8 ms·

Sea 'Boiling' with Methane Discovered in Siberia

137 points by Filligree 7y ago

mdorazio 7y ago
So have we fired a clathrate gun then [1]? It's getting increasingly difficult to pretend worst-case global warming scenarios won't turn into reality in the next 25 years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- blhack 7y ago
  What should we do?
  - kjar 7y ago
    Get a time machine
  - egloo 7y ago
    Throw as much engineering and innovation at the problems as possible. Conservation alone is no longer sufficient. And I meant problems. As in, protecting the food supply chain, protecting the electronics supply chain, adopting a defense posture to prepare for a far more desperate global population, finding ways to save coastal cities or quickly relocate people, throwing everything at the wall for innovative new exotic energy generation and storage systems (far past nuclear) and, most importantly, preserving the knowledge and means of humanity. We're past the point where pretending this will get fixed politically is reasonable. We need to assume it won't and work to protect the future in spite of the horrors to come.
    - seiferteric 7y ago
      I wonder why ocean fertilization isn't talked about much anymore? All the articles I found about it were from ~10 years ago, with some vague conclusion that we shouldn't do it because it might be bad for the life on the ocean floor or something. There are no good solutions though, nothing will be perfect.
      - Blackthorn 7y ago
        Haven't read anything about it in a while but I believe the conclusion was it wouldn't work, basically because it would take way too much iron to even start to make a dent.
        Robotbeat 7y ago
        That wasn't the conclusion. It'd make a dent, but not sufficient by itself. The real reason is people are skeptical of the wisdom of geoengineering in general. But I think we will almost certainly have to look at it.
        seiferteric 7y ago
        This is what I read as well. Couple this with planting 1e12's trees, maybe aerosol injection and possibly buy some time.
        mdorazio 7y ago
        There wasn't a real conclusion because the tests were always small. Governments became afraid of triggering toxic blooms and otherwise messing up coastal ecosystems and then being liable for damages, so they put a moratorium on testing [1]. Then in 2012 someone illegally tried it again anyway, with mixed results [2]. Basically it's like most geoengineering projects - everyone is too afraid of negative consequences to really try anything at scale, so instead we get endless inconclusive studies. Personally, I think we're going to pretty quickly get to the point where we need to make decisions about what negative consequences are acceptable to prevent complete environmental catastrophe. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/453704b https://www.nature.com/articles/453704b [2] http://www.planetexperts.com/two-years-russ-george-illegally-dumped-iron-pacific-salmon-catches-400/ http://www.planetexperts.com/two-years-russ-george-illegally...
  - falcolas 7y ago
    Use technology to survive in an inhospitable atmosphere. Probably without any dependency on the atmosphere outside our cities in the long run. Cleaning the atmosphere is harder when you’re just trying to survive. EDIT: Inhospitable atmosphere, to my mind, includes weather, drought, flash floods, etc. Not just the chemical makeup of the air.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > Use technology to survive in an inhospitable atmosphere. Oh, please. The atmosphere will be perfectly hospitable. This is just FUD.
      - falcolas 7y ago
        Really? Everything I’ve heard indicates a fairly dramatic change in the weather patterns as our global temperatures rise by even 1-2 degrees. The atmosphere is not just the chemical makeup, it’s the weather it creates. The droughts. The flash floods. The unnaturally cold winters, and unnaturally hot summers. Or vice versa - neither is very good for us.
        pdonis 7y ago
        > Everything I’ve heard indicates a fairly dramatic change in the weather patterns as our global temperatures rise by even 1-2 degrees. These are not predictions based on data. They are predictions based on models--the same models that have been overpredicting warming for several decades now. The actual data says that extreme events have not been getting more frequent. Their consequences have been getting more severe because so many more people live in areas that are primarily affected by them. That's not a climate change problem: that's a problem of mismanagement and politics. The southwest US has been a desert for centuries if not millennia--now all of a sudden lack of water is a problem? Anyone with half a brain could have seen that coming. Coastal cities are finding problems with drainage? Sea levels have been rising since the last Ice Age ended, and if your coastal city in a hurricane zone suddenly has a problem with a storm surge, that just means you've been ignoring the problem for too long. Yes, the climate is changing; it's always been changing, and it will keep changing. People need to be given accurate information about risks and the tools to adapt to change.
  - tanilama 7y ago
    Nothing. Too late. Our current global political structure can't coordinate such action. So what will left to be done is dealing with the mess. Big countries will have a lot more room to weather this, but small countries are on their own.
  - abootstrapper 7y ago
    I don’t mean to pick on you, but this question comes up in every single climate change post. Answering it is exhausting. We need a climate change FAQ. The simple answer is end fossil fuels. How do we do that? Vote, eat less meat, bike ride, strike, protest, invest in solar, boycott, reuse, buy less, telecommute, etc. Use your imagination. Do something, do everything, the end goal is we all stop releasing sequestered green house gasses into the atmosphere.
    - rewgs 7y ago
