I'm sorry to hear that the gulf stream has altered course.The tipping point has been reached when the ocean's currents have been altered and the earth has started it's fail safe cycle.Stopping all non renewables now might buy us a little more time but it won't stop the earths cycle that we've begun.Just get ready to hunker down and to be on your own for survival.

Another scare tactic by the looney left. So it happens. Learn how to deal with it in a way that is adult. ADAPT! Don't just say 1. Stop driving cars; 2. do not burn coal; 3. Turn of the air conditioner; 4. Yes, Man IS the cause. There are too many of us. That is the problem. My idea: Keep North America for us. Stop immigration. We can let the rest of the world explode. We will be fine. Changes your paradigm, right?

Actually, ocean ecosystem changing is not due to atomspheric CO2, because our air pressure and air CO2 composition hasn't changed much. Ocean methane increase is a sign of something is killing the ocean photosynthesis algaes. Decreasing photosynthesis algae population reduces ocean oxygen content, which increase anaerobic bacteria growth and produce more methane. Things that killing the photosynthesis algae include biohazardous waste dumped into the water by human, such as the antibiotic in the hand soap, which prevents cell wall formation of the algae. This is just one example, any kind of biohazardous dumping would alter ocean ecosystem, and eventually could affect atomsphere.

Quite frankly, I'm going to live it up and do what I want from now on and screw the future. China overtook the US to become the worlds biggest producer of CO2 and they've said their economy comes first (hence they have never signed any agreements to reduce CO2). When you look at the numbers, global CO2 emissions have been going up despite every attempt at reducing them. China's output grew 9% in 2011, driving the output to a record 31.6 Gigatonnes. And this is with the US and Western economies in a funk due to the recession and recovery. Of those economies start growing, watch out as this number will explode! Plus, even if we somehow managed to do ZERO emissions in a year, it takes time for the environment to settle on a new temperature. So all the existing CO2 in the air will continue to drive up global temps for at least the next 30 years no matter what we do. Once you figure this in with the continued growth, you can come to only one conclusion. There is no stopping this train wreck from happening. Heck the train may wreck even faster than we suspect as once the methane starts being released (by temps that will keep on rising even if we stopped producing any more CO2), global averages will sky rocket. So, time to enjoy life while you can. As it's not going to last much longer in it's present state.

Some planets are completely a diamond. Interested in going Republicans? I'm sure we can collectively fund such a one way trip very quickly.

Wasn't "acid rain" going to kill us all? SARS? Global cooling? DDT? DDT is a great example: DDT saved millions of 3rd world people from various insect born (Malaria, etc) tropical diseases. Millions. But it turned out that DDT was harmful to a few bird species. So the death parade is back on for the humans, and the birds are looking strong. I know PETA is happy, but the deaths are on the hands of "anti-pollution" activists armed with junk science.

Methane? Really? Vegetarians produce approximately 9 times the methane of carnivores per 1000. P U

Damn it George Bush!

FREE PANGEA!

Stop man-made continental drift!

This is the reason mankind is reaching out via the space programs to leave this planet!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCgaJtUDbIE

To all you bed wetters foaming at the mouth about the Earth's ultimate demise, please turn off your computers, TVs, refrigerators and anything else running on electricity (you know, the magic stuff coming from the wall socket that's produced by BURNING something) and stop being sniveling hypocrites. Get off the grid and STFU. You're all dismissed.

Global warming has been happening between ice ages for a long, long time. When this period of global warming ends we will begin a slow temperature decline into the next ice age. How will we stop the ice age? Burn more coal and oil?

This may upset all the environmental nut jobs out there, but carbon dioxide is actually good for the rain forests!

It's the natural order of things. We humans are fleas on the Earth's back side. Some say we are in the beginning stages of the next ice age? I will keep smoking cigarettes and be LONG gone before it happens.

Several years ago, the same claim was made about methane deposits in the Arctic. It was trumpeted in the media as well. Doom and gloom sells copy. Last year another scientist surveyed the sites of Methane outgassing and discovered that the outgassing had been occuring for thousands of years. Thereby proving that we didn't have anything to do with it. That never made the media because it's not gloom and it doesn't sell to not scare people. This is the same story recycled with a different location. Why should the outcome be any different?

Stupid observation: For 20 or 30 years we have been told that hydrocarbons was going to kill everyone on the planet by eroding the ozone, so we have cut back on carbon emmissions, Now we are told that it won't be hydrocarbons that kill us it will be methane that erodes the ozone and kills us. Oh, by the way, when will this end come to us. Just wondering.

Will some one tell these "climate change" Dido's that this is the way the "Earth" does it. Man kind does not or can not do anything to change or fix it. IT IS A CYCLE that happens. Check your history. Look WAY BACK...................................................................................................

God didn't build the Earth, the government built it...

