Want something to Really Really worry about?

[Gabi Hayes]

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725124.500

size of France/Germany ....methane is way way way more of a greenhouse threat than CO2

if this comes true, nothing else is going to mean squat

can you say "Venus?"

[Gabi Hayes]

1. from the article

''Larry Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface worldwide.

His colleague Karen Frey says if the bogs dry out as they warm, the methane will oxidise and escape into the air as carbon dioxide. But if the bogs remain wet, as is the case in western Siberia today, then the methane will be released straight into the atmosphere. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.''

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Scary, eh?

[wtbymark]

3. we should be capturing it as a fuel source

[CrispyQ]

5. Is that possible? --eom

[Gabi Hayes]

6. pretty sure it would be too diffuse, like cow farts

didn't read the article entirely, but the irony is that, while peat bogs are among the most efficient CO2 sinks, once they get torn up, well, you read about the methane underneath, and what it does

[SteppingRazor]

4. Can't we just bomb it?

I mean, let's just blow up a bomb in the middle of the gas cloud. That'd work right? (I'm trying to think like Bush. You'll have to pardon me.)

[Gabi Hayes]

7. makes sense....peat, PETA.....terrorists, right?

BOMB em all, I tells ya!

[Nightjock]

8. That gas

hates us for our freedoms....

[pitohui]

9. we already had a pretty long discussion of this

it was in lbn a few days back, try searching for "tipping point" in the title

apparently it's been going on for 3, 4 yrs so it's game over for humanity by end of the century

[Gabi Hayes]

10. thx....I heard it on radio a few days ago, too.

I'm reading a book by Kim Stanley Robinson...40 Signs of Rain, that deals w/global warming.....sort of a scientifically plausible Day After Tomorrow

well worth a reade

KSR is VERY with it as far as economics, reprehensibility of current regime, etc

[villager]

12. good book -- read it myself last year....

I think it's part of a trilogy...

[Gabi Hayes]

16. really? have to check that out.....I've read parts of his Mars

trilogy

Icehenge

Antarctica

all very good reads, and his politics are right here....he should become a DU member. he'd be very much at home

just checked...it's the first of a trilogy

that's why some of the reviews were less than glowing: nothing much happens so far. I'm only 2 thirds of the way through, and I guess the feek won't hit the fan til at least the next book

nonetheless, it's absorbing....going to have a sit down with it right now.

[WCGreen]

11. Oh great....

Does this mean the French will smell worse........

:sarcasm:

[Karenina]

13. Game Over

Back in the 50's when we had our "window of opportunity" to deal with these issues, I integrated the school in our area. My parents both had advanced degrees and my daddy (a neuropsychiatrist) had his OWN ideas about what a thorough education meant. I had serious problems with my 5th grade teacher.(My daddy died before I was in her class). When we studied nuclear energy I INSISTED that it should be OFF THE TABLE as we had no means to dispose of the waste. When we did "duck and cover" drills, I was reprimanded for explaining to my peers that hiding under a desk or crouching in the halls was REEEEDICULOSSS! Then we studied the planets and I voiced my view that SOMEBODY may well have GOOFED on Venus! She HATED having this little self-assured pickaninny in her class and designated me the "conspiracy theorist" for my questions...

To this day I believe there WERE sentient beings on Venus and SOMEBODY fucked the shit up. :evilgrin:

[Gabi Hayes]

15. interesting story....have you thought about a memoir?

I can relate to much of that, except I was clueless. took a long time to wise up

dunno about Venus/sentience, though I'd like to believe there was intelligent life somewhere in the universe (deliberate non-mention of earth)

it's always been ultra volcanic, so I don't know what sort of life could have taken hold, though, given its hellish atmosphere, maybe that's where Rove, etal's ancestors originated....

[autorank]

14. Where's Corporate Media -- they're too busy in Aruba

Out frivolous society which tolerates the constant drum beat of stupidity on the news night after night will pay in spades. Unfortunately, everyone else will pay also.

This is very serious, as is the glacier that broke off a few days ago, barely covered.

What idiots we have running our corporate news sources.

If this doesn't doom us then we have the slightly longer path of China and India industrializing quickly and doing the same thing with cars, refrigerators, and other pollutants. Go globalism!

[Gabi Hayes]

17. zackly, and funny you should mention the glacier, as the book

I mentioned has a section in which one of the huge ice shelves in Antarctica breaks off, and only makes it to like page 25 in the Washinton Post

how many times does one have to repeat it: It's the MEDIA, stupid!

Clinton was right about the economy in 92, but, as soon as he took over, it became the media. what little tiny bit of progressive spirit WJC had in mind was quashed IMMEDIATELY, upon his display of effrontery in tackling the health "care" establishment

almost the exact same thing happened to Carter when he took on big oil and bit auto as part of his centerpiece reform program

any idea where we'd be today if CAFE standards had increased according to his plan? I can tell you where we WOULDN'T be: Iraq.

[MadHound]

18. Well, there might be some hope

According to some of the latest models on global climate change, it isn't global warming that we're going to have to really worry about, but another Ice Age. The theory goes something like this.

The Gulf Stream Current is the driving force in keeping Europe warm. And what drives the GSC is salt, specifically the fact that the saltier water picked up in the Caribbean flows northward, cools and due to its density, sinks and flows back along the bottom of the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and starts the process all over again. A conveyor belt if you will.

Now then, with temperatures warming, fresh water is melting out of the Artic and the Greenland ice sheet. It is already diluting the GSC, making it less salty. Fresh water doesn't sink, the conveyor belt doesn't work anymore, and the Gulf Stream stops, dead. And then the Ice Age starts.

This has been researched extensively in the past ten years, and judging by ice core records, a new Ice Age can begin literall within a few years. Nobody knows what the salinity tipping point is where the GSC will stop, but we are getting closer, as the latest samples show that the Gulf Stream is becoming increasing more fresh water.

Thus, we may be on our way to an Ice Age, but if that happens, these bogs will freeze back over, and we won't have to worry about methane.

Gee, what a choice:eyes: Freeze to death, or die from an excess of bad gas.