      > eat less meat While eating less or no meat is a big part of it, it's more nuanced than it's often presented. For instance, this talk provides a very, very good argument for keeping livestock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI Not disagreeing with you, only replying to you for visibility/to add on to what you said.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > The simple answer is end fossil fuels. How do we do that? Build nuclear power plants. All the other things are fine, but if you really want to end fossil fuels, you need a non-fossil-fuel source of reliable base load power. Nuclear is the only one we have. Other sources are fine, but they can't produce reliable base load power. And, btw, I think we should end fossil fuels even if it turns out not to make much of a difference to climate change (which might well be the case since all of the models that have a high sensitivity to CO2 built in have been over-predicting warming for several decades now).
      - daenz 7y ago
        >Build nuclear power plants. And to all the people who say "they take too long there isn't enough time": the best time to start nuclear power plant construction was 10 years ago, the second best time is now.
        zaroth 7y ago
        Except by the time the plant is done being built (10 years late and 10x over budget) renewables will have surpassed it in terms of cost for deployed GW, and grid-scale and consumer batteries will be at the point where we can store and demand shift enough power to use all the renewables we can bring online. Renewables has already surpassed nuclear in the US. I think the new reality is the best time to build a nuke plant is never.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    Methane is a valuable resource, so it should be cost effective for somebody to capture it.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - dougmwne 7y ago
      Certainly not. Methane may have some value, but it is quite plentiful and fracking has made it cheap. Oil drillers already flare it off when it's inconvenient and uneconomical to capture. You're talking a methane release spread across continents, then dispersed into the atmosphere in parts per billion.
  - dv_dt 7y ago
    Green new deal applying financing to scaling known replacement tech like wind solar batteries and electric vehicles. Also separate programs to identifying war scale R&D to identify topics and research them widely. Adjust contracting criteria for ability to pass scaling gates instead of financial or other criteria (this is the war terms for us). Labor programs for rapid training and factory capital deployment.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Well, cutting CO2 and CH4 emissions won't have much impact on decade scales. But we should still do that, to mitigate longer term damage. What could help shorter term is adaptation. Moving cities to higher ground, away from oceans. And building dikes, where it's workable. But not in Florida or New Orleans. Maybe not even for New York City. Also moving populations to areas that require less air conditioning. And moving farmland from areas that are becoming more arid. So generally, poleward. And then there's immigration. As others move generally poleward. Targets could block immigration, and build walls where feasible. As the US and UK are doing. Or they could focus on integrating immigrants, as some EU nations are doing. That seems like the best long term strategy. Otherwise, you're going to have huge refugee camps, near borders, and probably end up killing lots of people. And then we have social and political implications. I have no clue about that. Except to extrapolate current trends. So socially, that would be increased concentration of wealth, with the wealthy increasingly isolating themselves from the poor. And politically, increased authoritarian control, with associated surveillance. Interesting times, for sure.
  - iikoolpp 7y ago
    Nothing. We're fucked. The world will die in the pursuit of expanding growth and profit.
  - torpfactory 7y ago
    Geoengineering is really the only realistic option if this is the case. Sulfate aerosol injection is by far the most promising. And cheap - maybe 5-8b per year [1]. I'm not claiming this is a good idea in any way. As they say: desperate times call for desperate measures. We could buy ourselves several decades to sort our (as humans) shit out. We don't understand the unintended consequences very well, but at least this technique mimics natural processes (volcanic eruptions). [1]https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034019 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034...
    - strainer 7y ago
      I've a hunch that a Lagrange point sun shield is becoming quite affordable with recent reductions in cost of launching to space. A sunshield consisting of many self orientating mirror bearing craft would have the advantage of being able to be quickly attenuated if required, even filtering more or less light on particular continents or weather systems.
    - jaakl 7y ago
      It could win you some time to resolve real issues, wont work as permanent solution as stopping would have quick devasting results.
  - unsignedchar 7y ago
    Document our failures as a species for the next one that attempts to ‘civilize’?
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Or for our next time around the cycle. At which point I think of Mote Prime[1]. Their "museums" were to document tech for rediscovery each time around the cycle, after their civilisation crashed. [1] Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
- jumpingmice 7y ago
  Maybe, but that's not new. Atmospheric CH4 has been far, far above historical levels for decades.
- anonuser123456 7y ago
  No. Most methane calthrate exists at depths and pressures that will not be effected by warming for hundreds to thousands of years. The calthrate gun would more likely be the result of volcanic or continental landslides that mix warm surface water with disturbed sediments. This is probably a product of local geological activity.
  - flukus 7y ago
    > No. Most methane calthrate exists at depths and pressures that will not be effected by warming for hundreds to thousands of years. The calthrate gun is on geological timescales, if we've created enough warming for the reaction to become self sustaining (releases create more warming, creating more releases) over thousands of years then we have fired the gun.
- mirimir 7y ago
  No, we've fired the permafrost gun. A smaller gun, sure, but with a hair trigger. There is clathrate under the permafrost, but I doubt that it's substantially vaporizing yet.
kjar 7y ago
Apparently it’s no longer mitigation, now adaptation. The desire to avoid nihilism at point is tough. I’m pushing 40 and I hope I get 25 more years, family kids are in for it.:(
- eloff 7y ago
