Methane under the seabed is thawing as oceans warm
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
Textual description if you prefer that: in front of the skyline of a derelict city, a man in a torn suit and a few children in similarly ragged clothes are sitting at a campfire. The man says: “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”.
But seriously, this sort of "it's over, there's only doom ahead" is, IMO, counterproductive and hurts the efforts to help the environment more than it helps.
They said "every step on our current trajectory could represent a threshold triggering processes past which there is no return", and while it's left implied, the implication is that maybe we should consider stopping our current trajectory an emergency, much in the same way that someone who realizes they're as yet intact within a minefield might stop blithely strolling along even if the next step is only a marginal risk, not a guarantee of disaster.
Because there's a way forward
Climate change is going to suck, but I focus on the fact that we've been fighting against really horrifically bad reasoning skills. Climate change is really basic chemistry; if we can't get people to agree on that how are we ever going to solve problems with any actual complexity?
Climate change denial is associated with a ton of other ideological issues that cause a lot of people a lot of harm, today, in first world countries. Not all of them are as scientifically definitive, but they share a pattern of people expressing opinion as fact.
I feel like painful mitigation efforts are too grand to even think about. A lot of issues come down to leaving people alone to make their own decisions, with no effect on anyone else, and we can't even have that.
So for me the mitigations are less about dealing with climate change and more about hoping climate change deniers realize just how reprehensibly they've handled this entire thing. But I'm not optimistic about that.
Dollars.
People’s livelihoods depend on not understanding, so they don’t. We must incentivize understanding and propose a workable solution, which is basically a way to manufacture gasoline, diesel and natural gas out of literally thin air, because transitioning to electric everything is not happening due to natural resources constraints (thinking of mining primarily).
You can see this very well when compare American vs European climate change debate - in Europe is a very passive "not doing anything useful" while actually everybody gives at least lip service that something has to be done. This is because there was less opportunity to couple the debate into politics in an concentrated way. In the US the 2 party thing makes that very easy and the whole thing has staying power as an "issue" so it probably needs comparatively little or even no investment to keep alive.
In the EU I can only directly speak for Germany but to me it seemed like there were no direct attacks against the concept of climate change directly (although we get some splash damage from the US). most issues stem from single big companies or industry groups trying to bend things to their advantage. A good example that is maybe best known international is the "Clean Diesel" thing that VW so disastrously chose because it was short term cheaper than investments into EV technology. This is what in the end lead to the diesel scandal. There are better examples but they get too local to be as easy to explain.
Whereas exerting effort to antagonize a portion of the public despite knowing what the consequences of that are (they will dig in even harder) is something other than bad reasoning.
This planet is an exhibition of unrealized mass delusion, fuelled by mass specialized education, which further amplifies the phenomenon.
> Climate change is really basic chemistry...
It is also an extremely complex metaphysical phenomenon (watch out for that word "is", it is a doozy - also: it underlies most everything in our "reality").
Have you ever read any history of science, of times before we knew far less than we do now? How likely do you think it is that we have everything about causality figured out now, despite humanity (mostly) only studying the physical realm (while laughing at and calling names of those who do otherwise, some of whom actually recognize the folly in the current Streetlight Effect approach)?
> ...if we can't get people to agree on that how are we ever going to solve problems with any actual complexity?
Well, we always have the option of pulling the most powerful toolset in our arsenal out of storage: philosophy. Well, at least in theory we have this option (it is physically possible, but it may not be metaphysically possible).
> Climate change denial is associated with a ton of other ideological issues that cause a lot of people a lot of harm, today, in first world countries. Not all of them are as scientifically definitive, but they share a pattern of people expressing opinion as fact.
All ideologues state opinions as fact - take your comment for example. Even worse: doing so is a strongly enforced cultural norm - doing otherwise "is" "being pedantic".
> I feel like painful mitigation efforts are too grand to even think about.
The grandness is surely a problem, but our lack of capabilities in general thinking abilities is an even bigger problem in my view (a self-reinforcing problem, which makes it extremely possible to even realize).
> So for me the mitigations are less about dealing with climate change and more about hoping climate change deniers just how reprehensibly they've handled this entire thing.
