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Phoenix666 writes:

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.

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