  I see comments like this all the time, but it doesn't happen that fast. You won't notice a big difference in your lifetime, and neither will your children, unless maybe they live in a very low area by the coast. This plays out over hundreds of years. It's still a serious problem and we need to address it, but I keep seeing emotional reactions that ignore the science and the current predictions.
  - tempsy 7y ago
    Major US cities will see temp increases of 4-6 degrees in less than 30-40 years. That is not "hundreds of years". https://www.teenvogue.com/story/climate-change-timeline-st-louis-san-francisco-houston https://www.teenvogue.com/story/climate-change-timeline-st-l...
  - realusername 7y ago
    > I see comments like this all the time, but it doesn't happen that fast. You won't notice a big difference in your lifetime, and neither will your children I do already, the weather is much worse than when I was a kid, much drier and the heat waves are harsher.
    - Mikeb85 7y ago
      And it's -10 degrees C with half a foot of snow where I live at this exact moment, does that cancel out your anecdote?
      - defterGoose 7y ago
        No. No it really doesn't.
      - deleted 7y ago
ngold 7y ago
The tipping point of massive frozen methane bubbles melting and that's it. We better get really good at somehow containing them. Good luck humanity.
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  Time to use it as fuel for space ships
throwaway5752 7y ago
It's a good time to point out that coordinated global action is required. Trump withdrew us from Paris. Harper withdrew Canada from Kyoto. Russia is a petrostate that will benefit more from global warming than any other country in the world, so look at 2016 through that lens. Only 40% of conservative Republicans even believe climate change is happening (https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/politics-global-warming-march-2018/2/ https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/politics-...) They will drive us all off this cliff and then expect us nerds to fix it. We should do something first.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > coordinated global action is required. Trump withdrew us from Paris. Harper withdrew Canada from Kyoto. Neither of those were coordinated global action that will make any difference. "Symbolic" agreements don't fix anything; they're just a way for politicians to punt the problem (if you think it's a problem) further down the road so they can stay in power. Not to mention that none of the countries that signed up for Kyoto came anywhere near meeting their targets (which were already too permissive to make a difference) anyway, and it looks like the same will be true of Paris. The US prefers not to sign agreements that we know we won't keep and that won't make a difference anyway; that's why we didn't ratify Kyoto and why Trump pulled us out of Paris. The kind of draconian "coordinated global action" that would be necessary to actually stop CO2 emissions is not going to happen; nobody will accept that drastic a hit in standard of living. Not to mention that doing that would condemn all of the currently developing countries that have the most to lose to staying in poverty, which will make it so much harder for them to adapt. The best thing we can do is to create more wealth and bring more people out of poverty, and make our infrastructure more decentralized and robust. That will benefit everyone regardless of what kind of change comes.
waste_monk 7y ago
Could this be mitigated by floating a whole bunch of logs / other flammable carbon based material and burning them, burning off the methane in the process? It would certainly lead to increased local temperatures in the short term, but it would remove the methane problem, and if we got enough carbon into the air we would eventually see a "nuclear winter" type cooling effect. This is obviously Bad and we'd need to burn a fantastic amount of wood to accomplish it, but as far as I know it's the only readily accessible global cooling mechanism we have that is practical to implement.
- macawfish 7y ago
  This seems like a potentially good idea. Get it straight to CO2 as soon as possible. Otherwise I believe the half-life in the atmosphere is on the order of 10 years. The problem I could see though is that it would likely speed up the melting of the Arctic. I'm sure there are really complex tradeoffs and someone would have to study them very carefully. Intuitively I expect the gas to dilute very quickly, making it hard to burn efficiently over large surface areas... how much energy do you put into the fires vs. the amount of gas that is actually converted to CO2. It doesn't help that the methane will rise. All that energy will just go into quickening the melting of the Arctic. Which will also hasten climate change. Like yeah if you could visualise methane pockets and target them with lasers to the point of combustion as they erupted, sure that could maybe work and much more efficient at converting the gas. Still seems far fetched though.
- RobertRoberts 7y ago
  It's comments like this that make me question if people really understand climate science. If all we have to do to cool the earth is as simple as explained above, then global warming is solved.
  - macawfish 7y ago
    I took this idea to be: since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and since it takes decades for CO2 to decay in the atmosphere on its own, maybe we could speed up the decay process (via combustion) in order try and avoid triggering extreme positive feedback (the clathrate gun). Also yeah a lot of people don't understand climate science!
xvilka 7y ago
Urbanization, high-rises and city bubbles might be the answer to survival. Probably also the floating and underwater cities. Everything that protects from the hostile climate outside. It's better to prepare the technology and economy today, while there are still enough resources and manufacturing power.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
It makes me think of stuff I've seen suggesting that release of methane gas bubbles might explain disappearances (of ships, planes) in the Bermuda Triangle. https://www.bermuda-attractions.com/bermuda2_0000a1.htm https://www.bermuda-attractions.com/bermuda2_0000a1.htm
Grue3 7y ago
Looks like Bernie's "false solutions" like geoengineering and carbon sequestration are in fact the only solutions.

