Hoooooo-boy. Just in case global financial disasters and geopolitical instabilities haven’t given you enough things to worry about, here’s a another: remember when scientists suggested that melting ice-caps at the poles of the planet could end up releasing massive reservoirs of sub-oceanic methane into the atmosphere, amplifying the greenhouse effect and accelerating climate change to an even greater degree?
Turns out that we’re finding more evidence for that theory than anyone really wants to find. Anyone wanna buy us out of this little problem? [via WorldChanging; image from linked Independent article]
I wonder if it’s economically viable to start capturing it and adding it to the fuel reserves? After all, CO2 is considered to be less damaging than CH4 with respect to the greenhouse effect, so maybe we should just burn it (usefully).
Jamais Cascao posted about this last month and crunched some very, very scary numbers:
http://www.openthefuture.com/2008/08/methane_trigger_for_geo_bio_en.html