SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:21PM
The info on the ocean cathlates is a bit ambiguous. It appears that SOME of them HAVE been releasing, but slowly. And when a deep ocean cathlate releases slowly then the bubbles get eaten by microbes on the way to the surface. So it shows up as carbon dioxide instead of methane.
OTOH, unstable (i.e., near release) ocean cathlates have been known to release suddenly in response to a shockwave. An earthquake should do. But deep ocean temperature is pretty stable, so a release seems unlikely.
That said, there are some cathlates in relatively shallow water that has been kept quite cold. And temperature plays a large part in how likely a cathlate is to release. The other factor is pressure. As the ocean rises the pressure increases, as the ocean warms the cathlates warm. I don't know how to figure the tradeoff...and in any case it's probably site specific.
So we can expect SOME of the ocean cathlates to become unstable, and release suddenly. Others will become unstable, but not be shocked, and release slowly. Others will remain stable. And I can't even guess how much falls into each category. But note that the ones that release slowly in shallow water WILL be adding methane to the atmosphere (because the microbes don't have a chance to eat the methane on its way up). However many tons of them I'm talking about.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.