137 points by Filligree 7y ago

So have we fired a clathrate gun then [1]? It's getting increasingly difficult to pretend worst-case global warming scenarios won't turn into reality in the next 25 years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
blhack 7y ago
What should we do?
- kjar 7y ago
  Get a time machine
- egloo 7y ago
  Throw as much engineering and innovation at the problems as possible. Conservation alone is no longer sufficient. And I meant problems. As in, protecting the food supply chain, protecting the electronics supply chain, adopting a defense posture to prepare for a far more desperate global population, finding ways to save coastal cities or quickly relocate people, throwing everything at the wall for innovative new exotic energy generation and storage systems (far past nuclear) and, most importantly, preserving the knowledge and means of humanity. We're past the point where pretending this will get fixed politically is reasonable. We need to assume it won't and work to protect the future in spite of the horrors to come.
  - seiferteric 7y ago
    I wonder why ocean fertilization isn't talked about much anymore? All the articles I found about it were from ~10 years ago, with some vague conclusion that we shouldn't do it because it might be bad for the life on the ocean floor or something. There are no good solutions though, nothing will be perfect.
    - Blackthorn 7y ago
      Haven't read anything about it in a while but I believe the conclusion was it wouldn't work, basically because it would take way too much iron to even start to make a dent.
      - Robotbeat 7y ago
        That wasn't the conclusion. It'd make a dent, but not sufficient by itself. The real reason is people are skeptical of the wisdom of geoengineering in general. But I think we will almost certainly have to look at it.
        seiferteric 7y ago
        This is what I read as well. Couple this with planting 1e12's trees, maybe aerosol injection and possibly buy some time.
      - mdorazio 7y ago
        There wasn't a real conclusion because the tests were always small. Governments became afraid of triggering toxic blooms and otherwise messing up coastal ecosystems and then being liable for damages, so they put a moratorium on testing [1]. Then in 2012 someone illegally tried it again anyway, with mixed results [2]. Basically it's like most geoengineering projects - everyone is too afraid of negative consequences to really try anything at scale, so instead we get endless inconclusive studies. Personally, I think we're going to pretty quickly get to the point where we need to make decisions about what negative consequences are acceptable to prevent complete environmental catastrophe. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/453704b https://www.nature.com/articles/453704b [2] http://www.planetexperts.com/two-years-russ-george-illegally-dumped-iron-pacific-salmon-catches-400/ http://www.planetexperts.com/two-years-russ-george-illegally...
- falcolas 7y ago
  Use technology to survive in an inhospitable atmosphere. Probably without any dependency on the atmosphere outside our cities in the long run. Cleaning the atmosphere is harder when you’re just trying to survive. EDIT: Inhospitable atmosphere, to my mind, includes weather, drought, flash floods, etc. Not just the chemical makeup of the air.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > Use technology to survive in an inhospitable atmosphere. Oh, please. The atmosphere will be perfectly hospitable. This is just FUD.
    - falcolas 7y ago
      Really? Everything I’ve heard indicates a fairly dramatic change in the weather patterns as our global temperatures rise by even 1-2 degrees. The atmosphere is not just the chemical makeup, it’s the weather it creates. The droughts. The flash floods. The unnaturally cold winters, and unnaturally hot summers. Or vice versa - neither is very good for us.
      - pdonis 7y ago
        > Everything I’ve heard indicates a fairly dramatic change in the weather patterns as our global temperatures rise by even 1-2 degrees. These are not predictions based on data. They are predictions based on models--the same models that have been overpredicting warming for several decades now. The actual data says that extreme events have not been getting more frequent. Their consequences have been getting more severe because so many more people live in areas that are primarily affected by them. That's not a climate change problem: that's a problem of mismanagement and politics. The southwest US has been a desert for centuries if not millennia--now all of a sudden lack of water is a problem? Anyone with half a brain could have seen that coming. Coastal cities are finding problems with drainage? Sea levels have been rising since the last Ice Age ended, and if your coastal city in a hurricane zone suddenly has a problem with a storm surge, that just means you've been ignoring the problem for too long. Yes, the climate is changing; it's always been changing, and it will keep changing. People need to be given accurate information about risks and the tools to adapt to change.
- tanilama 7y ago
  Nothing. Too late. Our current global political structure can't coordinate such action. So what will left to be done is dealing with the mess. Big countries will have a lot more room to weather this, but small countries are on their own.
- abootstrapper 7y ago
  I don’t mean to pick on you, but this question comes up in every single climate change post. Answering it is exhausting. We need a climate change FAQ. The simple answer is end fossil fuels. How do we do that? Vote, eat less meat, bike ride, strike, protest, invest in solar, boycott, reuse, buy less, telecommute, etc. Use your imagination. Do something, do everything, the end goal is we all stop releasing sequestered green house gasses into the atmosphere.
  - rewgs 7y ago
