Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

Re:Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' ... by Retric on Thursday March 23, 2017 @09:20PM (#13945791)

The risk is from 100s's of Gigatons which is a extremely massive quantity. How much of that is going to be liberated and how soon has a massive impact on estimates.

Anyway, your first link says " In the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, methane has a lifetime of 12.4 years" (If that's X ln(2) for half life it's 8.6 years)

"This means that a methane emission will have 28 times the impact on temperature of a carbon dioxide emission of the same mass over the following 100 years." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

PS: As to small quantities, we are talking about billions of tons of a gas.

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Re:Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' ... by zasz on Friday March 24, 2017 @01:22AM (#13946822)

The point of everything I have said is that it would take only a small quantity of methane, relatively speaking, to make a significant contribution to global warming. You don't need to emit as much methane as would match all the warming caused by current levels of CO2. Even an extra tenth of a degree is bad news. Every tenth of a degree shaves off a decade from the time we have to fix our planet. Any significant source of greenhouse gases.

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