I just heard the natural gas the ruptured Nordstream pipeline is spewing into the atmosphere is—Methane.
Methane? As in cow farts? As in “most deadly greenhouse gas”? No,I do know: actually that would be water vapor)
(A) how come nobody is mentioning that this incident undoes all the good Beyond Meat has done? That it dwarfs AOC’s concern over farting cows? What’s the point in slaughtering cattle, when the earth itself could burp out copious amounts of methane at any time, due to volcanoes or earthquakes?
(b) so…does everybody know that the earth itself produces methane, just like us carbon -based life forms who breathe, vocalize and fart?
(C) this reminds me of the Exxon Valdiz oil spill. I thought at the time, this ain’t some kinda man-made chemical pollution; this is just the earth vomiting or bleeding. Why all the ruinous sanctimonious “cleanup”? It’ll wear off, it’s biodegradable.
Just, ah….venting.
Check out oceanic methane clathrates. Found on the ocean floors around the world, these are estimated to have trapped between 1 \times 10^{15} to 5 \times 10^{15} cubic metres of methane, which amounts to 500–2500 gigatonnes of carbon, far more than the 230 gigatonnes of all known natural gas reserves.
Catastrophic release of methane clathrates into the atmosphere has been proposed as a cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction event through the mechanism of methane hydrate gasification, which has been called the “clathrate gun hypothesis”. In the Permian-Triassic event 252 million years ago, around 95% of all marine species went extinct.
If you want to put together a doomdsay scenario of how warming can cause a similar mass extinction today, a positive feedback loop of methane hydrate gasification set in motion by release of methane from melting permafrost in arctic regions is the way to bet.
Yet another plausible end of the world scenario… How’s an eschatologist to cope?
If it were a real problem, they’d just throw in a lit match.