Methane - the worst that could happen has begun, with no solution in sight

I have seen stuff (on bbc web news perhaps) where they have tracked methane bubbling up from the hydrates in the northern oceans. They used sonar! And I guess they had not thought of using sonar before!   In this case, the methane is not reaching the surface at all! It is a giant hidden problem!

It either gets disolved in the water or gets converted to CO2 by microorganisms along the way up from the bottom. So many of the hydrates are melting away as we swarm the oceans and have been doing so for years.  But it is increasing, and it is adding to the carbonic acid load of the oceans and it is adding to the disolved gas load of the oceans. So it means that sooner than people thought, the oceans will stop being that CO2 buffer that it once was.

I cannot believe how the intergovernment panel of scientists do not factor stuff like that into their estimates!  I know that there is political interference, but still!  How dare they ignore stuff just because they cannot get a perfect measurement.  You GOT TO give a best guesstimate.  Otherwise you are being an idiot.  I think it was oppenheimer who measured the power from the first fatman atomic explosion by  dropping a handful of leaves as the shock wave hit. It landed a foot or 2 behind and he got a pretty close estimate!

Scientists today are too cought up in procedeure.

If the temps are rising faster than your models predict, gees guys, adjust the models!

Improvise, you silly guys!

I think there is a small possibility of the venus situation happening. The sun throws out more heat and light now than it did 50 or 60 million years ago and all the previous anoxic events did not have fossil carbon from oil and coal added to them as will be the case in this one.  Who survives if average temp reaches 38C for a hundred years?  Or if the minimum temp is 38C? Who survives?        We will all be fighting for the heights of the alaskan mountains and we might all lose.

The oil companys are flairing a lot of methane too and cows fart more on industrial foods. I come from ireland. No termites.  There are lots of termites in canada and they are spreading north and they eat wood and they fart methane.

Doug wrote:

marzo wrote:

If methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide does this mean that Earth's atmosphere could end up being more like that of Venus? That would be unsuitable for life. Maybe it would be a much warmer Earth with less land, mostly covered by water with no ice caps at the poles.  If human beings want to survive in such a world they might have to build artificial islands or offshore cities. Will it ever be possible to have large-scale desalination of seawater? Large scale farming of the oceans?

 

We're a long way from that, but something else very unpleasant happens at a high enough level of greenhouse gases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event