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Methane under the seabed is thawing as oceans warm
- echelon 3y agoHumans evolved during a period of ice age. The earth (while it has hosted terrestrial life) has typically been much warmer. If we return to a Cretaceous period temperatures, can we and our crops survive? I've read that if we wind up with a navigable north sea and arable north, that the earth would be net better for some (eg. Russia) despite the fact that other climates will suffer. (Some surmise that Russia could be catapulted back into superpower status.) Could these runaway heating systems go beyond sustainable and turn earth into Venus?
- kiba 3y agoThere are levels of survival that humans must be prepared to tolerate as long as we do not work together to act in the interest of our species.
- huijzer 3y agoI agree. We have no idea. From a statistical standpoint, I‘d rather have humanity pollute less because the chance that humanity will thrive in a changed ecosystem is lower than in the current since humans have evolved in the current.
- gmuslera 3y agoIt could take from hundreds to thousands of years to reach to a new stable, that may be worse than Cretaceous period. But the problem is not just the final temperature, but the speed of change. Adaptation takes time, with things changing as fast as now few things will survive, and that may not include us.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoIt's the rate of change that is significant. If the change took place over tens or hundreds of thousands of years, climates and species would adapt, and the positive and negative changes could roughly balance. But it is happening on the decade scale, and negative shocks happen faster than positive ones.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adrian_b 3y agoThe regions that are now good for humans will become bad and some regions that are bad now will become good. It is clear that the majority of the humans live in the regions that are good now and much fewer live in the bad regions. When the quality of the regions will change, this will be an undesirable change for much more humans than those for which the change will be favorable. The owners of the regions that will become good are unlikely to welcome those from the regions that become bad to relocate there. Therefore it would certainly be much better if the changes were prevented, instead of hoping to be among the few who could benefit from them. I am old enough to remember the cold and snowy winters that were normal in the past, where I live. For now, it is convenient for me that more than a decade has passed since the last time when I have used my winter clothes and my winter boots, but it is extremely scary to have witnessed such a climate change in much less than a human lifetime, without knowing where it would lead eventually.
- wongarsu 3y agoIt's quite possible that we reach a new "stable" state. There is a lot of land in Siberia, Canada and Greenland that might become well suited to agriculture as temperatures increase. Meanwhile the Northern shipping routes open up as the northern ice caps retreat, making these regions even more attractive. But this would come with monumental challenges, the kinds that have caused previous civilizations to collapse. Billions of people live in regions that will reach hostile temperatures or that will have population centers destroyed by sea level rise. Imagine a large portion of them moving North and South to more hospitable climates. Russia might have won the lottery in terms of future-proof land, but trying to control migration across its Southern border would be a near impossible challenge. Meanwhile the EU has a ... complicated relationship with border control right now, and will be faced with a lot worse.
- barbazoo 3y agoAnd that’s assuming borders have any meaning at all when it comes to the problems we’re facing. We’re all on this planet together and if land becomes uninhabitable those people need to go and live somewhere. Whether that somewhere is beyond a border is irrelevant. People will just go where they don’t starve, die or be persecuted etc and that’s their right to do so. The borders we have were made in the context that won’t exist 50 years from now. Everyone will have to adapt. No one will be untouched from climate change just because of their winning ticket at the lottery of birth.
- RandomLensman 3y agoThat is the optimistic scenario. Even possible that productivity and wealth growth increases in some scenario like that.
- netsharc 3y ago> We’re all on this planet together Too optimistic. The borders will become the lines in people's heads where people say "This is our territory, we own the food and water here, we don't have enough, so you stay out and here are the bullets to help us keep you out.". And the other side will say "We're dying of hunger and thirst, we will ignore the lines, and here are the bullets to help us.".
- lucidguppy 3y agoWhen will corporations get scared? When the insurance dries up? New Zealand can't hold all the world's millionaires and billionaires. If there's a rush, then that money won't matter much.
- consumer451 3y ago> When will corporations get scared? In my personal experience, n=1, it appears that most publicly traded corporations are concerned with the future as far out as 4 financial quarters, maximum. Executive compensation is tied to stock price, so that is the depth of focus. I have only had one gig at a public company, and it put me off of at working at another. Any longer term planning was derailed by a VP coming into a meeting, spewing shortsighted nonsense, and running off to the next thing. edit: There are notable exceptions to this short term thinking, but those appear to be corps where a founder was still at the helm. ex: NVIDIA, Tesla.
