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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

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!
flukus 7y ago
This is a vast area, you could float and light the whole amazon rain forest and it would only make a small dent for a day.
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  In that case, maybe it'd be more effective to just drill for natural gas in the area and get it out of the ground before it has a chance to escape into the atmosphere? Might even turn out to be a profitable venture depending on how difficult it is to extract the gas in that area.
  - flukus 7y ago
    It's not a trapped gas deposit, it's methane in a solid form spread across vast areas of the world so there's nothing to contain it and nothing to drill into. It's unlikely to have any concentrations for high enough and long enough to ever be worth extracting.

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!

flukus 7y ago

This is a vast area, you could float and light the whole amazon rain forest and it would only make a small dent for a day.

Ajedi32 7y ago
In that case, maybe it'd be more effective to just drill for natural gas in the area and get it out of the ground before it has a chance to escape into the atmosphere? Might even turn out to be a profitable venture depending on how difficult it is to extract the gas in that area.
- flukus 7y ago
  It's not a trapped gas deposit, it's methane in a solid form spread across vast areas of the world so there's nothing to contain it and nothing to drill into. It's unlikely to have any concentrations for high enough and long enough to ever be worth extracting.