Clathrate gun hypothesis (global warming)

[dwarven]

You literally said "in a couple decades or less." You were the one being hyperbolic and pushing fearmongering, I simply called you out on your bullshit.

Data shows mass starvation would occur at 10-20 years. What is extinction if not that?

[Cosmic Janitor]

If this comes to pass humanity won't go extinct, but there will be billions dead. We have ways of surviving, underground, or leaving this planet for Mars, for instance.

But Billions might die, thanks to greed.

We don't have that...

[Nadiru]

Methane combustion is basically converting 1 CH4 and 2 O2 molecules into 2 H2O molecules and 1 CO2 molecule. Plus a bunch of energy. You get as much CO2 out of the combustion as methane went in, so it's not really a "win".

Plus, the bubbles it's in are often fairly small; it's not like there's one giant bubble of it or something. It's not released in one big "burp", it's released in trillions of miniscule ones. And putting methane capture systems over the entire arctic and antarctic regions, to collect releases from both sea floor and permafrosts, would be ridiculously expensive, to boot.

You get a vastly different kind of problem if you ignite the methane, one which you already pointed out gives humans more time to figure out a solution to. I'm gonna be an adult here and ignore that humans have the carbon cycle down well enough that they can teach it to pre-teens but somehow don't know how to solve the problem of "too much carbon in air what do"

[Endus]

You get a vastly different kind of problem if you ignite the methane, one which you already pointed out gives humans more time to figure out a solution to. I'm gonna be an adult here and ignore that humans have the carbon cycle down well enough that they can teach it to pre-teens but somehow don't know how to solve the problem of "too much carbon in air what do"

It's not so much that nobody has any idea how to get CO2 out of the air.

It's that the measures we could use, given the scale of the problem, cost in the range of hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars. And until we rein in emissions, it's kind of like bailing out your boat while not trying to fix the hole in the bottom first.

Planting high-carbon fast-growing plants is a relatively low-tech option (as long as you ensure they don't get burned/rot and release the carbon again). But again, given the amount of carbon, the land required to do that, the staffing, etc, hundreds of billions of dollars. Even if we use relatively unused landscape like tundra.

[aviger]

If you havent already started making plans and building shelter for the great collapse youre an idiot

I am prepared. Are you ?

yeah i know a lot of people who have prepared like you....i know where they live and am a better shot ;P

[PC2]

If this comes to pass humanity won't go extinct, but there will be billions dead. We have ways of surviving, underground, or leaving this planet for Mars, for instance.

But Billions might die, thanks to greed.

There's no reason as to why we would have to live underground, even if the Earth went back up to the peak it was at millions of years ago. Animals and plants can still live on the surface.

[Nadiru]

It's not so much that nobody has any idea how to get CO2 out of the air.

It's that the measures we could use, given the scale of the problem, cost in the range of hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars. And until we rein in emissions, it's kind of like bailing out your boat while not trying to fix the hole in the bottom first.

Planting high-carbon fast-growing plants is a relatively low-tech option (as long as you ensure they don't get burned/rot and release the carbon again). But again, given the amount of carbon, the land required to do that, the staffing, etc, hundreds of billions of dollars. Even if we use relatively unused landscape like tundra.

You could do it for a hundred million dollars, 4000 people, and the willingness to go to jail for the crime of saving the planet. Iron fertilization to restore lost iron particles in the ocean due to global warming (specific mechanism involved: More CO2 causes greening of the Sahara Desert leading to less dust flyoff across the Atlantic to South America leading to reduced iron in the ocean leading to reduced plankton populations.)

It even comes with lovely knock-on effects: Increased fish catches for years afterward because there's enough food to support them and an impossibility of letting the sequestered carbon come back because the plankton that don't turn into fish food die and fall to the bottom of the ocean. Iron powder is almost literally cheaper than dirt; the problems and most of the cost are bound up in transportation and targeting. Feed the planet, stop global warming. Seems like a win-win to me.

[Endus]

You could do it for a hundred million dollars, 4000 people, and the willingness to go to jail for the crime of saving the planet. Iron fertilization to restore lost iron particles in the ocean due to global warming (specific mechanism involved: More CO2 causes greening of the Sahara Desert leading to less dust flyoff across the Atlantic to South America leading to reduced iron in the ocean leading to reduced plankton populations.)