Are you familiar with this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
To add to the controversy, I will add this gem: why during these conversations is the question of the degree to which our "democracy" is illusion[1] so rarely mentioned? It is (or at least could be) the primary coordinating force of humans, and human coordination is a pre-requisite for solving if we're going to address this problem - why is it that people are not able to care about such things? What is it about the system we live in that makes it not possible for people who are experts in systems analysis to analyze as a system?
Will we now stick with convention and see an exhibition of 2023 memetics in response to this "hot take" of mine?
[1] I would like to hope that we've moved past the binary question of is it an illusion by this point.
s/impossible/annoying/
> A lot of issues come down to leaving people alone to make their own decisions
Stupid people still have a sense of right and wrong. I would suggest you are hoping for things that many people find wrong while reframing the conversation to discredit them.
I guess denial is a tough shell, some people even manage to be world leaders even if they deny reality all the way. We are some funny irrational apes aren't we...
I don't mind that we're irrational apes. It's just that all of the other apes don't go around telling each other how rational they are and demanding that we keep providing proof over and over.
Family one is calm and logical. Has a good idea of what’s going on but up until the very end doesn’t believe it could be that.
Family two is a couple where the wife is someone who’s natural demeanor is “People Suck” and the husband is a professor (re: intelligent) but still entirely uninformed about the world, having resigned any sense of responsibility to anything but his family
The third is a conservative “prepper” type, who is similar to family one but believes everything is the work of outside forces who “hate the US” to be at fault, missing many signs of dysfunctional society around them (while being aware of a few others)
Why am I bringing this up? Because my thesis is that the middle familty represents the average American mindset, which is truly only concerned with their immediate problems and thoughts at the end of the day and is incapable of reasoning about the importance of solving major problems facing society. The other two families seek to sway as many people from this average bloc as much as possible to their causes, but both also have a fatal flaw: they’re unable to believe that it’s our own society that is at fault, either entirely or until it’s too late, and the kind of honest reflection it takes to have that very real conversation with ourselves and the country as a whole.
That, in essence, is what I think is the root of the problem
The reality is worse than this. Most people that strongly believe in climate change are also ignorant of basic chemistry, promulgating solutions that betray their lack of understanding of e.g. the laws of thermodynamics. On top of this, most people's understanding of chemistry is at the naive level of basic lab chemistry. When you need to scale chemistry, especially at planetary scales, it plays by a completely different set of rules and we largely pretend these rules don't exist because 1) they are too complex for most people to understand and 2) they are inconvenient for those selling easy solutions.
I am a climate doomer of sorts, having working on climate off and on for decades, but not because the problem cannot be mitigated in theory. Currently, both "sides" are delusional about the science and economics of regulating the climate. The public discourse is almost entirely soundbites from people disinterested in the science while trying to smuggle in unrelated ideological agendas, regardless of the side they claim to represent.
As long as scientifically literate perspectives are considered a fringe take, progress on this matter will be limited and in many cases coincidental. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
Says who? We've been parroting the opposite message ("there's still time! go solar! electric cars!") is CLEARLY not working.
I'm a climate change doomer, in that I'm certain our children will live in a very different world than us, and there's a real (10%+?) chance of total environmental collapse in our lifetimes. The positive feedback loops are inescapable.
The science is the science...who are we to lie to people hoping that the lie somehow inspires mass coordinated change?
I suppose I could be described as a doomer too, but I think this understates the issue. Even if we got carbon emissions to zero today, we're facing a very real chance of imminent ecological collapse in our lifetimes. Climate change is just the tip of the iceberg.
To all appearances, (post)industrial civilization is not sustainable, whether or not you use fossil fuels.
Implying we alreayd know everything we need to know, which is patently untrue. People who discuss science as a settled matter should be treated with suspicion.
Namely:
- we know a mechanism that causes global warming, which is empirically proven and theoretically backed.
- multiple scenarios of positive feedback loops that result in rapid warming
- very few ideas even for positive feedback loops that result in cooling
- little to no demonstrated political will to act decisively.
Seems to me like we know a lot!
“Post pandemic” (it’s not over for many people, but officially the govt considered it over) was the best time to enforce that and they simply didn’t.
If the US had spearheaded less and no commuting for the majority of American workers, this would’ve set a trend worldwide.
Heck, we can even make it a required part of our trade deals.
We need both. We need both a hopeful view of the future, and one that warns us what will happen if we don’t take action.
