Here's a bit of good news about climate change:
One climate doomsday scenario can be downgraded, new research suggests.
Decades of atmospheric measurements from a site in northern Alaska show that rapidly rising temperatures there have not significantly increased methane emissions from the neighboring permafrost-covered landscape, researchers reported December 15 at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting.
Some scientists feared that Arctic warming would unleash large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, worsening global warming. "The ticking time bomb of methane has clearly not manifested itself yet," said study coauthor Colm Sweeney, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Emissions of carbon dioxide — a less potent greenhouse gas — did increase over that period, the researchers found.
Some have been concerned about a sudden, runaway spike in greenhouse gases owing to thawing methane clathrates in the ocean (the "Clathrate gun hypothesis") and in the permafrost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:46PM
If the climate were prone to runaway feedback like from methane, it would be evident in the historical record.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:41PM
Don't think we are using the same definition of runaway?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect [wikipedia.org]
A runaway greenhouse effect is a process in which a net positive feedback between surface temperature and atmospheric opacity increases the strength of the greenhouse effect on a planet until its oceans boil away. ...
Since we still have oceans there isn't going to be any record of this happening in Earth's past.