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Siberia's Methane Release Larger Than Previously Thought
An anonymous reader writes "New research suggests that the amount of methane being released from Siberian permafrost is much larger than previously thought. From the article: 'Thawing permafrost gets a lot of attention as a positive feedback that could amplify global warming by releasing carbon dioxide and methane, both of which are greenhouse gases. Because of this, a lot of effort goes into studying Arctic permafrost. An international group of researchers led by Natalia Shakhova at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has been plying the remote waters of the Siberian Shelf for about a decade to find out how much methane was coming up from the thawing permafrost. They didn't expect to find it bubbling.'"
Methane ice under the ocean also does this. Interesting?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
You had me at Free Pussy.
God damn it. Capitalism is not a style of managing an economy. Capitalism is how money works when left alone. Any government regulation that does anything other than inform the public is NOT capitalism. The only pro-capitalistic regulation would be something like weights and measures, it informs by governing a system of common measurement preventing deception.
As such there is no truly capitalistic society in the world. If anything the economics of rural Africa are more capitalistic than any western society. The majority of the problems we have in the west with regard to our economies are our poorly thought out, half implemented attempts at socialism. If we'd just go all in, it would probably not be so bad. But as things are, we institute weak regulation which interested parties with large capital then manipulate to their advantage usually to the detriment of those the regulation was intended to help. Look to our financial markets to see some real regulatory abuse.
Studying doesn't reduce it. Looks like a runaway process to me. Mars-like surface to come at the end - thanx a lot. Probably not the only idiotic failure in the universe.
However, studies show an interesting fact: it is not (yet) a runaway process. TFA (at the end):
Finally, this is not the first time this region has experienced warmer temperatures. During some of the warm periods between past ice ages, it has been as warm as, or warmer than, it is today. No sudden spike in atmospheric methane shows up in climate records from those times, however. That tells us that, fortunately, it takes a pretty strong kick to awaken a methane giant.
(mind you, I'm not saying that we are out of Siberian marshes yet: the previous ace ages didn't have an industrious population of hominides willing and capable to burn fossile fuel at a massive scale. We are still in the race for that "idiotic failure" prize that you mention).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
By "money is left to its own," one of course means "the rich are left to their own" (being the ones with the most money, which controls how money is used to produce more money for the rich, etc.). "Capitalism" left to its own is an inevitable slide into oligarchy, with an oppressive tiny elite at the top. The "invisible hand of the free market" is not a beneficent God working for the good of all if only entrusted with our full hearts; it is the manipulating iron fist of whoever has the most money, squeezing the labor and life out of those with less.
Adam Smith himself defined his perfect "Free Market" as including everyone knowing how much the productive process cost, and broke this down into such costs as labor, raw materials, and financial charges in his examples. Even by a very strict pro-capitalist model, that sounds like the government would be legitimately supporting capitalism by providing a lot more information than just weights and measures. Consumer safety information for one example, or average salaries for a given area, or an acurately derived inflationary index for others. (Of course, modern capital theory claims there would be no inflation in a pure capitalism, but even so, the government would need to accurately index inflation in a mixed economy trying to move towards that pure state - not reporting it would be retarding the motion). I'd point out too, that all of these could also fit your clause about preventing deception to a greater or lesser extent. But, that still means a medium-large role for governments, although yes, it's theoretically much less in some areas than what we see currently.
Such things as a business holding trade secrets while continuing to seek the protection of patents or copyrights are not really part of theoretical Capitalism, by Smith's original work. Most modern business and all publicly traded corporations would not want anything like this level of "money being left alone" This is another reason why we aren't moving towards what you call "truely capitalisitic society" - the people crying out the loudest for more capitalism actually oppose many of the most basic elements of it, and fear the very possibility.
Who is John Cabal?
Did you even bother to read the definition of capitalism:
a way of organizing an economy so that the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) are owned by individual people and companies rather than by the government
You don't even address the main point, that capitalism inherently produces market failures, for instance what we call externalities. If you think that the failures of socialism is bad, nearly every ecological indicator that we see seems to indicate failure, most of which are borne from a market failure of capitalism.
Furthermore what people refer to as "the third way" or otherwise known as a hybrid of socialism / capitalism IS actually the most stable, as it provides checks and balances to prevent excessive corruption from either the public or private sectors, they are two halves of the same coin the introverted and extroverted locus of economic growth.
I want to be rich. Is it so horrible to want to have enough money to fund my dreams?
If your dream is to mercilessly grind millions into poverty, then yes, you are horrible for wanting to fund them. I actually have no problems with people who build up money to satisfy "dreams" of the "travel around the world by sailboat" or "establish a youth symphony orchestra for inner city kids" type. However, this represents a minuscule proportion of the apparent "dreams" of the ultra-rich, which generally seem to revolve around becoming ever richer and richer with no regard for human life and suffering.
I'm willing to accept being poor for a while in order to have a chance to get what I want.
How generous of you. However, a shitload of people aren't given a chance to accept being poor, but are thrust into it from birth, with infinitesimal chances of ever reaching beyond grinding poverty. I wouldn't object to a world where a person living a decent, comfortable life could choose to lower their standard of living on a gamble for greater gains. But, that's not the case today --- the rich start with much and get more, stripped from the poor who start with little and end with less.
The nice thing about pure capitalism is that the people who gain power are the ones who work for it
Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Oh, my sides! I'm sure the Walton (Wal*Mart) heirs who were *born* into immense fortunes have personally put in so much more work than the approximately *half of all US families* who together own the same amount of wealth. Not to say that the ultra-rich don't sometimes have to put in some work; but it's not the work that distinguishes them from people who put in immense lifetimes of work and never come anywhere near being rich.
Cowtan and Way 2013 compensated for missing HadCRUT4 surface temperature measurements in places like the Arctic and Africa by using the spatial pattern of satellite data to produce a hybrid satellite/surface dataset. Jane and Lonny ponder the differences between Cowtan and Way's hybrid dataset and HadCRUT4:
Jane and Lonny's basic premise wrongly ignores the large error bars on these noisy, short-term trends. The SkS trend calculator can calculate the trends and error bars from 1997 through (including) 2012 for both HadCrut4 and Cowtan and Way's hybrid dataset:
1997-2013 HadCRUT4 Trend: 0.049 0.126 C/decade
1997-2013 HadCRUT4 hybrid Trend: 0.119 0.150 C/decade
The hybrid dataset's central estimate is inside the error bars of the original HadCRUT4 estimate.
I calculated error bars on UAH trends. The black line on the second page shows the UAH trend ending in 2012, for different starting years. The error bars are shown in red; they're 95% confidence uncertainty bounds. Note that error bars on longer trends are smaller than the large error bars on shorter trends.
Anyone can reproduce my results by downloading the free "R" programming language used by professional statisticians. Then save this code as "significance.r":
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I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The parent is right. The people who work their way to the top are the rare exceptions, and nobody born into wealth is going to understand what that took. Inter-generational wealth doesn't mean inter-generational lessons, and it rapidly turns into entitlement to use wealth as social clout to secure more wealth.
Most of all - it's used to trample the ability of others to negotiate what they earn from their work. Come on, if you're not a CEO or major shareholder - how likely is it that capitalism is working to create profits? Most people are being reduced to a minimum or less in this system, and Adam Smith didn't write with ultra-wealthy and ultra-poor people in mind. That would just be feudalism by any other name. Students of history know how dark that gets.