A lot of the doom visions are going to come true even if we do take aggressive action today. But remember, bad can always be worse.
The optimist designs the airplane, and the pessimist designs the parachute.
If we didn't downplay "the doom" for years now (and your framing is exactly kind of that), we maybe wouldn't be so tight in running out of time and getting into more and more risky situation.
We collectively didn't. We did quite the opposite by giving airtime to any quack predicting the end of the world, so much so that encountering "end of the world people" is a common trope in American sitcoms.
(Edit: Hell, watch a documentary from the late '70s on "Global Cooling" to see what I mean. The episode of "In Search Of…" narrated by Leonard Nimoy is my suggestion.)
If the "The End Is Nigh!" people hasn't ever existed, then I think the warnings over the past 4+ decades would have been taken far more seriously.
As it is now, most are afraid of lending an ear to a boy crying "Wolf!". It sucks.
It is something similar to the Red Queen Race, we should be running as fast as we can to keep things as they are and even faster to improve. But so far we are still accelerating into the wrong direction. And what we are doing is what may turn something into a practical impossibility rather than what is theoretically possible.
For decades the primary point of discussion with regards to climate change is "the right way to talk about it." And as far as I can tell, that's only ever shot us in the foot. Too optimistic, and people don't act because they think it's not that bad or that someone else will deal with it; too pessimistic, and everyone will apparently just shut down and not do anything about it because why bother.
Call me crazy but perhaps we should stop thinking about it this way and simply deal with the science and the facts as head-on as possible, and that includes not calling out accurate representations of where we're at and where we're going as "counterproductive."
A negligible (both in terms of numbers and wealth) part of the world population feel this way. I guess most people actually still barely think about these things while they continue to live their lives as they come. In a lot of counties the discussion is still barely taking place.
There also seems to be no harm in drinking just another pint - until the the next morning, when you feel the hangover.
"Global Warming doesn't exist"
"Sure it exists, but humans are not responsible"
"Well sure, it's human made, but we can't do anything about it now"
1. CO2 is not actually increasing.
2. Even if it is, the increase has no impact on the climate since there is no convincing evidence of warming.
3. Even if there is warming, it is due to natural causes.
4. Even if the warming cannot be explained by natural causes, the human impact is small, and the impact of continued greenhouse gas emissions will be minor.
5. Even if the current and future projected human effects on Earth's climate are not negligible, the changes are generally going to be good for us.
6. Whether or not the changes are going to be good for us, humans are very adept at adapting to changes; besides, it's too late to do anything about it, and/or a technological fix is bound to come along when we really need it.
I believe you made a typo here. Shouldn't it be "landmine" instead of "landline"?
If nothing serious is done (as we are doing at present) and the warming becomes a runaway, it will progress until the causes have dissipated (e.g. we are no longer pumping GHG into the atmosphere and the natural sources of these have been exhausted or at least come into some kind of equilibrium.)
I'm too old to be able to witness that but I think our race as a whole is likely to do so.
It’s very beneficial to the status quo if everyone gives up hope.
This current trend of finding any kind of cynical counter argument against a phenomenon whose evidences keep piling up is something that comes already from the 00's. It's the same thing with vaccines, it's the same thing with creationism and to a smaller extent it was the same thing with the flat earth theory.
One side of the "debate" is not really interested in debating anything. They are only interested in propagating outrageous and colorful conspiracy theories that in their minds piss off people who disagree with them politically.
When the planet goes down to drain in 20, 30 years these same people either will be dead or will come up with some kind of excuse saying that in spite of the climate catastrophe all that was needed to save the planet from a global green dictatorship.
Isn't that the most ridiculous possible approach to solving the climate issue?
Presumably people making climate models must keep up on the latest info on how much each element contributes, with some of them being less warming than predicted. Are there places that collect that information? Is there any way to see the aggregate change in overall understanding?
But this isn't all that satisfying a conclusion for either the doom and gloom crowd or the optimistic crowd :)
> ...analysed[sic] data on ship emissions as a model system for quantifying the climatic effect of human aerosol emissions in general.
This analysis could produce a whole set of factors and a relatively up-to-date numerical characterization of their impact. Some will be higher, but some may be lower (which also matters for planning!). Instead we get a report on a single factor that's most alarming.
