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I have a degree of skepticism about these near term arctic clatherate release stories. There seems to be to be some big gaps in it. The methane in under over 50 m of water and beneath permafrost. That takes a huge huge amount of energy to warm up and melt, yet the story is that the recent changes in sea ice cover have sent a pulse of warming deep enough and warm enough to do melt a permafrost cap. While that part of the ocean gets cold enough to freeze for about 8 months of the year.

I have not seen one bit of evidence that these are new methane sources and not just long term seeps that have only just been discovered. Over 100 years and 1000 years this is likely to be a huge source of new carbon, but I am not convinced we are seeing something that is new and dangerous happening right now.
 
This methane thing is just a number pulled out of Shakhovas arse and fed into an economic model.

Gavin Schmidt on twitter has been pouring some very cold water on this.

Gavin Schmidt ‏@ClimateOfGavin
11h​
@cwhope Wow. "Highly possible at any time" Shakhova. I could not disagree more. Paleo provides *no* evidence for this level of sensitivity
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Id strongly advice people not to go out on a limb defending this study. If anything give it a boot.
 
Large, Troubling Methane Pulse Coincides With Arctic Heatwave, Tundra Fires
These first methane burps are a warning for us to act now, before our capacity to act is seriously degraded and before events start to spiral beyond the point of rational control. We have had other warnings which we have, so far, mostly ignored. And though the responses by the Obama Administration and World Bank to de-fund new coal plants are encouraging, we should redouble our efforts now, lest we enter an age of bitter regret as the consequences of our carbon emission form a trap that is difficult or impossible to escape.
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I am left wondering what, if anything, we can do that would be able to prevent a large-scale release?
I'm thinking of both the "momentum" of change in the climate system and the time it would take for governments to agree to act - even if their corporate puppeteers would let them.
 
Don't think there is anything to do to stop the release of natural gasses in natural ways. (other than drill them and tap the resource, not that I'm suggesting anything)
 
Do people here believe that we are past the point of return in regards to climate change? Is it possible that the ship can be turned around, or are we all fucked?
 
cynicaleconomy said:
Do people here believe that we are past the point of return in regards to climate change? Is it possible that the ship can be turned around, or are we all fucked?
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I think we're well past the point of return to a stable climate. Warming lags GHG emissions due to inertia in the climate system. We're already committed to at least 2° of warming, even if we stopped GHG emissions yesterday. So far we have had only 0.8° of warming.

Don't worry
 
Dr Jon said:
I think we're well past the point of return to a stable climate. Warming lags GHG emissions due to inertia in the climate system. We're already committed to at least 2° of warming, even if we stopped GHG emissions yesterday. So far we have had only 0.8° of warming.

Don't worry
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What would happen if we were to start taking carbon out of the atmosphere by artificial carbon sinks (if such a thing exists)? Would it be possible to reverse any of the damage, or are the changes to the climate system irreversible?
 
cynicaleconomy said:
What would happen if we were to start taking carbon out of the atmosphere by artificial carbon sinks (if such a thing exists)? Would it be possible to reverse any of the damage, or are the changes to the climate system irreversible?
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The questions there are what technology does it use / how do we power it / do we have the resources to build it.
There are already self-replicating, solar-powered, carbon-sinks. They're called trees. We just have to stop cutting them down and using the land for ourselves.

8ball said:
We are all doomed. Life is meaningless. Everything dies.
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Life is far from meaningless.
2/3
:)
 
Dr Jon said:
Do they still make that shit?
I thought it had been so thoroughly discredited it was no longer prescribed..?
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Yup, tonnes and tonnes of the stuff and lots and lots of very similar drugs.

They can have their uses tbf.
 
Dr Jon said:
The questions there are what technology does it use / how do we power it / do we have the resources to build it.
There are already self-replicating, solar-powered, carbon-sinks. They're called trees. We just have to stop cutting them down and using the land for ourselves.
Click to expand...

