I've thought about this, but I think there's a serious question as to whether humans can even muster an effort on the scale that would be required to harvest and prevent release into the atmosphere.

Take ocean clathrates, for example. At a certain point, the ocean may become warm enough to destabilize them. What do we do in that case? Put up collection tents over the ocean that are millions of square kilometers large? The problem just doesn't seem tractable.

But who knows? I'm certainly not the sort of engineer that is qualified to answer these questions.

[Unrelated: Good to see you're still around; feel free to drop by EFnet again sometime.]

from what i understand, just burning it would improve the situation too. bearing in mind that i don't know much about chemistry and this is entirely from google: when burned, 1 CH4 turns into 1 CO2 and 2 H2O, so you essentially trade CH4 for CO2.

that ignores the whole CH4 being a short term problem thing though...

Where're you going to store that much gas?

mentioned in a sibling comment to yours, but maybe we can just burn it? AFAIK 1 CH4 turns into 1 CO2 when burned, and that might be better