Because between losing reflective ice, and gases released in thawing permafrost soil, and now this...
...is there anything that is actually helping, by any chance? Because this news is just so depressing and scary.
https://x.com/hankgreen/status/1687535525169930241?s=20
But this might actually be bad news, because if we ever stop something like this, it could cause temperatures to rise extremely rapidly.
Relying on it as it is at a specific snapshot in time would require a very precarious balance and is probably not worth trying to achieve, there are better geoengineering hopefuls.
People most definitely are advocating that...
An increase in plant growth could be one, but methane is sooooo potent that we're kind of screwed--you can pump an arbitrary amount of methane into the air but foliage is pretty limited in area.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-00555-5#:~:text=I....
>the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report states "It is very unlikely that gas clathrates (mostly methane) in deeper terrestrial permafrost and subsea clathrates will lead to a detectable departure from the emissions trajectory during this century".
The point is 8b people live on earth! You can't build that many biosomes.
Edit: I forgot about radiation, silly me. I also enjoy having that blocked by earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, again, some people might actually enjoy that and find that to be a business opportunity or whatever.
You might be correct that we won't change the climate on earth so much we couldn't adapt somehow, there's some reason to believe that. But attainable extraterrestrial colonization isn't one of them and probably won't be in our lifetimes.
Also, it's far from guaranteed that we won't change the climate on earth so much it disrupts processes we rely on and possibly decimates the current population from production/supply issues.
There are continually-occupied bases in Antarctica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%E2%80%93Scott_South_P...) but they don't perform any function besides scientific inquiry. NASA has sent people to the moon and back multiple times with 1960s technology, multiple independent entities have sent cargo to the moon, and there have been people living in orbit on the ISS for a while now. We even have oil rigs out in the middle of the ocean.
Nobody lives in any of these places permanently but as far as I know there's no technical reason they can't. It sure seems like if humans set their mind to it there could absolutely be bases or even cities on the moon (I don't know about Mars) with roughly current technology. The reason it isn't happening is that there is no real incentive compared to the costs required. That's why in lots of science fiction the moon has fuel for fusion or something. We know that we probably can colonize the moon, but it's an easy shorthand to explain why we'd bother.
Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies exist, and probably will as long as the climates sustaining them last and the rest of humanity leaves the ranges involved alone. That's probably a good floor for consideration.
Every other society else exists on a scale of autarky to interdependence but given that globalization is fairly recent it seems fairly clear a lot of nation-state scale and maybe smaller societies probably could do agriculture + craft and maybe even industry well enough to be self-sustaining, if perhaps less efficiently or wealthily (Amish / Mennonite communities seem like they'd have a good shot).
Industrialization and interdependence are definitely associated, but we know we can get there from a much more independent place if given environments like those humanity has had (so far) to launch from.
Without a sufficiently friendly environment, we're talking about a different class of dependence (arguably complete). There are harsh environments on earth that demonstrate this, and every extraterrestrial destination available to us makes those harsh earthly environments look like easy mode.
They walk around, outside, with heavy coats, and don't die after 10 minutes. There are PBS videos on YT about how they manage the sewage and garbage in Antarctica, and you can see the guys walking around outside, hanging out.
> NASA has sent people to the moon and back multiple times with 1960s technology
NASA has sent people to the moon, who walked, briefly, while in suits to keep them alive on a minute-to-minute basis. If a single thing went wrong they would die. Several folks almost died -- they made a movie about that -- and some actually died (e.g. Challenger, Soviet losses, etc.).
> multiple independent entities have sent cargo to the moon
in trivial quantities, and where, in most cases, it stayed there.
> and there have been people living in orbit on the ISS for a while now
If by people you mean < 12 humans at a time, and at what is an insanely high expense compared to keeping someone alive in the Arctic or Antarctic. And most of them have major or permanent changes to their bodies, like vision, loss of bone density, or the myriad issues that the guy -- the one (1) guy, who did it once -- who stayed up for a year. An explanation of those health issues: https://time.com/5568522/kelly-twins-year-in-space/ There is no reason to think we could successfully have kids, mature to adulthood, and function as a human in less than Earth's gravity -- and given the impact of micro-grav on adults it's not crazy to think it would be a big problem.
These are exceptional, and incredibly expensive one-offs. Saying we can live on the Moon or Mars based off of that is like saying most humans can be Olympic runners because someone did a sub-2 hour marathon, one time.
