Signage for the new UN environmental agency under the direction of someone known only as “The Chief” to deal with the polar methane “issue”.
It appears — according to Canada’s Globe and Mail that the Arctic has a huge gas problem. A lot of methane is stored under there and it’s leaking out. Scientists thought cow farts were contributing to global warming, global cooling, climate change. They ain’t seen nothing yet. Gaia’s gonna drop a deuce and she’s got to make room I guess. It’s a tad unseemly for Mother Earth to do this, but there’s more room outside than in. Right? Maybe we are living in The Matrix and Zion is underneath the north pole producing all these greenhouse gasses after all. Either that or we can just admire all the pretty bubbles and giggle-snort at the bad smell.
From the story:
The consequence of all that seeping methane has become one of the biggest questions in climate science.
But one thing is certain: The fact it hasn’t been factored into previous global warming predictions means forecasts even as recent as the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change are too conservative.
“[Methane] was not considered in any of the predictions at all,” says Andrew Weaver, a Canadian researcher and one of the IPCC authors.
Methane, a carbon compound, is stored in organic material frozen into permafrost and in vast underwater deposits called hydrates — a strange, slushy blend of methane and water.
Estimates of how much is out there are vague. There could be anywhere between 500 to 10,000 gigatonnes of carbon in the hydrates and another 7.5 to 400 gigatonnes in the permafrost.
But some say there’s enough carbon in underground methane — including large deposits under tundra lakes in the Mackenzie Delta and along Canada’s Beaufort Sea coast — to equal the carbon from all the Earth’s remaining deposits of oil, coal and natural gas combined. Last week, a World Wildlife Fund report called methane the globe’s single biggest climate threat.
Methane escapes from underground into the atmosphere as the earth around it warms up. Some of that warming is from recent climate change but some of the deepest warming is in response to events that happened up to 12,000 years ago.
“Is our recent warming affecting it more or less?” asks Mr. Dallimore. “That’s a very reasonable question to ask.”
Scientists also don’t know how much of the methane is coming from deep deposits and how much is from relatively shallow beds.
“There’s a building international awareness that this is a gap in our knowledge that should be addressed,” says Mr. Dallimore, who has recently returned from his research season in the Mackenzie Delta of the Northwest Territories. “The challenge is to quantify what portion of that large reservoir of methane is presently stable or not.”
In other words… since the old reasons for creating hysteria no longer work — we have a new cause for hysteria. The Farting Arctic is comin’ to get us! Rich or Stosh?
h/t: Scott M.
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And you thought Germans had a lot of gas…
I’ve been onto this for years, now. There are a lot of articles that have come out saying that there’s a lot of undersea volcanic activity and that 80% of the Earth’s volcanoes are in the ocean. A few years ago, a History Channel documentary on The Bermuda Triangle showed that there are millions of vents in the Gulf Stream spewing methane, and that large bubbles of methane rising and breaking on the surface could stop a plane’s engine, and snap long ships in half, because that bubble grows in size as it rises. So there’s the whole Triangle explanation. There are undersea volcanoes off the coast of Greenland and Antarctica where they say the glaciers are receding. That’s most likely why they are receding at the shores, but in both places the glaciers are growing thicker vertically.
And yet Al Gore is allowed to keep breaking wind with his lies.
We must control the earth and save it from itself.
Ok, so here’s my theory: Christianity has a tendency to stress the “Peace and Love” aspects of God, and ignore the more frightening “Wrath and Judgement” aspects of God, right? So theoreticaly generations of people grew up assuming that God is some nanny who just tucks kids in at night, never understanding the other stuff. Then the baby boomers reject traditional religion, and become earth worshipers, right? But they have no real foundation in any particular religious thought excepting the superficial sunday school ‘peace and love’ stuff. So they go worship the godess, but the only theological training they’ve got stresses “God is good” and they’ve got no awareness of “God is entirely capable of killing everyone on earth because they were bad.” This means they thing “Gaia is good” and they’re entirely incapable of comprehending “Gaia snuffed the dinosaurs without a second thought, and she’ll kill you too, ya’ stupid monkey!”
They literally can not conceive that there’s anything wrong with nature.
Whadya’ think?
Ok, so here’s my theory: Christianity has a tendency to stress the “Peace and Love” aspects of God, and ignore the more frightening “Wrath and Judgement” aspects of God, right?
Not up until a few decades ago. The idea of God’s righteous wrath is not so distasteful to generations who had a fully-formed moral upbringing. Of course, point out to a boomer that their “peace and love” ethos (which is really neither peace, nor love, but that is a different discussion) stops if their own children were horribly brutalized–as they would want to bastard to be punished–and then tell them that God not only has the capacity but the willingness to forgive the person and that’ll just blow a fuse in their brain.
In reality, what happened is that “peace” and “love” were redefined; husks hollowed out and filled with new doctrines that don’t, in reality, resemble real peace or real love. The crusty old Marxists know how to do this well, destroying, distorting or hollowing out existing institutions to use as weapons against the culture(s) they wanted to overthrow. As Marxism and the later hyper-modernist/postmodernist schools has a significant influence on the counter-culture, it should be of little surprise to anyone that similar tactics were employed.
To add: The boomers rejected all the nasty truths that religion upheld–about man’s evil and the need for justice–but kept the feel-good *slogans* that are left over when the words are emptied of meaning.
CS Lewis in The Abolition of Man: “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
Sounds like CS Lewis foresaw the “Goracle.”
Let’s see…ozone hole on the south end. Methane hole on the north. Sounds normal to me.
http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Storms-John-Barnes/dp/0812533453/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1252354357&sr=1-1
Careful with that nuke, Eugene.
Be warned: when he wrote this, Barnes had a very fanciful idea of how the internet worked that will induce giggles today.
@ David Marcoe: Yeah, that was my point: the Baby Boomers are stupid little pukes with an inferior understanding of traditional religion, and then they transplanted this inferior understanding to their new religion of earth worship.