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

siberiantimes.com

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

#361

Post by ZephyrP »

buckbova wrote: post #360
brogrammer2 wrote: post #258

Honest question: Why is Mainstream Media not covering this like it should be doing? Heck, this should be the breaking news every single day!! After all, this spells doomsday for the upcoming generations, so shouldn't it be the news that should be shown/covered almost everyday on the front page. The people have the right to know that their children and grandchildren will suffer because of something that is going on ri…

Someone just copy/pasted your comment to reddit. Congrats. https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/6163gu/7000_unde...

This keeps happening to me! I wrote a fairly obscure remark about SICP on HN and 2 days later I was on reddit with one of the top comments as my exact comment.

Some kind of spamming operation? I have no idea.

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

#362

Post by astrodust »

AznHisoka wrote: post #274
astrodust wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...a political miracle occurs. You mean the Republicans get voted out of office completely and the other party isn't completely incompetent? On that day.

Please stop with this tangent. grandparent is asking a question almost every average person is asking: what is the impact on me? and you basically started an entirely new unrelated subthread.

I'm sorry, did another political party just designate the former head of an oil company as Secretary of State, or did they take someone actively suing the EPA the head of the EPA? Is there any other party on the planet receiving massive amounts of money from coal companies?

This is not unrelated. This is directly related.

If the US was some little country in the Pacific where they could do whatever they wanted with little consequence it wouldn't matter, but they're not. They're one of the largest polluters in the world and the largest economy, so it's absolutely important that they steer in the right direction to avoid disaster.

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

#363

Post by astrodust »

averagewall wrote: post #263
ythn wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's going to be bad. A little panic is not a bad thing. It's always lose/lose for the skeptics: Scenario A: skeptics were wrong - "burn them at the stake, they screwed us all over!" Scenario B: skeptics were right - "well, they got lucky. It wasn't as apocalyptic as experts were claiming. They were still wrong to have rejected the evidence at hand and I was still right to have believed the evidence at hand"

If reducing emissions means harming economies and impoverishing and killing people, then if skeptics are right, "you" will have caused needless destruction. If preventing climate change didn't cost anything, then nobody would be against it. But it will be pretty expensive and somebody will have to suffer to pay for that. That somebody probably doesn't want us to prevent it because they may well lose out, even in the…

> If reducing emissions means harming economies and impoverishing and killing people...

It doesn't. It just means shifting employment from one class of jobs to another class of jobs. Either you have people mining coal, or you have people making renewable power. Either you have people digging for oil, or you have people building batteries for elecric cars. You can steer the private sector with subsidies and incentives just as the have for the last hundred years.

Reducing emissions does not mean reducing employment. It means shifting. If you have two possible jobs that pay equally, one with high emissions and one with lower, incentivize the lower one. A carbon tax mechanism is one way to price the cost of emissions into the job and that naturally makes the lower emission one more rewarding.

> Do you use any power generated by coal?

No. We got off of coal about a decade ago. Now it's mostly nuclear, hydro-electric, and for boost, natural gas. The power company was able to phase out coal power plants ahead of schedule becaue power consumption has been declining, everything is getting more efficient.

> Do you use a car or bus?

I walk.

> Do you eat meat?

Mostly chicken, occasionally fish. Some people eat astounding amounts of red meat and they're the ones that can move the needle the most. If they cut back by 20% that's a huge shift. If I cut back by 20% it's irrelvant.

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

#364

Post by agentultra »

rhino369 wrote: post #359
agentultra wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the video linked in another comment it seems like drastic is basically impossible . The speaker, Stuart Scott, had said that we'd have to just drop $28 trillion worth of fossil fuel assets on the floor and walk away today . It seems more likely that we're going to hit at least 5 degrees over the next 100 years which, if I'm not mistaken, means mass extinction events and the collapse of civilization as we know it…

The IPCC reports don't substantiate those figure. RCP8.5 which assumes increasing co2 emmisions until 2080 results in 2.6-4.8 degrees by 2100. But Rcp8.5 is considered pretty much worst case. It is basically what happens if we just continue to use fossil fuels and have no climate policy. RCP4.5 which is a somewhat optimistic but still realistic plan would only have 1.1-2.6. RCP6 which is a realistic scenario where fo…

The estimates are still loose on the methane situation and how that would affect the IPCC reports. Isn't it called the "methane crisis" because it's likely going to rapidly accelerate warming?