> but as far as I know there's no technical reason they can't
We can't even keep a dozen people alive in the Biodome, and if they didn't open it chances are the ecology would have collapsed or they would have run out of O2 due to the concrete messing with the CO2 & O2 ratios. And when something went wrong they just walked out -- and that ain't happening on the Moon or Mars. At least on the Moon you're a "short" flight away -- not months of solid burn away.
0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13442?af=R
If I understand correctly they are saying that non renewable resources, specifically oil, will soon run out, leading to a collapse in industrial output which in turn leads to a loss of agricultural efficiency and thus famine.
This seems like complete nonsense? You can make a model say literally anything...
‘Oil will soon run out’ is questionable only in the ‘soon’ part and the rest follows pretty easily: there is no modern farming without oil. Source: ask a farmer, or read some Wikipedia.
One could hope for a transition to electric farming equipment and supply chains but you won’t be able to create artificial fertilizers without natural gas at scale.
If any of this was true you'd see commodity prices spiking across the board. And even if that happened, agriculture would be the last thing affected, since demand for food is completely inelastic.
World oil consumption is not growing exponentially and in many advanced economies is decreasing.
2) 1%/year growth is most definitely exponential and we're not talking about 'many advanced economies' but the total world consumption, 'many advanced economies' are in a terrible demographic situation but the world added a billion people in the past couple decades
Reminder: The original comment that I reacted to was this: "Recent recalibration of the limits of growth model has shown that collapse of industrial civilization is imminent".
I have pointed out how the paper does not support this conclusion and would appreciate specific pointers to improve my reasoning.
(Besides, "don't look at this part" is one hell of a defense of a paper... Again, you can't show dynamics with a clear physical time axis and then claim that you don't actually mean it.)
2) It's not growing exponentially. Exponential growth, even at 1%, would be plainly visible in any long term plot. Take this one for example, but feel free to find you own:
https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-images/rrapier/files/2018/0...
World consumption is what I was referring to.
The reference to advanced economies is because it is specifically advanced economies that have the ability to increasingly decouple their growth from energy consumption; the fact that oil consumption is not increasing there anymore is therefore significant.
Also, the model doesn't take account technological progress or mining resources from solar system etc. It's a very simple model with many faulty assumptions.
Technological progress is not a given or inevitability. There are real physical and material constraints affecting technological development. You can't simply handwave future problems away because "future technological development." For example, it seems very likely that extraterrestrial mining operations will never be technically and economically feasible. We have to disconnect what decades of scifi have taught us about the future from reality. In sixty years of human space travel, we've made very little progress and there's not much reason to hope for much more.
> one of which is that population keeps growing exponentially. Population is already collapsing, so the whole model goes to trash bin with that in mind.
It's true that exponential population growth is very obviously unsustainable. Unfortunately, the population collapse is another symptom of our problems that will ultimately lead to a systems collapse and likely ecological collapse. People are animals, however much we want to deny it. When animals stop breeding, it's because something is wrong. TFR is collapsing because of poisoned social environments, not because enlightened rational humanity saw the perils of exponential growth and took action. This in turn means that increasing proportions of our economic surpluses will be dedicated to attempted containment and control of our social problems, rather than technological development.
That all said, to paraphrase Adam Smith, there's a lot of ruin in a nation. Technology, mass surveillance, and huge economic surpluses have permitted and will permit unprecedented levels of social control that may stave off a systems collapse for longer than anyone expects, even if the resulting society is dystopian by our former standards. And our understanding of our ecological system is miniscule: we can see where doing tremendous amounts of damage at almost every known point (even ignoring global warming), but it's hard to say what it takes to really send us down the drain. It will probably happen slowly, then all at once.
And for reference, it was less than sixty years between the first airplane and the first human space flight.
White rhino population is collapsing. Human population is currently at 8.1B and growing 1.1% a year.
in a nutshell human world population growth overall is due to growing life expectancy, not childbirth, the number of children per women goes down because education goes up and extreme poverty ends.
Hans Rosling has a very entertaining way of conveying this.
a 1.1% growth y/y easily reads as exponential growth, and that, like collapse is a myth.
