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Originally Posted by OccultHawk
I met a guy at a punk show around ten years ago or more who told me this was going to happen. He said ALL the carbon in the Arctic is going into the atmosphere.
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Well, your guy was ahead of the curve, and his prediction will be truly catastrophic - not just the carbon, but also methane, previously frozen in peat bogs, is being released in unprecedented amounts.
On methane release worldwide:-
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"It's gone up by 150 percent since the pre-industrial period. So that's an enormous increase. CO2, by contrast, has gone up by something like 30 percent."
Molecule for molecule, methane is much more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. And that's just part of the trouble. "Methane is much more complicated once it gets into the atmosphere than something like carbon dioxide is," Shindell says, "and that's because it reacts with a lot of different important chemicals."
For example, methane in the atmosphere also creates ground-level ozone. And ozone isn't only bad for human health; it also contributes to global warming. Shindell recently totaled up all the effects of methane emissions and realized that the heating effect is more than 60 percent that of carbon dioxide's.
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Source:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/...ryId=122638800