We can presume that humans will stop making new CO2 pollution in the next 100 years. It will take hundreds or thousands of years for the CO2 to convert to meth

We can presume that humans will stop making new CO2 pollution in the next 100 years. It will take hundreds or thousands of years for the CO2 to convert to methane clathrates. I worry about creating a problem for people far in the future. It's like setting a climate bomb with a timer of 2,000 years. > Methane escaping dissolves in water This is a good point. Let's see if the ocean can hold enough methane. Methane dissolves 0.04g/l in pure water at 0C ant 1atm [0]. Seawater has about 35g salt per L [1], or about 3.5% NaCl by weight. Methane has slightly lower solubility in salt water than in pure water (see tables starting on page 11 of [2]). Ocean pressure increases 10 kPa per m, or 1.45 psi per m [3]. At 25C, increasing pressure from 1,000 psi (700m depth) to 2,500 psi (1700m depth) increases the solubility of methane in salt water by 2x, and 5x at 15,000 psi (10km depth). I couldn't find data for lower temperatures. Methane ice forms in mud starting at 300m depth [4]. Humans have burned fossil fuels and released about 380 GtC [5]. Converting this carbon into methane yields about 500 Gt methane. Let's assume that the ocean slopes linearly down to 10,000m depth. Then the ocean floor from 300m-1300m is 10% of the ocean floor and contains approximately 10% of the methane ice, about 50 Gt of methane. The volume of water above it is (300m + 0.5 x 1000m) x 0.10 x 361,900,000 km-km (the area of the ocean [6]), about 29,000,000 km-km-km or 2.9x10^22 l. About 1.160x10^21 g or 1,600,000 Gt methane can dissolve in this water. Let's assume that the average solubility in the ocean is 2x the solubility at the surface, or 0.08g/l of methane in sea water. Then the entire 1.335x10^9 km-km-km ocean could dissolve about 1.068x10^23 g or 100,000,000 Gt methane. You are right. The ocean could dissolve all of man's fossil fuel CO2 pollution as methane. Since the methane would probably not bubble up, the rate of methane escaping into the air would be very low. I think it would be slow enough that the methane would stay in the ocean's carbon cycle and not escape fast enough to trigger runaway warming. I feel relieved. > So, you are still reaching. Why? Describing my analysis as "reaching" is incorrect. I think you mean it as a personal attack, which breaks the site's guidelines [7]. Removing the insult yields "Why do you care about this issue?" The reason is that I think it is interesting and important. [0] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gases-solubility-water-d_1148.html https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gases-solubility-water-d_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater [2] https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr80371 https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr80371 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_per_square_inch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_per_square_inch [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere#Anthropogenic_CO2_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean#Geography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean#Geography [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html