Thursday, March 04, 2010

BUBBLES
...(CH4)


It's always been a disturbing what-if scenario for climate researchers: Gas hydrates stored in the Arctic ocean floor -- hard clumps of ice and methane, conserved by freezing temperatures and high pressure -- could grow unstable and release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, more worrisome than carbon dioxide, the result would be a drastic acceleration of global warming. Until now this idea was mostly academic; scientists had warned that such a thing could happen. Now it seems more likely that it will.
.................
Russian polar scientists have strong evidence that the first stages of melting are underway. They've studied [the] largest shelf sea in the world, off the coast of Siberia, where the Asian continental shelf stretches across an underwater area six times the size of Germany, before falling off gently into the Arctic Ocean. The scientists are presenting their data from this remote, thinly-investigated region at the annual conference of the European Geosciences Union this week in Vienna.


The implications are dire:
The permafrost has grown porous, says Shakhova [coauthor of the Russian study], and already the shelf sea has become "a source of methane passing into the atmosphere." The Russian scientists have estimated what might happen when this Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely and all the stored gas escapes. They believe the methane content of the planet's atmosphere would increase twelvefold. "The result would be catastrophic global warming," say the scientists. The greenhouse-gas potential of methane is 20 times that of carbon dioxide, as measured by the effects of a single molecule.




Greg Craven wraps it up in a nutshell...

3 comments:

  1. What terrifies me is that people need somebody to break it down for them like this guy in the video did.

    I have argued till I'm blue in the face that the worst case scenario with acting with all possible energy on this is we spent a lot of money and effort and come out with a cleaner, healthier, better environment... that may or may not have averted or mitigated catastrophe.

    If we do nothing there is NO chance we won't suffer, even if all the climate scientists are dead wrong, because we already are polluting and looting the planet so badly that very many people are getting very sick, and lots of humans and other species are dying of just what we already have.

    This is a no-brainer.

    And for everyone who bucks it, not caring if it's true or false, because they think it's the means for instituting The New World Order, they are fucking OUT of their minds. Nothing about it is any harsher than what's already in play and the risk is a very, very probable mass extinction event... one that includes humans. They're psychotic.

    I say this because they seem to think that fighting the climate scientists is the way to prevent the dreaded NWO, and [1] the NWO is already here, and right on schedule to proceed to full implementation; and [2] yelling like this is ONLY a way to avoid DOING anything to reverse it, to STOP it.

    This whole polemic is psychedelic to me. I've encountered many climate deniers, and they seem perfectly intelligent to me, EXCEPT that they seem completely blind to the dirt obvious. I wish the real problem were that somebody had dosed me with acid and none of this is real... but this must be some damn long-acting LSD....

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  2. For more from Greg Craven duoble click the video and expand the side bar where it says "more" - various links to his other videos and previews of his book.

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  3. I can't believe this is even up on youtube:

    Bubbles by Spooky Tooth:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBZ2qaYBqjo

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