    > eat less meat While eating less or no meat is a big part of it, it's more nuanced than it's often presented. For instance, this talk provides a very, very good argument for keeping livestock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI Not disagreeing with you, only replying to you for visibility/to add on to what you said.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > The simple answer is end fossil fuels. How do we do that? Build nuclear power plants. All the other things are fine, but if you really want to end fossil fuels, you need a non-fossil-fuel source of reliable base load power. Nuclear is the only one we have. Other sources are fine, but they can't produce reliable base load power. And, btw, I think we should end fossil fuels even if it turns out not to make much of a difference to climate change (which might well be the case since all of the models that have a high sensitivity to CO2 built in have been over-predicting warming for several decades now).
    - daenz 7y ago
      >Build nuclear power plants. And to all the people who say "they take too long there isn't enough time": the best time to start nuclear power plant construction was 10 years ago, the second best time is now.
      - zaroth 7y ago
        Except by the time the plant is done being built (10 years late and 10x over budget) renewables will have surpassed it in terms of cost for deployed GW, and grid-scale and consumer batteries will be at the point where we can store and demand shift enough power to use all the renewables we can bring online. Renewables has already surpassed nuclear in the US. I think the new reality is the best time to build a nuke plant is never.
- pdonis 7y ago
  Methane is a valuable resource, so it should be cost effective for somebody to capture it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dougmwne 7y ago
    Certainly not. Methane may have some value, but it is quite plentiful and fracking has made it cheap. Oil drillers already flare it off when it's inconvenient and uneconomical to capture. You're talking a methane release spread across continents, then dispersed into the atmosphere in parts per billion.
- dv_dt 7y ago
  Green new deal applying financing to scaling known replacement tech like wind solar batteries and electric vehicles. Also separate programs to identifying war scale R&D to identify topics and research them widely. Adjust contracting criteria for ability to pass scaling gates instead of financial or other criteria (this is the war terms for us). Labor programs for rapid training and factory capital deployment.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Well, cutting CO2 and CH4 emissions won't have much impact on decade scales. But we should still do that, to mitigate longer term damage. What could help shorter term is adaptation. Moving cities to higher ground, away from oceans. And building dikes, where it's workable. But not in Florida or New Orleans. Maybe not even for New York City. Also moving populations to areas that require less air conditioning. And moving farmland from areas that are becoming more arid. So generally, poleward. And then there's immigration. As others move generally poleward. Targets could block immigration, and build walls where feasible. As the US and UK are doing. Or they could focus on integrating immigrants, as some EU nations are doing. That seems like the best long term strategy. Otherwise, you're going to have huge refugee camps, near borders, and probably end up killing lots of people. And then we have social and political implications. I have no clue about that. Except to extrapolate current trends. So socially, that would be increased concentration of wealth, with the wealthy increasingly isolating themselves from the poor. And politically, increased authoritarian control, with associated surveillance. Interesting times, for sure.
- iikoolpp 7y ago
  Nothing. We're fucked. The world will die in the pursuit of expanding growth and profit.
- torpfactory 7y ago
  Geoengineering is really the only realistic option if this is the case. Sulfate aerosol injection is by far the most promising. And cheap - maybe 5-8b per year [1]. I'm not claiming this is a good idea in any way. As they say: desperate times call for desperate measures. We could buy ourselves several decades to sort our (as humans) shit out. We don't understand the unintended consequences very well, but at least this technique mimics natural processes (volcanic eruptions). [1]https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034019 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034...
  - strainer 7y ago
    I've a hunch that a Lagrange point sun shield is becoming quite affordable with recent reductions in cost of launching to space. A sunshield consisting of many self orientating mirror bearing craft would have the advantage of being able to be quickly attenuated if required, even filtering more or less light on particular continents or weather systems.
  - jaakl 7y ago
    It could win you some time to resolve real issues, wont work as permanent solution as stopping would have quick devasting results.
- unsignedchar 7y ago
  Document our failures as a species for the next one that attempts to ‘civilize’?
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Or for our next time around the cycle. At which point I think of Mote Prime[1]. Their "museums" were to document tech for rediscovery each time around the cycle, after their civilisation crashed. [1] Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
jumpingmice 7y ago
Maybe, but that's not new. Atmospheric CH4 has been far, far above historical levels for decades.
anonuser123456 7y ago
No. Most methane calthrate exists at depths and pressures that will not be effected by warming for hundreds to thousands of years. The calthrate gun would more likely be the result of volcanic or continental landslides that mix warm surface water with disturbed sediments. This is probably a product of local geological activity.
- flukus 7y ago
  > No. Most methane calthrate exists at depths and pressures that will not be effected by warming for hundreds to thousands of years. The calthrate gun is on geological timescales, if we've created enough warming for the reaction to become self sustaining (releases create more warming, creating more releases) over thousands of years then we have fired the gun.
mirimir 7y ago
No, we've fired the permafrost gun. A smaller gun, sure, but with a hair trigger. There is clathrate under the permafrost, but I doubt that it's substantially vaporizing yet.