It even comes with lovely knock-on effects: Increased fish catches for years afterward because there's enough food to support them and an impossibility of letting the sequestered carbon come back because the plankton that don't turn into fish food die and fall to the bottom of the ocean. Iron powder is almost literally cheaper than dirt; the problems and most of the cost are bound up in transportation and targeting. Feed the planet, stop global warming. Seems like a win-win to me.

You've got your numbers way out of whack.

Those 4000 people, if we're talking relatively low-skill middle-income type jobs at $50k/year, are going to cost you $200,000,000 alone for one year at that project. We haven't even gotten into material costs, training, planning, equipment, any of that. And that's for a single year; this isn't something that's going to be "fixed" with a one-off initiative like that.

[Nadiru]

You've got your numbers way out of whack.

Those 4000 people, if we're talking relatively low-skill middle-income type jobs at $50k/year, are going to cost you $200,000,000 alone for one year at that project. We haven't even gotten into material costs, training, planning, equipment, any of that. And that's for a single year; this isn't something that's going to be "fixed" with a one-off initiative like that.

I'm not, though. Paying 50k a year to have people dump some iron into the ocean once a year is a waste of money, that's not skilled labor or even really any labor at all. Really a hundred million should just go towards developing an attachment to go on the back of container ships that dumps out iron dust when certain GPS coordinates are hit. Using the ocean as a giant carbon sponge is far and away the best use of climate change funds due to the added benefits of increasing fish yields and having no risks of a forest fire burning down your carbon deposits.

[Endus]

I'm not, though. Paying 50k a year to have people dump some iron into the ocean once a year is a waste of money, that's not skilled labor or even really any labor at all. Really a hundred million should just go towards developing an attachment to go on the back of container ships that dumps out iron dust when certain GPS coordinates are hit. Using the ocean as a giant carbon sponge is far and away the best use of climate change funds due to the added benefits of increasing fish yields and having no risks of a forest fire burning down your carbon deposits.

50k/person is pricing that out really low. This isn't like all they'd have to do is press a button and release the iron rebar into the ocean. If that's what you needed, you'd need one dude. You know better. Come the hell on.

Plus, at best, iron fertilization might handle about one sixth of the issue. It's not like you can just scale that up infinitely.

This isn't the magic solution you think, and isn't as cheap as you think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization

[Zeta333]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

TLDR: Shitload of methane is trapped under ice. Warming releases methane. Methane increases warming. Humanity goes extinct in a couple decades or less.

why would humanity die? do you think the planet will turn so hot that we will all be killed off? I dont think you have this down right.

[Nadiru]

50k/person is pricing that out really low. This isn't like all they'd have to do is press a button and release the iron rebar into the ocean. If that's what you needed, you'd need one dude. You know better. Come the hell on.

Plus, at best, iron fertilization might handle about one sixth of the issue. It's not like you can just scale that up infinitely.

This isn't the magic solution you think, and isn't as cheap as you think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization

It's a solution that negates up to 16% of emissions annually that's not being pursued for legislative reasons. They jailed the last guy who tried, which is unfathomable to me if people are actually serious about this chicanery involving global warming. And I call it chicanery not because it's fake but because we have options that work that we're not doing because reasons. Iron seeding may not be as cheap as my estimate but it's nowhere near the hundred billion dollar endeavor like you suggested. You're not constantly seeding the oceans, you do it in concurrence with plankton growth cycles, which is annually insofar that I'm aware.

[dwarven]

why would humanity die? do you think the planet will turn so hot that we will all be killed off? I dont think you have this down right.

Ecosystems are delicately balanced. If our food supplies die, so do we. But, methane warming would make it too hot for humans to live on earth.

[Endus]

It's a solution that negates up to 16% of emissions annually that's not being pursued for legislative reasons. They jailed the last guy who tried, which is unfathomable to me if people are actually serious about this chicanery involving global warming. And I call it chicanery not because it's fake but because we have options that work that we're not doing because reasons. Iron seeding may not be as cheap as my estimate but it's nowhere near the hundred billion dollar endeavor like you suggested. You're not constantly seeding the oceans, you do it in concurrence with plankton growth cycles, which is annually insofar that I'm aware.

