Vocal Voices

The Chinese have found a way of extracting methane gas from methane hydrates or clathrates. These are found all over the planet, under every sea floor, under permafrost, under our feet. They are the last great source of carbon-based fuels. They sound like the answer to our energy needs well into the future. Hooray!

Except that if methane gas escapes into the atmosphere it is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide for the first 20 years and 21 times more potent over a century! And even when it is burned 100% efficiently every single molecule of methane releases one molecule of CO2 into the atmosphere. It is NOT clean and we CANNOT afford to go burning it like there is no tomorrow or there will be no tomorrow.

I despair I really do.

Magic and they call it "clean" because it has none of the pollution issues of Coal Oil or Diesel.... Except for the little CO2 problem.

People don't realise that Methane in clathrates on the sea bed exceed the total amount of Oil and Coal reserves on the planet.. By about 2:1 at least.

Right now we haver passed 400ppm CO2 and will pass 410 shortly. Given that peak interglacial has been ~280ppm and ice ages are around 180ppm, which is significant cause for concern. 450ppm is considered the gateway to uncontrollable (by humans), increase of CO2 where the planet takes over and we're just a passenger.

At the current decadal rate of rise 450ppm will take us 25 years. At the 5 year rate it will take us 20 years and if we were to average the rate of increase over the last two years for the next 15 year's we'd be there....

With clathrate mining we could get there even faster.

What an ingenious race we are...

And in other news, we find that t he permafrost is melting in Spitzbergen.

The only surprise in all of this is that the people responsible for the seed vault, supposed to protect the world from loss of crops through disaster, have not anticipated the disaster of Global Warming and the impact it might have on their frozen part of the world.

After all we've only been trying to get people to sit up and take notice for 20 years. These people are supposed to be part of a disaster and catastrophe management group yet they can't even plan for the current ongoing disaster. Doesn't bode well for the future of our seed vault.

“It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,”

Such is the overconfidence of zealots - it is cold now, it is in the Arctic, therefore it will always be cold.

I remember a piece on the seed bank by David Shukman of the BBC. It was in the Arctic circle on a geologically stable platform and far away form any meaningful human habitation - it would last forever.

It looks like "forever" has been redefined.

Not only should it have been in their plans that Permafrost would not be there, but it was actually their Job to foresee that and plan for it.

Lulled by the IPCC estimates of 2070 or later for the collapse of Arctic sea ice by AGW, they have been idiotic. Now they are paying that price with hasty and rushed changes. Let's hope they do better planning in the future.

It's not as if they didn't know, the Ice Hotel in Sweden had to create a cold store (more than a decade ago), to hold the winter ice through the summer, so they could start the build early enough to have a meaningful season. Kiruna is not _that_ far south of Spitzbergen and is well within the Arctic circle.

If they want "forever" they'd better start looking way up on the Antarctic ice cap, sunk into the bedrock below it. Even that won't be forever but it will be there for all human significant time.