Is this ever going to happen though, realistically? It seems to me that it is pretty much impossible (politically, not technologically) to organise the the preservation of natural carbon sinks such as trees whilst a capitalist economy exists, and the global economy isn't going to fundamentally change any time soon. Certainly not before it's too late for the climate. Artificial sinks might be the quickest and most pragmatic solution to the problem as far as the politics/economics are concerned.

Could you direct me to some more information on these self-replicating sinks you mentioned?
 
Carbon dioxide has an approximate thirty-year time lag between its release into the atmosphere and its corresponding affect on average global temperature. Even if we stop all emissions today – keeping it at 400 ppm – we still have nearly thirty years of warming and climatic changes to undergo.

And right now, nothing that we are currently observing matches up with any of the models that we have – a stark acknowledgement that this historical moment we find ourselves in exists largely beyond our ability to comprehend it let alone predict its movement.

We are in uncharted territory – we are facing challenges never before experienced in the history of the human species. This presents a grave problem: if the best science we have today cannot accurately offer any model predictions for the path that we are currently on, how can we effectively plan for the future?

The honest truth: we can’t. We cannot effectively plan for a future that is beyond all known human experience.
The best that we can do now is stop exacerbating the problem – stop contributing to the rapidly accelerating decline and destruction of the Earth’s biosphere and ecosystems.

Quite literally: we have to completely dismantle the industrial economy, we have to do it soon, and really, we should have done it yesterday.
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From: The Time Lag of Irreversible Change
 
Dr Jon said:
we have to completely dismantle the industrial economy, we have to do it soon, and really, we should have done it yesterday.
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See this is the sort of shit that makes me ask about artificial carbon sinks, because they are pretty much the only way to practically combat the rise of CO2. Dismantle the industrial economy? Doing that would probably kill off just as many people as climate change itself. It's not exactly a solution, is it?
 
A global reforestation program might help, but that's something which ought to have been started decades ago. We're still slashing and burning our way to a bottleneck event if not extinction.

I don't think the author was seriously expecting the industrial economy to be dismantled, though it seems to be doing a good job of falling apart all by itself right now - despite the spin from the illusionists of high finance.
 
Arctic News said:
The video below is a visualization of the Arctic Death Spiral showing the evolution of the volume of sea-ice over time from 1979 to July 2013. The rate of ice loss in the Arctic is staggering. Since 1979, the volume of Summer Arctic sea ice has declined by more than 80% and is accelerating faster than scientists believed it would, or even could melt.
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ETA:
Sea-level “lock in” is happening 10 times faster than sea-level rise itself, but thanks to the long time lag, it’s even more invisible.
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link
 
temperature.png

Ugo Bardi said:
The above is a very simple and effective image. In a single and easy to read graph, it completely debunks the legend that "global warming has stopped." Decadal averages remove the short term yearly noise and show the hot truth.

If there is any justice in the world, this image should go viral, but - as it always happens - it is the wrong meme that goes viral; the one that says that global warming has stopped.

Maybe the readers of this blog would try to give a "viral push" to this image? See if you can share it to your friends, to your social networks and the like. Let's see if we can move things a little bit....
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link
 
New science reafirms that the ENSO is playing a role is suppressing surface temperatures.
http://www.nature.com/news/tropical-ocean-key-to-global-warming-hiatus-1.13620

“The equatorial Pacific cooling turns out to be strong enough to offset the general rise in temperature induced by anthropogenic greenhouse gases,” says Shang-Ping Xie, a climate modeller at Scripps and co-author of the study, which is published today inNature1. Just as importantly, he says, the model helps to explain regional trends that seem to defy the global warming hiatus, including record-breaking heat in the United States last year, and the continued decline of Arctic sea ice.
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This cooling is in part caused by stronger winds across that region that pull waters from the cold Humboldt current to the surface. The net energy being added to the ocean atmosphere system is likely to be about the same as before but more colder water from the deeps is being pulled up to be warmed.
 
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