When I was listing budgets for these kinds of things, I wasn't referring to annual recurring costs, but the overall long-term costs. Maybe I didn't make that clear.

You're right; we COULD be doing things, but I still maintain that the bigger issue is emissions, since making efforts to reduce the pee in the pool by 10% really doesn't help that much when people are still pissing in the pool. That doesn't mean we can't get started, but this is very much not going to be a "one solution" issue. We're going to need to mitigate emissions, we're going to need to invest in carbon sequestration, we're going to need to invest in adaptive planning and such, and all that is going to have a cost attached. The alternative is we just kick back and wait for Mother Nature to kick our teeth in, which will cost us a lot more.

And the problem is the decisions are largely getting made by wealthy people who think Mother Nature's boot won't start swinging until after they're dead, so fuck it. That's why we didn't get started on this stuff in the '80s, when the issue was already clear.

[Nadiru]

When I was listing budgets for these kinds of things, I wasn't referring to annual recurring costs, but the overall long-term costs. Maybe I didn't make that clear.

You're right; we COULD be doing things, but I still maintain that the bigger issue is emissions, since making efforts to reduce the pee in the pool by 10% really doesn't help that much when people are still pissing in the pool. That doesn't mean we can't get started, but this is very much not going to be a "one solution" issue. We're going to need to mitigate emissions, we're going to need to invest in carbon sequestration, we're going to need to invest in adaptive planning and such, and all that is going to have a cost attached. The alternative is we just kick back and wait for Mother Nature to kick our teeth in, which will cost us a lot more.

And the problem is the decisions are largely getting made by wealthy people who think Mother Nature's boot won't start swinging until after they're dead, so fuck it. That's why we didn't get started on this stuff in the '80s, when the issue was already clear.

I don't know about all that. Just because the bigwigs who run shit haven't seen fit to fix the problem doesn't mean all work on the problem has ceased. We have at least three de-carbonizing ideas that are fleshed out enough to act on with a year's organizing: Iron fertilization, beach deposition of mafic/ultramafic rocks (calcium carbonate cycle,) speed growing old growth forest (Shubhendu Sharma's work on afforesting.) These combined with work on efficiency gains (Amory Lovins is the prime mover here; if you've never heard of him definitely give him a Google) as well as rolling out battery and renewable energy technologies will cut emissions precipitously.

[Zeta333]

Ecosystems are delicately balanced. If our food supplies die, so do we. But, methane warming would make it too hot for humans to live on earth.

you should go see how much warmer methan would make earth cus its not enough to kill us, and we would adapt food. some people would starve but humanity wouldnt perish. You dont have a grasp on this situation.

[Machismo]

Data shows mass starvation would occur at 10-20 years. What is extinction if not that?

Well, extinction means something different... so you were using hyperbole.

We have mass starvation right now, are we extinct?

[omfgreally]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

TLDR: Shitload of methane is trapped under ice. Warming releases methane. Methane increases warming. Humanity goes extinct in a couple decades or less.

Simple fix

[Techno-Druid]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

TLDR: Shitload of methane is trapped under ice. Warming releases methane. Methane increases warming. Humanity goes extinct in a couple decades or less.

That's primarily the reason why scientists like Sergey Zimov are trying to recreate the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem (see Pleistocene Park). The theory that the introduction of megafauna such as bison, horses, reindeer and eventually mammoth will create the conditions that allow the permafrost to stay mostly frozen by compacting snow with their hooves (in the case of the first three animals mentioned).

[Shalcker]

Plus, the bubbles it's in are often fairly small; it's not like there's one giant bubble of it or something. It's not released in one big "burp", it's released in trillions of miniscule ones. And putting methane capture systems over the entire arctic and antarctic regions, to collect releases from both sea floor and permafrosts, would be ridiculously expensive, to boot.

Released methane from Deep Horizon spill was actually consumed by bacteria in timelines as low as several months...

And those bacteria should be living in Arctic oceans just fine.