kjar 7y ago

Apparently it’s no longer mitigation, now adaptation. The desire to avoid nihilism at point is tough. I’m pushing 40 and I hope I get 25 more years, family kids are in for it.:(

eloff 7y ago
I see comments like this all the time, but it doesn't happen that fast. You won't notice a big difference in your lifetime, and neither will your children, unless maybe they live in a very low area by the coast. This plays out over hundreds of years. It's still a serious problem and we need to address it, but I keep seeing emotional reactions that ignore the science and the current predictions.
- tempsy 7y ago
  Major US cities will see temp increases of 4-6 degrees in less than 30-40 years. That is not "hundreds of years". https://www.teenvogue.com/story/climate-change-timeline-st-louis-san-francisco-houston https://www.teenvogue.com/story/climate-change-timeline-st-l...
- realusername 7y ago
  > I see comments like this all the time, but it doesn't happen that fast. You won't notice a big difference in your lifetime, and neither will your children I do already, the weather is much worse than when I was a kid, much drier and the heat waves are harsher.
  - Mikeb85 7y ago
    And it's -10 degrees C with half a foot of snow where I live at this exact moment, does that cancel out your anecdote?
    - defterGoose 7y ago
      No. No it really doesn't.
    - deleted 7y ago

ngold 7y ago

The tipping point of massive frozen methane bubbles melting and that's it. We better get really good at somehow containing them. Good luck humanity.