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

#365

Post by njharman »

averagewall wrote: post #227
M_Grey wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you look at the many different potential sources of, "Fucked... goodbye..." the trend is very clear. We're juggling apocalypses and just waiting to find one that will stick. Will it be ocean acidification first? Ocean levels rising? Catastrophic weather patterns? Famine? Drought? War touched off by rapid changed? Mass extinctions? They're all in play, each with the potential to end us.

How would any of these things end us? We've have world war II. That didn't make a dent in the population. Famine and drought would be localized so we can use international trade to smooth them over, just like we currently do. For long term failures, there will always be other arable places to grow crops, they just might be fewer or more inconvenient than they currently are, and they'll change at an easy human scale s…

3-4% of world population is a dent. But non-nuclear/non-biological wars are hardly civilization ending events.

Things like deaths of mesoamerican civs due to destroying their environment http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0313_030313_.... Or all of america after 2nd european invasion. Ever hear of the mississippi mound builders? I'd expect not since there civ was totally wiped out.

And civ bending doesn't mean everyone's dead. Just large enough population drop to break the institutions and social order supported by that population.

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

#366

Post by yborg »

sqeaky wrote: post #11

At first I was thinking "stupid click bait title", then I saw the pictures. Anything making those craters is properly an explosion. Anything heard 100km away is properly and explosion. If anything this article plays it down with words like eruption and venting. This seems super dangerous for people in the area. And dangerous in the climate change sense for the rest of us.

I can't believe that this got 350+ comments and nobody actually recognized the clickbait here. For one thing, it's a story from that noted climatology journal "The Siberian Times".

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

They're full of ice, not methane. And what makes those craters is the ice melting and/or drop in groundwater pressure. The issue of entrained methane trapped in permafrost is real and the pingo ice most likely also contains trapped methane, but the implication that these are domes of pressurized methane READY TO BLOW AND HURL EARTH INTO RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE AT ANY MOMENT is absurd. The melting of permafrost generally over wide areas is the actual threat.

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

#367

Post by yummybear »

ZephyrP wrote: post #361
buckbova wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone just copy/pasted your comment to reddit. Congrats. https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/6163gu/7000_unde...

This keeps happening to me! I wrote a fairly obscure remark about SICP on HN and 2 days later I was on reddit with one of the top comments as my exact comment. Some kind of spamming operation? I have no idea.

The user in question has also copied a comment about chili from HN, so it's not the first time. Maybe some attempt at providing reputation for his account, but as you say, what's the point?

Or maybe just some guy harvesting imaginary internet points.

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

#368

Post by ABCLAW »

ZephyrP wrote: post #361
buckbova wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone just copy/pasted your comment to reddit. Congrats. https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/6163gu/7000_unde...

This keeps happening to me! I wrote a fairly obscure remark about SICP on HN and 2 days later I was on reddit with one of the top comments as my exact comment. Some kind of spamming operation? I have no idea.

It's an automated system for farming 'legit' looking accounts through comment arbitrage between platforms.

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

#369

Post by good_vibes »

whyenot wrote: post #139
M_Grey wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you look at the many different potential sources of, "Fucked... goodbye..." the trend is very clear. We're juggling apocalypses and just waiting to find one that will stick. Will it be ocean acidification first? Ocean levels rising? Catastrophic weather patterns? Famine? Drought? War touched off by rapid changed? Mass extinctions? They're all in play, each with the potential to end us.

Is this why we have not yet found signs of intelligent life in the universe? Every time a civilization is advanced enough to really screw up (their) planet, inevitably, they do? Fermi Paradox redux.

I agree. This is where the bottleneck is. What really hurts for me is knowing just how close we are but how many are willfully choosing to stay in the dark. We really could make the planet habitable for humans for at least a few more centuries while we become multiplanetary but inertia is our biggest obstacle right now, not lack of technology or information.

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

#370

Post by i2amsam »

dcchambers wrote: post #347
geoka9 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consumer gas vehicle make up a TINY fraction According to [1], transportation is 26% of greenhouse emissions, of which over half is passenger cars and light-duty trucks. [1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Those are US emissions only. What about China? India? The EU? As you can also see from that report, 30% of emissions come from electricity generation. If we all switch to EVs, expect that % from consumer vehicles to just flip to electricity. That can't be fixed until all our electricity is 100% renewable.

It can be improved as soon as average electricity generation is cleaner than internal combustion engines, which it is today.
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