For those who have read my book ZERO Greenhouse Emissions – The Day the Lights Went Out – Our Future World, the reports this week by the science community of the discovery of methane release from thawing methane clathrates from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf will come as little surprise. In chapter 9 Mother Natures Super Salesman put the case quite clearly. Here is what he said:- Excerpt;

“In that 70 percent or so of the world’s surface—oceans that we have been tampering with by warming, Mother Nature’s effervescence, ‘Bubbles,’ has been working on a fermentation process. She got the idea from Schweppes. Her marketing department is working on a catch phrase. On the table for consideration at present are ‘Bubbles stored for your life,’ ‘Bubbles borrowed direct from Nature to you’ and ‘Bubbles brewed for Millennia.’ She, Mother Nature, has had a couple of product test runs with surprising results.”

“Around 251 million years ago at the end of what’s called the Permian period, product trials came close to wiping out all life on Earth. More than 94 percent of the marine species present in fossil records disappeared suddenly as oxygen levels plummeted and life teetered on the verge of extinction. Over the next 500,000 years, a few species struggled to regain a foothold. It took 20 to 30 million years for even the most rudimentary coral reefs to re-establish themselves and for forests to regrow. In some areas, it took more than 100 million years for ecosystems to reach their former healthy biodiversity. We weren’t around at the time or even during the next failed product launch about 55 million years ago in what geologists now call the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM for short. This managed massive die-offs and disrupted the climate for a little over 100,000 years. Now, the weather plays a big part in these product launches, just ask Fosters. They sell a lot more cold beer in the warmer months. So as we get back up there to the right level, she is ready for another try. This time though, she has a bigger target market, you and me. Unlike the closely guarded secret formula for Coke, some have taken a look at the ingredients and given it the name Clathrates. The formula is made up of naturally occurring greenhouse gases trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern mud and at the bottom of the seas. Mother Nature’s special herbs and spices contain the all important ingredient, methane. Unlike those in her under-story in the Siberian and Alaskan permafrost, these are secured by either intense cold (pause for a moment—Arctic water now warming at 3 times the global average) or in the deep oceans under high pressure. Just a reminder—now warming to a depth of 3 kilometers. A few years back a palaeoceanographer called Gerald Dickens was (ironically) trying to assist our friends in the oil industry. While working for the University of Michigan, on a drilling expedition he had a drill pipe explode dramatically with the internal pressure build-up of methane, shooting mud 50 meters skyward. Quite simple for ‘Bubbles’ really, unlike an ice cube harmlessly melting (unless you’re the size of the Ross Ice Shelf), in the case of frozen methane it doesn’t change from ice to water, it changes from ice to gas. Indeed gas that is twenty to twenty-four times as potent as CO₂ as a greenhouse gas. Put another way, 1 cubic metre of ‘Bubbles’ clathrates brought to the surface releases 164 cubic meters of methane. Now when ‘Bubbles’ lets a few go, it can be a bit like an underwater flare that triggers more ‘Bubbles’ in the area. And before you know it the flame-like flare (like a gas flare on an offshore oil rig) under the right conditions can set off a chain reaction. The old ripple in the pond trick. This though, the theory goes, turned from a ripple in the pond to more like a deep sea nuclear holocaust in the case of the incident 251 million years ago and may have been more like a couple of dozen Hiroshimas in the incident 55 million years ago. To get the whole product launch going again might seem like a long-term project, unless she tries a couple of market tests in the now nearly ice-free Arctic. Estimates of Mother Nature’s store room in Davey Jones’s locker, are at best guess between 1 and 10 trillion tonnes—nobody is really sure at this stage, it’s a big ocean. There are a couple of other possibilities for the launch but at this time, it’s just a guess. On the basis of a very large and mostly uninhabited area of 71 percent of the planet, and with that 3 kilometers of warming going on, might it just be possible that one or two minor ‘bubbles’ would get the chance to be released? Might it even have, or be happening right now? Why do we ask this question? Throughout history, at least as ‘best available science’ suggests, when this sort of event takes place the oceans suddenly turn acidic as vast amounts of carbon dioxide dissolve into the surrounding waters, killing fish and other marine life. Have we not seen such occurrences of late, mass fish die-offs along coastlines and in open oceans from the Caribbean to the Baltic, from Scotland to New Zealand and Australia? Since first recorded in 1970 ocean dead zones have been on a dramatic increase, doubling in each decade from recorded areas in the 90’s to 150 in 2003, some stretching 70,000 square kilometers. The United Nations reports over the following two years 2003–2005 estimates were of 200. In 2008 the reported figure was 417 worldwide. And could this ripple effect be three-dimensional?”

End excerpt.

Many other tipping points both in the natural systems now being disrupted by climate change and by the perpetuation of our living and business as usual lives are also foreshadowed within the pages of the book. Maybe now would be a good time to get yourself a copy HERE.