was trying to say is that "global warming" will have unpredictable local results due to the heterogeneous make-up of the atmosphere as well as other features. For instance, Great Britain is on the same latitude as Labrador and Newfoundland, but has considerably more temperate weather. That's because of the circulation of the air in the atmosphere. Things like the Gulf Stream (but not necessarily the Gulf Stream itself) could cause the extra heat to be distributed unevenly.
We need to remember that heat in these cases is energy that powers the "engines" that produce our weather. Much like electricity can be used to heat and cool, if it is pumped through the right engine, there are natural processes that could cool the planet locally if they receive more energy.
Of course, eventually steadily increasing heat in the system will simply overwhelm any cooling features, and you'll get Venus out of it. However, that's not going to happen overnight and not without some unusual effects. It may not even happen at all if there are some special cases of equilibrium for the Earth, but those points may still be at a very uncomfortable place for humans.
So, the guy who is blaming the unusually hot weather this summer directly on global warming is just as misguided as the guy who is suggesting that since this is the coldest year on record, global warming is a joke. Determining cause and effect in weather in the long term is still not as much of a complete science as we'd like.
None of this is meant to suggest that I know the truth of whether a global warming disaster is going to come to pass, but I know enough about climate and weather to know that changes to the former can have interesting, sometimes counter-intuitive effects on the latter.
so the piece doesn't explicitly state that there is a relationship, but it suggests there is one.
Correct. The data given as a putative "response" is irrelevant to the question on so many levels it hurts. It doesn't state what the connection between sunspots and solar activity is; it shows the normal 11-year sunspot cycle, not anything different or unusual, and it shows only about one and a half cycles, not enough of a long term time series to even judge whether sunspot number (much less solar output) is going up or down.
So, with respect to the request, "Could you give a citation for that 'lowered solar output?' "-- fail.
But-- as you go on to demonstrate-- it does serve excellently to completely change the subject, and thus does its job of distracting people from noticing that there is no evidence whatsoever for the original assertion by changing the topic to a discussion of the relationship between sunspots and climate.
On that subject, the best data at the moment seems to show that the onset of the "little ice age" cooling was correlated with volcanic eruptions, and hid little or nothing to do with sunspots.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/02/eruptions-not-quiet-sun-may-have-triggered-little-ice-age/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=volcanoes-may-have-sparked
http://www.geoffreylandis.com