A whole lotta methane from the deep (GW-apocalypse #9)

posted at 12:25 pm on March 6, 2010 by CK MacLeod

Pretty picture with arrows and blobs

Seems the world’s coming to an end, again. Seems we’re all doomed, again. It’s your fault, again. Don’t know how you can live with yourself, this time.

The Warmists are perspiring, as they do, over a report from University of Fairbanks researcher Natalia Shakhova indicating that methane has been leaking in some rather unimaginable way from certain unimaginable structures known as clathrates, located in the unimaginable seabed in the unimaginable super-Siberian arctic.

Having read a science fiction novel several years ago in which these clathrates were accidentally disturbed (an errant missile barrage, as I recall), causing a total destabilization of world weather patterns and an incidence of civilization-wrecking super-hurricanes (superduper mama hurricanes giving birth to baby super-hurricanes) and other stuff, I feel qualified to report that this isn’t that quite yet.

Some amount, possibly large, of something, but a small amount compared to other amounts of other things, is entering the atmosphere by some unimaginable process, in unimaginable quantities that may or may not lead to temperature change of some uncertain but possibly significant significance. It could very well have been caused by the action of global warming – heating the oceans, melting things that God or Darwin meant to stay frozen.

This possibly resultant possible release of methane may be something new and catastrophically catastrophic, more worrisome than worry itself, and it therefore deserves, in Dr. Shakhova’s opinion, urgent monitoring. Whether Dr. Shakhova’s department would be involved intimately with this monitoring activity, for years if not decades, is not stated in the reporting.

On the other hand, this release of methane may not be anything new, it seems, reports a skeptical German scientist. It may have been going on for a very long time. Very long. Not a long time if considered in relation to measures of time on greater scales, but quite long compared to lesser-scaled ones.

Young leftwing experts on everything and committed climate alarmists are up in arms about it – or would be, if they weren’t generally anti-”arms” – and their commenters are downright fortumulous, where not beschnaggered.

No one else cares or believes, or likely will care or believe, until and unless bears give birth to hares, oxes give birth to foxes, and the faces on Mt. Rushmore weep tears of human blood. That is the state of things post-Climategate, post-Glacier-gate, post-IPCC-horndog-gate, etc. That may not be a good state of things, compared to some other states of things, or then again, that may have been the way things always were, or at least for a very long time. Very long. Not a long time compared to measures of time on greater scales, but quite long compared to lesser-scaled ones.

Intellectual humility leads me to note that this one may be THE ONE, the problem, the overturning, the singular bad thing. I don’t know. I don’t claim to know. A choir of angels could sing the truth to me, and I still wouldn’t know. And neither would you.

However, if THIS is IT, the Mother of Storms, then all of the other stuff – the incredibly convenient INCONVENIENT TRUTH, IPCC reports, 2020 targets, cap’n'crunch, and all the rest – has been even more a super-colossal waste of time than even the most committed climate skeptic would have said, because the effect will have been a gross crying of wolf on a global scale. If this one, or the next one, is the real climate wolf – there’s a likelihood of that somewhere between zero and certain, inclusive, is my assumption – a lot of sheep are going to get eaten – and then the real fun will start, and it won’t have much to do with the IPCC, 2020 targets, or cap’n'crunch.

cross posted at Zombie Contentions

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