Re: this time the sky is falling. really.
by
JanZ
07/01/2008, 12:18 AM
Not to worry, when the clathrate beds under the Siberian permafrost start going there will be a spike in the rate of climatic change.
Methane is if memory serves some 22-24% better as a green house gas than CO2, think of black cars and white cars, the black being methane.
Regardless of how or why or who (Moot point now) the process is started and has gained its own momentum and will continue to accelerate in a sort of geometrical progression.
More heat, more melting, more methane released, more heat and so on, one can think of it as a self replicating process that very well may not stop or reverse until there's no more methane to release.
There are also vast beds of Methane clathrate on the seabeds, billions of tons of it so if it goes it will be interesting.
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The laughably simplistic idea that if we humans just stop doing whatever the "Experts" claim we humans are doing to warm the earth things will immediately get better an a few years is just not going to work.
Humans started affecting the environment the first time they lit a fire, started farming and keeping animals and forming cities.
The climate is getting warmer, just like it has over the eons and it will get colder again too, you just won't be here to see it as your life span is far too short.
That's what climate change is all about, but hey if being green makes you feel good have a ball, it isn't going to change squat.
Even if it does make a difference you won't be around to see it change or know about it.