If that were the case, though, we likely would have hit that turning point in the past. The Earth's temperature has been significantly warmer in recent memory, and if it were, we'd have already fallen past that turning point.
This isn't to say that there aren't currently positive feedback mechanism, nor that they're not big positive feedbacks, nor even that we won't stumble upon new positive feedbacks as we hit temperatures outside our historical memory. However, it's unlikely we'll ever hit a point where a unit of carbon causes a discontinuous change in average global temperatures.
TLDR: "Something melted, therefore global warming is the cause and mass extinction is the inevitable result" is such absurd logic its not worth wasting time debating it.
Have you ever seen fossilized sea creatures buried in rocks thousands of feet above and thousands of miles away from the sea? The planet has undergone massive climate and geological upheavals, and mass extinction events.
Human life is not really so important. Wether or not even we survive as a species is like a drop in the bucket of nothingness. Remenber there were fire-making, tool-making, upright walking species besides us that survived long enough to leave traces of their civilization.
No body owed them anything, survival least of all, and as a result they perished.
The Holocene climatic optimum, on the other hand, was something like ten thousand years ago, and it explored temperatures that we're not close to (yet). If there were a life-ending loaded clathrate gun out there, the Earth would have hit it and triggered it then, not when we're experiencing relatively cooler temperatures now or in the near future. Unless it somehow got loaded in the ten thousand years since then, but no one thinks that.
ETA: To be clear, I'm not saying that climate change is fake, or that it's harmless because temperatures have been higher in the past. Those are orthogonal arguments to this (and they're bad arguments). This is just a statement about whether we're going to accidentally shock the globe into a radically different climate by triggering a methane clathrate gun.
Just in this one picture one can see hundreds of such craters:
http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/crater-...
Trying to link the phenomenon to the post Industrial Age 'Global Warming' I call that just another lie.
If it was that common, the scientists and/or the people would know about it. What we're talking about here is very rare.
https://www.google.fi/maps/place/Poluostrov+Yamal,+Jamalo-Ne...
If you somehow would get a hole in the ground, it does not sound that far fetched to me it would get filled with water over time.
And of course other people have noticed this too. It is just, that many times the most vocal ones are the people who have a belief system/agenda to drive. How things really are, is not a matter of an opinion.
> Russian scientists have now spotted a total of seven craters, five of which are in the Yamal Peninsula. Two of those holes have since turned into lakes.
Could we harness these mechanisms to keep the earth compatible with human habitation?
As I recall, there is a group of creatures that may did the first big wave of carbon fixation at the beginning of life, binding CO2 and releasing the important O2 that enabled the appearance of complex life forms, but I can't remember it's name.
You'd expect to see this effect most prominently in continental rain shadow areas, particularly at altitude.
Frankly, the outcome is unknowable, there are too many variables, both known and unknown. The only element which does seem inevitable is that there will be major changes to human civilisation.
Oh - one thought I did have was blanketing the Arctic in artificial icebergs - just big white floating plastic platforms, millions of them.
It won't, methane doesn't "want" to mix with water anyway, at normal pressures and temperatures any dissolved methane will start to bubble out and float away.
> Can we filter it out?
It leaves on its own. Most of the time when you're concerned about methane in the water, it's because the water is being pumped up from underground where they were trapped together. The main risk there is explosions or fires if your equipment doesn't bleed off the methane safely.
> I imagine even if we could, other animals will still go extinct, which would disrupt our food chain.
Whoah, no, no no... you're thinking of something very different from methane, like perhaps heavy-metal contamination.
Methane isn't toxic unless there's a ridiculous amount pumped into a room. [Corrected: Odorless] Most animals generate some methane when digesting things.
TLDR: Nope, the issues with methane are going to be the climate and ozone-layer, not water-supplies.
Methane traps up to 100x more heat in the atmosphere than an equivalent amount of CO2 (over a 5 year period) and 72x more heat over a 20 year period
Source: http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/methane-vs-ca...
For drinking water aeration is probably sufficient to deal with methane content (but I don't think it's necessary very often).
Methane derivatives on the other-hand are known to be dangerous and can form as by products of disinfection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trihalomethane.
Yet we can tell they don't take it seriously, because they are adamantly opposed to nuclear power, which would defang coal, a major contributor to climate change.
One of the reasons otherwise reasonable people don't take AGW seriously is this kind of disconnect, in which the people who make the most noise about it are so clearly, obviously and transparently inconsistent between what they say they believe ("AGW runs a serious risk of creating civilization-ending events") and what they actually believe ("Global industrial capitalism is the root of all evil").
This is unfortunate, because AGW is a real problem, and should be addressed aggressively by both technological (nuclear, solar, etc) and political (carbon tax) means. But neither will happen until people start actually taking it seriously, instead of simply using it as a stick to beat some political hobby horse.
Denialists are little better, of course, but I honestly think it would be possible to get them mostly on side--and I have had some success in doing so--by sincere and consistent arguments that separate the science from the rabidly anti-capitalist, anti-industrial proposals for solution.
As to the methane issue, there are a number of scientists who think about it quite a bit -- and probably don't sleep much as a result. The problem is that two decades of intense lobbying and industry pressure have taught mainstream scientists to be incredibly conservative about their predictions. If the IPCC started including methane releases in their predictions, they'd be quickly torn to pieces for promoting speculative theories.
As for the nuclear stuff: if you're just looking for an excuse to not to care about climate change -- then go ahead and don't care about it! You're well aware that the main policy proposal on the table is a carbon tax of some sort and that such a policy would benefit both renewables and nuclear -- basically any technology that doesn't use the atmosphere as a waste dump.