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Numerous Methane Leaks Found On Atlantic Sea Floor
sciencehabit writes Researchers have discovered 570 plumes of methane percolating up from the sea floor off the eastern coast of the United States, a surprisingly high number of seeps in a relatively quiescent part of the ocean. The seeps suggest that methane's contribution to climate change has been underestimated in some models. And because most of the seeps lie at depths where small changes in temperature could be releasing the methane, it is possible that climate change itself could be playing a role in turning some of them on.
A lot of people discuss this notion, and it's only rarely contextualized in terms of what's actually happening.
Methane is big. A huge greenhouse gas. It knocks the socks of carbon in all ways except that there's not that much of it(yet). It also doesn't "clean up" nearly as nicely after a couple of centuries of forest expansion/ocean calcification.
And a lot of evidence suggests warmer temperatures are going to release more big-time. It's scary because: we can't just stop producing it in bulk like CO2 the heat will release a lot of it naturally(and keep warming things). It's scary because: we have no (economically plausible) geo-engineering solutions like we might have to CO2. It's scary because geologic history suggests the runaways in the past last on the order of thousands of years.
We really really really don't want this.
Nature usually creates negative feedback loops that contribute to equilibrium. The textbook one is if there is population growth in a prey species, the population of predators will increase to check that growth.
In this case we have a positive feedback loop. Increases in temperature will cause more methane hydrate to melt, which causes an increase in temperature.
This is a very not good situation that does not have easy solutions.
No this is naturally occurring seeps. We have known about them in the past but recent discoveries have shown that more exist than was thought and with methane being 30x more potent of a green house gas than CO2 it throws the models and calculations off.
There is however the hypothesis that we create the CO2 that causes the base warming and the because we are warming the oceans it may be causing more methane to be released.
However, this is not known for sure and the extent at which methane is being released from natural sources is still in question.
From TFA-
"Even in the more likely event that aerobic microbes devour the methane while still in the ocean, it is converted to carbon dioxide, which leads to ocean acidification."
And let's break from the summary and go to the article for an even more damning quote(emphasis mine):
Jens Greinert, who heads the deep-sea monitoring unit at GEOMAR, downplays the effect of the new seeps on the atmosphere or ocean chemistry because the magnitude of the releases is dwarfed by human-associated inputs, such as livestock, or even other marine sites. “These little bits of bubbling here or there will not make a memorable impact,” Greinert says. He is more interested in what will happen as the world warms. “It becomes interesting only if you have a catastrophic release,” he says.
Excuse me, but - discussions here will be more free flowing and productive if people's opinions aren't pre-biased by any so-called "facts" which might appear in the linked articles. This is why we have a longstanding prohibition against reading them. Please remember that next time.
Thank you.
-- The Management
#DeleteChrome
And because most of us in here are software types, we will carefully extract the car from the wreckage, put new wheels on it, push it back up the hill, close all the windows, and nudge it downhill again so that we can see if it does the same thing again.
Stop arguing with strawmen. I really hope you got upvoted by shills, because the alternative is that some people have actually bought into the propaganda, which sickens me to consider.
The science that is settled is:
a) The average global temperature is rising
b) Increased CO2 levels cause increased temperatures
c) Humans are releasing far more CO2 than can naturally be absorbed
Those are the settled science - or as most people call them, facts. You will see GW defenders trot out the "settled science" line because people still try to deny those fundamental facts.
Those three facts lead to a settled conclusion:
d) Human activity is causing increases in global temperature.
Again, if you're arguing that, you are either grievously misinformed, or do not understand how logic works, or have decided that you want to argue for a point you know to be wrong.
That humans are contributing is settled science. The extent to which we are contributing is mostly-settled - we know we are the largest factor, but we don't have a complete and clear picture as to how secondary effects (ie. global-warming-caused global warming) or natural effects (solar variance) affect things.
The precise models of "given conditions A, B, C and D, what temperatures can we expect in the next X years at places Y and Z?" are not settled. Further, the data we give those models is not entirely precise, because getting absolute perfect knowledge of the entire planet is basically impossible.
But this does not invalidate the entire argument. You can say "physicists don't know how gravity works for supermassive singularities at nuclear scales", and say that physics is not "settled science". You would be correct. However, if you try to use that to argue that scientists don't know why the Earth orbits the Sun, you're committing serious errors of logic.
And if you then try to argue that you can build a giant but rickety skyscraper over the city, because it can't fall over because gravity isn't a settled science, well, you're just using broken logic to try to make a quick profit despite the fact that you will inevitably kill people when it falls over because hey, science may not be able to figure out the exact second it's going to collapse but we know it's not gonna stay up forever. I hope you managed to understand that metaphor there.
a) What hiatus? The hiatus only appears when you use incomplete data. citation
b) Uh, what? I don't even know what you're talking about there.
c) Plant (and algae) growth is a negative feedback loop on CO2, but it doesn't work on the same timescales. We're dumping centuries worth of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. And we're combining that with deforestation. By the time plants have grown to stabilize the temperature, we'll be stabilized several degrees over our current temperature, and that's assuming any positive feedback loops don't override it (look at the "clathrate gun hypothesis" for an example of what could happen).
Clearly a troll, but for the benefit of anyone who may miss that point, I will simply state that there is no known mechanism for farts causing rain, whereas the greenhouse effect is a thoroughly understood and experimentally verified mechanism for CO2 causing warming.