LINK: Melting Arctic is releasing millions of tons of methane
Only the first half of this page is devoted to stating facts; the latter half is a call for political action. The facts section states that the millions of tons of methane trapped in the Arctic ice are a factor not commonly taken into account in future climate models, and its release will very quickly worsen global warming to the point of posing a serious existential risk.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/giant-methane-monster-lurking?paging=off
It is very possible that this would make it worse than anticipated, but a quick reminder to anyone afraid ice melting will create a positive feedback loop:
The main thing that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere is the ocean. Adding more water will mean more CO2 can dissolve. This is the main reason why in the past, the climate always returned from getting too hot or too cold.
About 2.5% of the planet’s water is freshwater; about 99% of that freshwater is ice, so considering only freshwater ice, if it all melts we’d have about 2.5% more CO2 capacity. There’s also such a thing as seawater ice (see: North pole), but it doesn’t add that much volume to the system, overall.
Any expansion in CO2 capacity due to melting ice will be completely dwarfed by other effects.
Without knowing how much CO2 is stored in the sea it’s difficult to say whether 2.5% more CO2 capacity is much or very little.
I think the key question is: How much methane/CO2 is a liter of water in the state of ice storing and how much is the average liter of sea water storing.
A good example of a blatantly scaremongering agitprop piece which is highly misleading and pretty much just lies.
P.S. And right below...
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Could we harvest the methane out of the arctic and use it as fuel instead of letting it escape? Relevant NY Times.
Problematic. Unlike with oil, it isn’t kept down by a hard cap of rock; we can’t drill a single hole and have it bubble up, we’d need to physically harvest vast quantities of methane slurry, and meanwhile it’d still be bubbling up.
So basically the article argues that the IPCC is stupid enough not to account for methane that’s released from Arctic ice in their models. Then because the mainstream climate scientists are so wrong in their science, we should do something about global warming?
I move to taboo “mainstream.” It’s being so often used as a swear word now that it has lost its meaning.
In that case the mainstream opinion on climate change is the IPCC opinion.
This is collective blog devoted to the risk of Arctic methane release. They consider it existential risk in near term (2040-2050) http://arctic-news.blogspot.ru/
They neglect negative feedbacks and exaggerate positive feedbacks, and are generally not credible.
This article appears just below “16 Epic Jon Stewart Insults Worthy of Shakespeare” in Alternet’s current most-read list.
I really need to start buying up land in Alaska… :(