Quote:
Originally Posted by Thor
You understand we have been able to see the ups and downs back for millions of years, to the time when antartica was a tropical jungle and there was no ice anywhere on earth.
People seem to think because it WAS once way hotter that we would go back to that cycle naturally, but the warming periods and mini ice ages is a normal 10-20,000 yr cycle while the planet on the longer time scale has reached before the last 100 yrs a cycle that would never lead back to the extremes that are a big part of the fact 99.9% of all species have died out since life began.
There is no question we are harming and speeding up the warming, the question is how bad will this be for us in the next 50, 100yrs, 500yrs. Sea level rise is the most immediate concern, then there is more extreme weather, more droughts, more crazy winter storms, etc..
The evidence for what is coming is overwhelming, the problem is figuring out how severe it will be, we don't know but we can look at the distant past to see massive disasters caused by warming like releasing all the frozen methane gas at the bottom of the oceans and especially near Siberia, if the ocean warms enough it can turn the oceans into lifeless toxic waters.
There are literally dozens of distasterous scenarious we risk facing with allowing our planet to warm up over 4-5c, and more seriously closer to 10c warming.
No matter what happens, we are going to face some brutal challenges, and we have people with no expertise treating this like a conservative vs liberal argument, ignoring the experts and we do so at our own peril.
Doesn't mean we have to do extreme things now, but we have to start, we have to address this and we can even make money by doing it.
Sadly I have little hope of that, this issue deals with many decades and hundreds of years, politicians only care about the next 4 yrs, so how this issue ever gets addressed properly is problematic to say the least.
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This is my concern. Methane gas (and water vapour) are far more effective green house gases than CO2. Methane has other obvious impacts as you mention. I read a few shocking artciles on recent data being gathered on this in the arctic...
http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.uk/p/...one-human.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8205864.stm
http://theconversation.edu.au/methane-makes-shale-gas-a-current-climate-danger-5020
The scary thing is just how much methane there is stored under permafrost and undersea hydrates globally. I've read estimates that over 50% of the known hydrocarbon resources on the planet reside in this form. I'll look for a link to a couple papers and post it here when I find it.
Obviously, mild temperature changes are enough to cause a shift in the phase of the hydrates. Any release in pressure (caused by gas being liberated from the solid state) in these hydrates causes a pressure drop to occur, which creates a low pressure "front" that will encourage more methane to move from solid to gaseous state. In other words, its a chain reaction that you can't control. That's why we don't produce these resources as reserves currently.