- Joeri 3y agoThey’re listening to economists that tell them the effects on GDP will be negligible, and in fact mitigation measures may be very profitable. That those economic predictions are based on assumptions with a high degree of hand waving doesn’t matter, they want to believe.
- marcus0x62 3y agoI don’t think corporations can get scared. The people running them can, but all talk of ESG and the like aside, those people aren’t incentivized to put long-term concerns over short-term profits.
- justinclift 3y agoMaybe when it's more profitable for them to do something constructive?
- lijok 3y agoWhy would corporations get scared? Climate change is going to be such a cashcow, corporations can't wait for it to accelerate further
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- gmuslera 3y agoThe road to global warming is mined by positive feedback loops all the way to hell. Every step forward on it is risking a disaster, and by the time we finally acknowledge that we stepped over a landline, there is no way back, even if all those processes takes years to decades.
- barbazoo 3y agoAt least there’ll be lots of shareholder value so it wasn’t for nothing. /s
- _Microft 3y agoIn case you are wondering, this is most likely alluding to a cartoon: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 Textual description if you prefer that: in front of the skyline of a derelict city, a man in a torn suit and a few children in similarly ragged clothes are sitting at a campfire. The man says: “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”.
- pluc 3y agoThat last guy is gonna be so wealthy, he'll literally be able to afford anything.
- martin-adams 3y agoAnd nothing at the same time
- voisin 3y agoWill the last trillionaire left alive at the end of our species please turn out the lights?
- rmah 3y agoIf there's no way back, then why bother with painful mitigation efforts? But seriously, this sort of "it's over, there's only doom ahead" is, IMO, counterproductive and hurts the efforts to help the environment more than it helps.
- labrador 3y agoIf we expect humans can live on Mars and the Moon, I'd expect we could continue to live on Earth and besides, mammals have existed on Earth for over 100 million years, surviving even the extinction event the destroyed dinosaur species. I'm not saying I'm not worried or things would be ideal, I'm just doing some back of the envelope checking.
- tiku 3y agoBut the hardships on Mars and the Moon are a lot less violent and different than what we see on earth already. I wonder if our future is under the sea or in more bunker like structures. It probably won't have to be very deep.
- georgeecollins 3y agoThat is saying unable to support human life is better than sometimes dangerous. It would be easier to live in Antarctica or under the Ocean than Mars. The point is 8b people live on earth! You can't build that many biosomes.
- barbazoo 3y agoI’d recommend looking up temperatures (min and max), day/night periods, atmosphere etc on the planets you’re considering here. Doesn’t sound appealing to me but that’s just me, I have this thing where I enjoy living in between -15C and +35C with a pretty particular ratio of oxygen in the air and days and nights so I don’t go crazy. But again, that might just be me. Edit: I forgot about radiation, silly me. I also enjoy having that blocked by earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, again, some people might actually enjoy that and find that to be a business opportunity or whatever.
- proto-n 3y agoWell, I doubt anyone expects 8 billion people to be able to live on mars in the coming years
- labrador 3y ago
- westcort 3y agoRecent recalibration of the limits of growth model has shown that collapse of industrial civilization is imminent [0]. Climate change is one of the most visible symptoms of the limits of growth, but not the only symptom. 0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13442?af=R https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13442?af=R
- svara 3y agoI tried for a bit to understand this paper since the result, if true, seems extremely significant. If I understand correctly they are saying that non renewable resources, specifically oil, will soon run out, leading to a collapse in industrial output which in turn leads to a loss of agricultural efficiency and thus famine. This seems like complete nonsense? You can make a model say literally anything...
- baq 3y agoWhich part is nonsense? ‘Oil will soon run out’ is questionable only in the ‘soon’ part and the rest follows pretty easily: there is no modern farming without oil. Source: ask a farmer, or read some Wikipedia. One could hope for a transition to electric farming equipment and supply chains but you won’t be able to create artificial fertilizers without natural gas at scale.
- svara 3y agoLook at their plots, they show it running out... Right about now. When in reality oil is most likely to last longer than us using it. If any of this was true you'd see commodity prices spiking across the board. And even if that happened, agriculture would be the last thing affected, since demand for food is completely inelastic.
- baq 3y agoRead the article, they say upfront they have no idea how much is really left. What’s important is that exponential growth in consumption shifts the exhaustion a few decades at best even if there’s still a lot left.