I'm not really sure what those of you who continue to argue against the science of climate change need in order to be convinced. Insurmountable evidence has been provided and scientists across every discipline have been polled on their beliefs on the subject. Scientists who specialize in earth sciences overwhelmingly believe that climate change is real andthat it is being fueled by mankind's activities. The only areas where belief is not as strong are those whose studies are funded by energy corporations or in no way actually study the science of climate change (i.e, those who study the economics of energy). I'm not a scientist now, I've moved on to better things. I wasn't a climate scientist but I dealt with areas that were related. I've no doubt in my mind of the robustness of the scientific techniques used to evaluate climate change and, consequently, have no doubt in my mind of the dire nature of the situation that mankind is faced with.

If you still doubt what nearly every scientist says is true, perhaps you should step back and ask yourself why you're having so much trouble accepting it. Read something other than skepticalscience.com and truly evaluate the information in an objective manner. Quit clinging to beliefs that have no basis in science.

Suicide of the species by clathrate gun... Classic!

For those of you who do not believe in global warming, climate change or whatever you prefer to call it please do the following: Tell your congressman that you don't want the Pentagon to spend any more of your money working on studies, contingency plans and strategies for dealing with the geopolitical turmoil and military threats that will result from the effects of climate change. Since congress controls the countries purse strings and they are providing money to the pentagon for this type of work just tell em to quit wasting your tax dollars. Heck they could use that money somewhere else; like actually building a supposed "clean coal" fired power plant. Clean coal, yeah, like that will happen, Ha!

Isn't this what they say was causing ships to disappear in the so called Bermuda triangle? It would bubble up and the water would be less boyant or something?

This is sort of old news. I've seen shows about methane lakes.

And how much trash were cavemen generating to create such deposits?

Didn't any of you take geology in college? We know what caused the End Permian Extinction(or as most know it the Great Dying when 95% of all earths species died) 250mil years ago. The rocks tell us. The atmosphere changed and there was an over abundance of CO2 in the air(from the Siberian Traps and the burning of massive coal deposits). Then came the methane toward the very end of the EPE. The CO2 in the atmosphere caused rapid climate change. This melted the Ice in the polar regions. Less ice meant less sunlight reflected back. This caused the oceans to heat up, because ocean water absorbs heat very well. That rise in ocean temps destabilized the frozen methane that was trapped thousands of feet below in the oceans. We're talking billions of metric tons of gas. Methane is 20 times more powerful greenhouse gas than C02. If it is released. You'll see a massive raise in temps across the globe unlike anything we've seen before. When it happens it go quickly. As much as 25 degrees above normal. Yeah. I said 25 degrees above normal. Just 6 degrees above normal temp can have a huge impact. 25 degrees and you can kiss the 95% of the earths species goodbye and probably humans as well.

This isn't fantasy stuff. It isn't made up. This is what happened 250 million years ago. The rocks tell us this happened and if we continue to pump massive amounts of CO2 into the air unchecked - it'll happen again and it is happening. We can all ready see deposits of frozen methane melting just 1 mile off the coast of California. Scientist monitor the methane being released there constantly - as they do in other oceans and seas. If the bigger deposits of methane that exist in the northern oceans and seas melt - well, let's just say you'll be able to lounge beneath a palm tree on the North Slope of Alaska within a few years.

Just Google End Permian - educate yourself.

So, we don't need to concern ourselves with the 0.038% any longer. Methane makes the minor greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide irrelevant. Then water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, makes both of them irrelevant. Perspective.

I accept the science of humans changing the atmospheric chemical composition through globalized industrialization. Much to my frustration and concern for future generations, the political reality is that there are so many ignorant Americans (some by choice, some by circumstance) it will take many years of violent and powerful weather, unusually hot summers, drought, and increasingly acidic oceans before today's ignorant are dead and more informed voters decide to take action. The problem is that so much more pollution will have been added to the atmosphere by then that the train of climate change will have already left the station and the seas will inevitably rise. What I don't understand is that we buy insurance for our lives, homes, autos, and other valuables but we don't place a value on our planet by paying for insurance just in case the science is correct.

For those of us who don’t like to be ignorant about the science of altering the atmosphere's chemistry, I suggest the following books with a brief quote from each:

1. A Green History of the World, Clive Ponting, 1991 – “The net result of these human activities is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by a third in the last two hundred years – from about 270 parts per million in 1750 to 350 parts per million in the late 1980s. About half of this increase has occurred since the 1950s – carbon dioxide emissions rose from 1.6 billion tons a year in 1950 to 5.4 billion tons in the mid-1980s. Global use of fossil fuels is rising at about 4 per cent a year (which means a doubling every sixteen years) and carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere at about .5 per cent a year. Carbon dioxide has provided by far the greatest volume of greenhouse gas emissions and contributed about two-thirds of the total warming effect so far.” [page 388]
2. The Little Ice Age, Brian Fagan, 2000 – “The Little Ice Age reminds us that climate change is inevitable, unpredictable, and sometimes vicious. The future promises exactly the same kinds of violent change on a local and global scale. If the present, unusually prolonged high mode of the North Atlantic Oscillation is indeed due to anthropogenic forcing, then we must also assume that global warming will accentuate the natural cycles of global climate on the largest and smallest scales. Some of these potential cycles of change are frightening to contemplate in an overpopulated and heavily industrialized world.” [page 214] “Over a century ago, Victorian biologist Thomas Huxley urged us to be ‘humble before the facts’. The facts stare us in the face, yet we do not display sufficient humility. The vicissitudes of the Little Ice Age remind us of our vulnerability again and again. In a new climatic era, we would be wise to learn from the climatic lessons of history.” [page 217]
3. The Long Summer, Brian Fagan, 2004 – “Short-term climatic events like droughts do not often leave a clear footprint. But the droughts of the Medieval Warm Period (or Medieval Climatic Anomaly, as it is often called) left giant tracks across the American west, wrought in deep-sea cores, pollen samples, tree rings, and ice cores from high in the Andes. From the California coast to the Maya lowlands to Lake Titicaca, five centuries of sudden aridity wrought havoc on human societies already living close to the environmental edge.” [pages 214-215]
4. The Weather Makers, Timothy Flannery, 2005 – “The concentration of C02 in the atmosphere in times past can be measured from bubbles of air preserved in ice. By drilling about two miles into the Antarctic ice cap, scientists have drawn out an ice core that spans almost a million years of Earth history. This unique record demonstrates that during cold times CO2 levels have dropped to around 160 parts per million, and until recently they never exceeded 280 parts per million. The Industrial Revolution changed that, albeit slowly, for even by 1958, when Keeling began his measurements of CO2 atop Mauna Loa, it was up to only 315 parts per million.” [page 29] “Today the figures are 380 parts per million….” [page 28]
5. Collapse, Jared Diamond, 2005 – “…the atmosphere really has been undergoing an unusually rapid rise in temperature recently and that human activities are the or a major cause. The remaining uncertainties mainly concern the future expected magnitude of the effect: e.g., whether average global temperatures will increase by ‘just’ 1.5 degrees Centigrade or by 5 degrees Centigrade over the next century. Those numbers may not sound like a big deal, until one reflects that average global temperatures were ‘only’ 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age.” [page 493]
6. The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock, 2006 – “Predictions of climate change do not depend only on theoretical models in the form of computer simulations of the Earth. There is now a vast array of monitoring activities sustained globally. Air and sea temperatures are continuously measured, as are the gases of the atmosphere, the cloud cover, the floating ice and the glaciers and the health of the ecosystems in the ocean and on the land. The truth of the models is therefore continuously tested against the observations coming in from the real world.” [page 57]
7. Dead Pool, James Lawrence Powell, 2008 – “The question is not whether the earth has warmed, but why? The scientific consensus is that the cause is the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which absorb heat and trap it near the earth. In one of the most prescient predictions in science, in 1896 … Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius predicted the very rise that we now observe. Based on the knowledge that carbon dioxide molecules trap heat, Arrhenius calculated that if atmospheric carbon dioxide level were to double, global temperatures would rise between 7 and 11 degrees F. More than a century later with vastly more information, IPCC forecasts that by 2100, temperatures will rise between 2.5 and 10.5 degrees F, overlapping the range the Swedish chemist forecast long ago. Arrhenius thought it might take three thousand years for carbon dioxide levels to double, but sadly that is one forecast that he got wrong.” [pages 171-2]
8. The Flooded Earth, Peter Ward, 2010 – “Our planet did not break out of the 180-280 ppm range until about 1800, when carbon dioxide levels began to rise well beyond the old upper limit. By 1900, the level was 295 ppm…. From 1900 to 2000, CO2 levels went from 295 all the way up the current level of about 385 – a 90 ppm rise in just a hundred years. The rate at which carbon dioxide is increasing…is accelerating. Models using the latest values of the measured rise for the past decade, and projecting forward, lead to an estimate that CO2 levels will nearly double in the next two centuries. That is the level of the Mesozoic Period and will cause the ice sheets to rapidly melt – all of them.” [pages 56-7]

I make these suggestions to help frame the science behind the issues associated with human-caused changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Many people seem ignorant of the science behind climate analysis and content to put their heads deeply into the sand. The defining characteristic of humanity, complex intelligence, is enhanced by a broad liberal education. Thomas Jefferson had this to say about higher education including science: “the university [of Virginia] would be ‘now qualified to raise its youth to an order of science unequalled in any other state; and this superiority will be greater from the free range of mind encouraged there, and the restraint imposed at other seminaries by the shackles of a domineering hierarchy and a bigoted adhesion to ancient habits.’” [from Thomas Jefferson, Willard Sterne Randall, 1993, page 588]

First it was global cooling or another ice age or something. Then it was global warming and then it was climate change so the doomsayers could have it either way. Then it was Katrina and we were going to have at least 5 or 6 of those type hurricanes every year. I know that hurricanes are bad no matter the category when you are the one experiencing it but I don't I don't recall any that bad since. Now it is methane that is going to do us in. Maybe some whiz kid can come up with a way to capture the methane and use it productively for society. That would give the doomsayers a whole nother thing to bitch about. Some greedy business man getting rich off of it.

wow

8 pages and 539 scientists here, all of them global warming climate change experts, good to know, we are saved.

/sarcasism

please quit driving your cars, and using electricity then you'll be a leader and maybe then people that don't cotton to the your fevered pitch will follow.

If not your just a do as I say not as I do'er.