I feel like what I need in order to really internalize something like this is a game based on the model, where I can play with different variables and see how things play out over time. Otherwise it's just a bunch of figures and conclusions that I am unable to build any intuitive connection to.
The original "Limits to Growth" made predictions.
Almost none of them came true.
If you disagree, please quote a prediction from the original "Limits to Growth" and tell me what page it was on.
As Dr. Robert Zubrin says in "Merchants of Despair," a scientists first duty is to see if his hypothesis agrees with the facts.
Any other answer is trolling.
> As described in the review section, the debate around the actuality of the LtG is still ongoing.
translating: "the LtG is pure fantasy, but deserves to be retold in the manner of a lie repeated".
"" n 2020, an analysis by Gaya Herrington, then Director of Sustainability Services of KPMG US,[52] was published in Yale University's Journal of Industrial Ecology.[53] The study assessed whether, given key data known in 2020 about factors important for the "Limits to Growth" report, the original report's conclusions are supported. In particular, the 2020 study examined updated quantitative information about ten factors, namely population, fertility rates, mortality rates, industrial output, food production, services, non-renewable resources, persistent pollution, human welfare, and ecological footprint, and concluded that the "Limits to Growth" prediction is essentially correct in that continued economic growth is unsustainable under a "business as usual" model.[53] The study found that current empirical data is broadly consistent with the 1972 projections and that if major changes to the consumption of resources are not undertaken, economic growth will peak and then rapidly decline by around 2040.[54][55]
In 2023, the parameters of the World3 model were recalibrated using empirical data up to 2022. [56] This improved parameter set results in a World3 simulation that shows the same overshoot and collapse mode in the coming decade as the original business-as-usual scenario of the Limits to Growth standard run. The main effect of the recalibration update is to raise the peaks of most variables and move them a few years into the future. ""
Buried beneath the oceans surrounding continents is a naturally occurring frozen form of methane and water.
Sometimes dubbed “fire-ice” as you can literally set light to it, marine methane hydrate can melt as the climate warms, uncontrollably releasing methane – a potent greenhouse gas – into the ocean and possibly the atmosphere.
It's somewhat worse than that in practice, studies indicate that when methane hydrates melt and are released at the land|ocean edges where the bottom waters have warmed ... more methane ice hydrates slowly migrate under pressure to the melting zone, replacing lost methane ice hydrates and then melting itself.
Long-distance migration and venting of methane from the base of the hydrate stability zone
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01333-w
Some of the methane containment zone warming enough to melt and release methane is akin to taking the cap off the toothpaste when the tube is under pressure.
> Marine methane hydrate is an ice-like substance that is stable in sediment around marine continental margins where water depths are greater than ~450–700 m.
All the water below 200 m depth is virtually at the same temperature of about 4 degrees Celsius [2]. So, the methane hydrate is well below the surface layer that gets heated by the sun and affected by the climate change.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1038/npg.els.0003...
[2]https://rwu.pressbooks.pub/webboceanography/chapter/6-2-temp...
Such as depths of 200m where the pressure is less and tempreture greater?
Good.
You read onwards, I trust ...
The potential for methane from hydrate in deeper water to reach the atmosphere was considered negligible.
Increases in bottom-water temperature at the landward limit of marine hydrate around continental margins, where vulnerable hydrate exists at or below the seabed, cause methane to vent into the ocean.
The punchline on the article I linked that you quoted is:
We demonstrate that, under suitable circumstances, some of the 96.5% of methane bound in deeper water distal hydrates can reach the seafloor and vent into the ocean beyond the landward limit of marine hydrate.
This reservoir should therefore be considered for estimating climate change-induced methane release during a warming world.
There are multiple reasons for this to happen, one in particular that you overlooked is:
But frozen methane in the deep ocean may vulnerable after all. In oceans and seas where the water is deeper than around 450 metres to 700 metres are layer upon layer of sediment that contains the hydrate.
And some of it is deeply buried and warmed geothermally by the Earth so, despite being hundreds of metres below the seafloor, it is right at the point of instability.
So we're talking a geological process, on a geological timescale, on one hand.
On the other hand, I've always heard that water is densest at 4C, which is probably the temperature at the bottom of any ocean, regardless of the warmth of surface water (which is what has been in the news).
So, what's up with the headline? I read the whole piece, and it still doesn't gibe.
If we return to a Cretaceous period temperatures, can we and our crops survive?
