Climate Change: A Runaway Heating Scenario?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. methane...gas hydrates...runaway greenhouse. It is old news. But Alister Doyle, an Environment Correspondent for Reuters, writes today about a new report from the Benfield Hazard Research Center. We at the CHL are not overly impressed by this scenario, because gas hydrates have about a tenth of the atmospheric residence time as carbon dioxide. Any rapid warming would be short-lived. We continue to hope for runaway greenhouse scenarios that includes potent greenhouse gasses with long residence times (think thousands of years!). We can only hope...

Excerpt: A thawing of vast ice-like deposits of gas under oceans and in permafrost could sharply accelerate global warming in the 21st century, British-based scientists said on Wednesday. Rising temperatures could break down buried mixtures of water, methane and other gases -- called gas hydrates -- and release them into the atmosphere where they would trap the sun's heat, they said. Gas hydrates could be a "serious geohazard in the near future due to the adverse effects of global warming on the stability of gas hydrate deposits," the Benfield Hazard Research Center said in a report. A big release of methane could speed up global warming far beyond the levels forecast in current models, upping the risk of floods, droughts and wildfires, the report said.

"The big problem is that a warmer world is a less predictable world," Mark Maslin, the report's author, told Reuters.
U.N. reviews of climate change had not taken enough account of the threat from gas hydrates, he added.
Methane is 21 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for driving up temperatures, the report said. Carbon dioxide is largely released from burning fossil fuels, from cars to factories.

- nostradamusfunkadelic, 12:51 PM | |