- aeturnum 3y agoArticles like this seem to get published most often when a problem turns out to be worse than we thought. That makes sense - and I suspect that, on balance, we've been overly optimistic about how much warming will come from each source, but it can't always be worse than we thought. Presumably people making climate models must keep up on the latest info on how much each element contributes, with some of them being less warming than predicted. Are there places that collect that information? Is there any way to see the aggregate change in overall understanding?
- sanderjd 3y agoYeah I think it's likely that we have been (and are being) over-optimistic about many things and under-optimistic about many others. But the outcome is very sensitive to exactly which things are which, and which feedback loops they contribute to in which direction. It's just genuinely hard to know where things are headed. The only thing for it is to gather and analyze as much information as possible, constantly, and adapt to it wisely as it comes in. But this isn't all that satisfying a conclusion for either the doom and gloom crowd or the optimistic crowd :)
- aeturnum 3y agoYah - I guess what I am saying is that in order to write the, "factor X is worse than we thought" article - you need to know what factor X was before. So really...people who do this work must have a set of coefficients that go into their models. I don't think it's fair to expect popular reporting like this to cover every factor...but I think we could do a better job of sharing the most recent set.
- kamilner 3y agohttps://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-10-06-new-analysis-shipping-emissions-reveals-air-pollution-has-larger-effect-climate https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-10-06-new-analysis-shipping-e... is the most recent example I can think of, not being an expert in the field.
- aeturnum 3y ago
- RecycledEle 3y agoWe can mine it an burn it as fuel, Ot we can let it pollute our atmosphere.
- marcosdumay 3y agoIt's very hard to mine. It's very dispersed, and well, at the bottom of the ocean.
- defterGoose 3y agoYou just said the same thing twice.
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago[dead]
- VikingCoder 3y agoI'm rereading Mother of Storms right now.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago"We believe they formed as a result of repeated warming periods. These periods impacted hydrate in the deep ocean and the released methane migrated up to 40km towards the continent, to be vented beyond the shallowest hydrate deposits." So we're talking a geological process, on a geological timescale, on one hand. On the other hand, I've always heard that water is densest at 4C, which is probably the temperature at the bottom of any ocean, regardless of the warmth of surface water (which is what has been in the news). So, what's up with the headline? I read the whole piece, and it still doesn't gibe.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoCould it erupt into boiling ocean? Like that lake in a volcanic lake in Africa, where the trapped gases erupted and smothered several villages, suffocating them.
- ipaddr 3y agoGreenhouse gas models are like crypto white papers. In a few years both are worthless. At least they made some money.
- thih9 3y agoI wish articles like this came with more specific language than “worse than we thought”; either skip it, or provide an estimate, or other way for the reader to quantify what worsens and by how much. I appreciate the link to the research though.
- fredgrott 3y agoFor context, the current pilgrimage to Mecca told participants to do it during off hours such as midnight-4am....let that sink in for a moment...
- Roritharr 3y agoIsn't this the Clathrate Gun? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
- chrisfrantz 3y agoThis was an interesting read, thanks >the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report states "It is very unlikely that gas clathrates (mostly methane) in deeper terrestrial permafrost and subsea clathrates will lead to a detectable departure from the emissions trajectory during this century".
- whatshisface 3y agoThat was before they discovered the deep clathrate liberation described in the article.
- kragen 3y agoas context for davies' new research, it's useful to know how bad we thought it was previously; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis#Current_outlook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis#Curre... explains: > In 2018, a perspective piece devoted to tipping points in the climate system suggested that the climate change contribution from methane hydrates would be "negligible" by the end of the century, but could amount to 0.4–0.5 °C (0.72–0.90 °F) on the millennial timescales.[6] In 2021, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report no longer included methane hydrates in the list of potential tipping points, and says that "it is very unlikely that CH4 emissions from clathrates will substantially warm the climate system over the next few centuries."[7] The report had also linked terrestrial hydrate deposites to gas emission craters discovered in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, Russia beginning in July 2014,[133] but noted that since terrestrial gas hydrates predominantly from at a depth below 200 metres, a substantial response within the next few centuries can be ruled out.[7] Likewise, a 2022 assessment of tipping points described methane hydrates as a "threshold-free feedback" rather than a tipping point.[134][135] one of the reasons for this is that below 200 meters, the methane apparently goes into the ocean rather than the atmosphere. what happens to it there? i'm unclear on that. maybe it gets oxidized? by marine life? that seems like the only way it could 'cause the oceans to become more acidic', as davies says; methane isn't acidic! the end of davies' article summarizes the results as follows: > So during a warming world the volume of hydrate that will be vulnerable to leaking methane is more significant than previously thought. > The positive outlook is that there are many natural barriers to this methane. But be warned, we expect that in some places on earth, as we warm the planet, methane from the deep will escape into our oceans. it would be nice to have some clue in the 'conversation' article about whether the timescale he's talking about is months, years, centuries, millennia, tens of millennia, hundreds of millennia, millions of years, or what, but presumably if he disagreed with the ipcc's sixth assessment report that it would be at least millennia, he would have said so has anyone read the nature geoscience paper?