I've read that if we wind up with a navigable north sea and arable north, that the earth would be net better for some (eg. Russia) despite the fact that other climates will suffer. (Some surmise that Russia could be catapulted back into superpower status.)
Could these runaway heating systems go beyond sustainable and turn earth into Venus?
It is clear that the majority of the humans live in the regions that are good now and much fewer live in the bad regions.
When the quality of the regions will change, this will be an undesirable change for much more humans than those for which the change will be favorable.
The owners of the regions that will become good are unlikely to welcome those from the regions that become bad to relocate there.
Therefore it would certainly be much better if the changes were prevented, instead of hoping to be among the few who could benefit from them.
I am old enough to remember the cold and snowy winters that were normal in the past, where I live. For now, it is convenient for me that more than a decade has passed since the last time when I have used my winter clothes and my winter boots, but it is extremely scary to have witnessed such a climate change in much less than a human lifetime, without knowing where it would lead eventually.
But this would come with monumental challenges, the kinds that have caused previous civilizations to collapse. Billions of people live in regions that will reach hostile temperatures or that will have population centers destroyed by sea level rise. Imagine a large portion of them moving North and South to more hospitable climates. Russia might have won the lottery in terms of future-proof land, but trying to control migration across its Southern border would be a near impossible challenge. Meanwhile the EU has a ... complicated relationship with border control right now, and will be faced with a lot worse.
Too optimistic. The borders will become the lines in people's heads where people say "This is our territory, we own the food and water here, we don't have enough, so you stay out and here are the bullets to help us keep you out.".
And the other side will say "We're dying of hunger and thirst, we will ignore the lines, and here are the bullets to help us.".
Fun fact, oil wells rarely recover more than a third of the oil present in the rock, so this methane hydrate stuff has way more carbon than the oil and gas we will be able to produce.
Like that lake in a volcanic lake in Africa, where the trapped gases erupted and smothered several villages, suffocating them.
> In 2018, a perspective piece devoted to tipping points in the climate system suggested that the climate change contribution from methane hydrates would be "negligible" by the end of the century, but could amount to 0.4–0.5 °C (0.72–0.90 °F) on the millennial timescales.[6] In 2021, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report no longer included methane hydrates in the list of potential tipping points, and says that "it is very unlikely that CH4 emissions from clathrates will substantially warm the climate system over the next few centuries."[7] The report had also linked terrestrial hydrate deposites to gas emission craters discovered in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, Russia beginning in July 2014,[133] but noted that since terrestrial gas hydrates predominantly from at a depth below 200 metres, a substantial response within the next few centuries can be ruled out.[7] Likewise, a 2022 assessment of tipping points described methane hydrates as a "threshold-free feedback" rather than a tipping point.[134][135]
one of the reasons for this is that below 200 meters, the methane apparently goes into the ocean rather than the atmosphere. what happens to it there? i'm unclear on that. maybe it gets oxidized? by marine life? that seems like the only way it could 'cause the oceans to become more acidic', as davies says; methane isn't acidic!
the end of davies' article summarizes the results as follows:
> So during a warming world the volume of hydrate that will be vulnerable to leaking methane is more significant than previously thought.
> The positive outlook is that there are many natural barriers to this methane. But be warned, we expect that in some places on earth, as we warm the planet, methane from the deep will escape into our oceans.
it would be nice to have some clue in the 'conversation' article about whether the timescale he's talking about is months, years, centuries, millennia, tens of millennia, hundreds of millennia, millions of years, or what, but presumably if he disagreed with the ipcc's sixth assessment report that it would be at least millennia, he would have said so
has anyone read the nature geoscience paper?
Ot we can let it pollute our atmosphere.
In my personal experience, n=1, it appears that most publicly traded corporations are concerned with the future as far out as 4 financial quarters, maximum.
Executive compensation is tied to stock price, so that is the depth of focus.
I have only had one gig at a public company, and it put me off of at working at another. Any longer term planning was derailed by a VP coming into a meeting, spewing shortsighted nonsense, and running off to the next thing.
edit: There are notable exceptions to this short term thinking, but those appear to be corps where a founder was still at the helm. ex: NVIDIA, Tesla.
That those economic predictions are based on assumptions with a high degree of hand waving doesn’t matter, they want to believe.