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Comment by gph | Hacker News Reader

I know it's stupid and crazy, but would carpet bombing the arctic work to burn up the methane trapped below the permafrost before it leaks out into the atmosphere and causes worse problems? Or maybe we should send out expedition crews to find and preemptively explode these methane bubbles.

Perhaps the way things are going they will become too plentiful to really do anything realistic about it.

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How about just spreading a bunch of methane consuming bacteria over there? Not quite suited to the environment - how about breeding some that are?

I don't see that working real well.

After the methane bubbles pop, the methane spreads out widely.

Before the bubbles pop, the bacteria would not quickly / easily get to where the methane is actually concentrated. They don't just dig for resources, they have to ride along with some other process (like water flow).

So maybe in the ocean for the clathrate.

Sounds drastic, but once there is runaway greenhouse effect, something drastic would need to be done to cool the Earth.

Your idea of carpet bombing might just work, provided that the result would produce aerosols that have the similar effect of those produced by volcanoes (volcanic winter)

It burns to CO2. Not enormously helpful?

Pound for pound, methane is a much stronger GHG then CO2.

Breaks down more quickly though I'd expect?

Not quickly enough to save us from disaster, if the CG hypothesis holds.

Methane naturally breaks down to CO2. Transforming it to CO2 faster is unambiguously better.

A stat I hear often is that methane is 26x "worse" of a greenhouse gas than CO2, so not ideal but still helpful.

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