sieabahlpark 7y ago
Time to use it as fuel for space ships

throwaway5752 7y ago

It's a good time to point out that coordinated global action is required. Trump withdrew us from Paris. Harper withdrew Canada from Kyoto. Russia is a petrostate that will benefit more from global warming than any other country in the world, so look at 2016 through that lens. Only 40% of conservative Republicans even believe climate change is happening (https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/politics-global-warming-march-2018/2/ https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/politics-...) They will drive us all off this cliff and then expect us nerds to fix it. We should do something first.

pdonis 7y ago
> coordinated global action is required. Trump withdrew us from Paris. Harper withdrew Canada from Kyoto. Neither of those were coordinated global action that will make any difference. "Symbolic" agreements don't fix anything; they're just a way for politicians to punt the problem (if you think it's a problem) further down the road so they can stay in power. Not to mention that none of the countries that signed up for Kyoto came anywhere near meeting their targets (which were already too permissive to make a difference) anyway, and it looks like the same will be true of Paris. The US prefers not to sign agreements that we know we won't keep and that won't make a difference anyway; that's why we didn't ratify Kyoto and why Trump pulled us out of Paris. The kind of draconian "coordinated global action" that would be necessary to actually stop CO2 emissions is not going to happen; nobody will accept that drastic a hit in standard of living. Not to mention that doing that would condemn all of the currently developing countries that have the most to lose to staying in poverty, which will make it so much harder for them to adapt. The best thing we can do is to create more wealth and bring more people out of poverty, and make our infrastructure more decentralized and robust. That will benefit everyone regardless of what kind of change comes.

waste_monk 7y ago

Could this be mitigated by floating a whole bunch of logs / other flammable carbon based material and burning them, burning off the methane in the process? It would certainly lead to increased local temperatures in the short term, but it would remove the methane problem, and if we got enough carbon into the air we would eventually see a "nuclear winter" type cooling effect. This is obviously Bad and we'd need to burn a fantastic amount of wood to accomplish it, but as far as I know it's the only readily accessible global cooling mechanism we have that is practical to implement.

macawfish 7y ago
This seems like a potentially good idea. Get it straight to CO2 as soon as possible. Otherwise I believe the half-life in the atmosphere is on the order of 10 years. The problem I could see though is that it would likely speed up the melting of the Arctic. I'm sure there are really complex tradeoffs and someone would have to study them very carefully. Intuitively I expect the gas to dilute very quickly, making it hard to burn efficiently over large surface areas... how much energy do you put into the fires vs. the amount of gas that is actually converted to CO2. It doesn't help that the methane will rise. All that energy will just go into quickening the melting of the Arctic. Which will also hasten climate change. Like yeah if you could visualise methane pockets and target them with lasers to the point of combustion as they erupted, sure that could maybe work and much more efficient at converting the gas. Still seems far fetched though.
RobertRoberts 7y ago
It's comments like this that make me question if people really understand climate science. If all we have to do to cool the earth is as simple as explained above, then global warming is solved.
- macawfish 7y ago
  I took this idea to be: since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and since it takes decades for CO2 to decay in the atmosphere on its own, maybe we could speed up the decay process (via combustion) in order try and avoid triggering extreme positive feedback (the clathrate gun). Also yeah a lot of people don't understand climate science!

xvilka 7y ago

Urbanization, high-rises and city bubbles might be the answer to survival. Probably also the floating and underwater cities. Everything that protects from the hostile climate outside. It's better to prepare the technology and economy today, while there are still enough resources and manufacturing power.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

It makes me think of stuff I've seen suggesting that release of methane gas bubbles might explain disappearances (of ships, planes) in the Bermuda Triangle. https://www.bermuda-attractions.com/bermuda2_0000a1.htm https://www.bermuda-attractions.com/bermuda2_0000a1.htm

Grue3 7y ago

Looks like Bernie's "false solutions" like geoengineering and carbon sequestration are in fact the only solutions.