- crazygringo 3y ago...are there any feedback loops that counteract global warming...? Because between losing reflective ice, and gases released in thawing permafrost soil, and now this... ...is there anything that is actually helping, by any chance? Because this news is just so depressing and scary.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoPlants love CO2 and as CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise, so will plant populations. This is a huge one. The CO2 level in the atmosphere has been much higher than it is today, and the planet was very lush at the time.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoThat was likely before mass deforestation and clearing of land across most of the planets surface by a particularly invasive hairless primate.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoThere are a lot of plants in the world, not just trees. Algae, grasses, and small plants are much more elastic than trees. Also, as the world warms, the tundras in Canada and Russia become a lot more hospitable for plant life.
- Klathmon 3y agoThere have been arguments that the sulfur dioxide we have been pumping into the atmosphere from ships has actually been geoengineering keeping temperatures down for decades. https://x.com/hankgreen/status/1687535525169930241?s=20 https://x.com/hankgreen/status/1687535525169930241?s=20 But this might actually be bad news, because if we ever stop something like this, it could cause temperatures to rise extremely rapidly.
- NikkiA 3y agoSulphur Dioxide becomes Sulphuric acid when it breaks down in the atmosphere, the threat/reality of acid rain due to this is why sulphur scrubbers were mandated on power stations from the 1980s onwards. Relying on it as it is at a specific snapshot in time would require a very precarious balance and is probably not worth trying to achieve, there are better geoengineering hopefuls.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- whatshisface 3y ago>This is a worry as that hydrate contains about as much carbon as all of the remaining oil and gas on Earth. Fun fact, oil wells rarely recover more than a third of the oil present in the rock, so this methane hydrate stuff has way more carbon than the oil and gas we will be able to produce.
- credit_guy 3y agoMaybe I'm wrong, but I thought that at a fairly shallow depth the seawater is at a constant temperature of 4 degrees Celsius, because that's the temperature where the water is at its densest. Global warming may push this depth a bit lower, but I can't see how it can impact the seabed.
- defrost 3y agoThe article opens: Buried beneath the oceans surrounding continents is a naturally occurring frozen form of methane and water. Sometimes dubbed “fire-ice” as you can literally set light to it, marine methane hydrate can melt as the climate warms, uncontrollably releasing methane – a potent greenhouse gas – into the ocean and possibly the atmosphere. The oceans surrounding continents are, for the majority, shallow waters not deep ocean. It's somewhat worse than that in practice, studies indicate that when methane hydrates melt and are released at the land|ocean edges where the bottom waters have warmed ... more methane ice hydrates slowly migrate under pressure to the melting zone, replacing lost methane ice hydrates and then melting itself. Long-distance migration and venting of methane from the base of the hydrate stability zone https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01333-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01333-w Some of the methane containment zone warming enough to melt and release methane is akin to taking the cap off the toothpaste when the tube is under pressure.
- credit_guy 3y agoThe link you posted starts with this: > Marine methane hydrate is an ice-like substance that is stable in sediment around marine continental margins where water depths are greater than ~450–700 m. The continental shelves are the areas close to the continents that are shallow, with an average depth of 200 m. They constitute 7.5% of the total ocean area [1]. All the water below 200 m depth is virtually at the same temperature of about 4 degrees Celsius [2]. So, the methane hydrate is well below the surface layer that gets heated by the sun and affected by the climate change. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1038/npg.els.0003193 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1038/npg.els.0003... [2]https://rwu.pressbooks.pub/webboceanography/chapter/6-2-temperature/ https://rwu.pressbooks.pub/webboceanography/chapter/6-2-temp...
- gabrielfernado 3y ago[dead]
- rjknight 3y agoThis is why I think if we're going to do geoengineering, we ought to do it sooner rather than later. The amount of geoengineering needed to offset the current level of methane release is going to be much less than the amount needed once the ocean warms by another degree.