Siberian Methane Bomb

"It’s unlikely that the U.S. is going to take serious action on climate change until there are observable, dramatic events, almost catastrophic in nature, that drive public opinion and drive the political process in that direction."
~Robert Stavins, the head of Harvard’s Environmental Economics program:

Global Warming Methane Danger

Published by tonyleather | January 3, 2012

"Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has warned of having witnessed unprecedented volumes of the lethal greenhouse gas methane - which is 20 times as bad as carbon dioxide for heat retention –bubbling to the Arctic Ocean surface during an extensive survey there.

A Russian research team been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years, and are astounded at the scale and volume of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.
In earlier surveys, the team had found torch-like plume structures were only tens of metres wide, but this time they have discovered, for the very first time, continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 100 times bigger.
The team were even more astonished that the sheer scale and high density of the plumes was such that over 100 were discovered in a relatively small area, suggesting that there should be thousands of them throughout the arctic region
It has been estimated that the Arctic permafrost is the storeroom for possibly billions of tonnes of methane gas, locked in the frozen ground, which extends for a vast distance into the seabed of the relatively shallow East Siberian Arctic Shelf sea from the mainland.
With Arctic sea-ice disappearing at ever more rapid rates in the summer months, and the region subject to rapidly risingtemperatures, the Siberian permafrost is already melting, and should the the trapped methane be suddenly released, the atmosphere would quickly change so much that rapid and severe climate change would be inevitable.
The Russian team published a 2010 study which estimated annual methane emissions from this region at 8,000,000 tons a year, but the latest findings make this seem a gross underestimate of the real situation.
The Academician Lavrentiev research vessel carried out a ten thousand square mile survey of East Siberian coastal seas, deploying four highly sensitive seismic and acoustic instruments to monitor the methane bubbles rising to the sea surface from beneath the seabed in plumes.
Checks conducted at over one hundred stationary points revealed methane fields on a scale not seen before, with some plumes as much as a kilometre wide, the emissions going directly into the atmosphere at concentrations 100 times higher than has been normal before. It seems likely that, within 20 years the arctic will be ice-free in summer months, and even more alarmingly, that global warming has already reached the point of no return."

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FOX NEWS says it ain't so

"We have many advantages in the fight against global warming, but time is not one of them. Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge."

~JOHN MCCAIN, speech, May 12, 2008



Climate change and the methane time bomb.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Courage

One man with courage is a majority.
~Thomas Jefferson

Uploaded by PensacolaDigest on Dec 16, 2011

Father Nathan Monk tells the City Council, "We have the right to redress our government without fear of being arrested," and is nearly arrested. Read the article:

"Monk had not raised his voice or threatened anybody. He merely stated in no uncertain terms that the government violated the civil liberties of several citizens who had spoken in opposition to proposed anti-homeless ordinances earlier in the week.

The council took umbrage and had the citizens removed after they made comparisons between the ordinances and Heinrich Himmler’s Final Solution.

“As Americans, we have the right to redress our government without fear of being arrested,” said Monk. “Whether or not they’re connecting dots from Hitler to George Wallace to Barney … you should be asking, ‘well what are we doing that’s allowing people to connect those dots?’ It was a sick and gross abuse of power.”

Council President Hall interrupted Monk. “Your time is up, sit down,” he said.

“No, I have a minute and 12 seconds left,” Monk said as he glanced at the timer on the speaker’s lectern.

“I’m ruling you out of order,” Hall said.

At that point the council had cops flank Monk.

The priest was not arrested and two council members stormed off in protest of the obvious dictatorial behavior of their fellow members.

The incident is more evidence that government – from the federal government all the way down to state and local government – is increasingly out of control and often flagrantly violates the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It treats citizens like subjects to be abused, culled for “revenue enhancement,” victimized by militarized police, and taxed relentlessly." Kurt Nimmo

Infowars.com
December 19, 2011

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Income inequality in the United States is higher than in any other advanced industrial democracy

The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.
~Warren Buffett

Why The Rich are Getting Richer (Foreign Affairs)

By Robert C. Lieberman

January/February 2011

Article Summary and Author Biography

"The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams. Unemployment remains at nearly ten percent, the highest level in almost 30 years; foreclosures have forced millions of Americans out of their homes; and real incomes have fallen faster and further than at any time since the Great Depression. Many of those laid off fear that the jobs they have lost -- the secure, often unionized, industrial jobs that provided wealth, security, and opportunity -- will never return. They are probably right.

And yet a curious thing has happened in the midst of all this misery. The wealthiest Americans, among them presumably the very titans of global finance whose misadventures brought about the financial meltdown, got richer. And not just a little bit richer; a lot richer. In 2009, the average income of the top five percent of earners went up, while on average everyone else's income went down. This was not an anomaly but rather a continuation of a 40-year trend of ballooning incomes at the very top and stagnant incomes in the middle and at the bottom. The share of total income going to the top one percent has increased from roughly eight percent in the 1960s to more than 20 percent today.

This is what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call the "winner-take-all economy." It is not a picture of a healthy society. Such a level of economic inequality, not seen in the United States since the eve of the Great Depression, bespeaks a political economy in which the financial rewards are increasingly concentrated among a tiny elite and whose risks are borne by an increasingly exposed and unprotected middle class. Income inequality in the United States is higher than in any other advanced industrial democracy and by conventional measures comparable to that in countries such as Ghana, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan. It breeds political polarization, mistrust, and resentment between the haves and the have-nots and tends to distort the workings of a democratic political system in which money increasingly confers political voice and power.

It is generally presumed that economic forces alone are responsible for this astonishing concentration of wealth. Technological changes, particularly the information revolution, have transformed the economy, making workers more productive and placing a premium on intellectual, rather than manual, labor. Simultaneously, the rise of global markets -- itself accelerated by information technology -- has hollowed out the once dominant U.S. manufacturing sector and reoriented the U.S. economy toward the service sector. The service economy also rewards the educated, with high-paying professional jobs in finance, health care, and information technology. At the low end, however, jobs in the service economy are concentrated in retail sales and entertainment, where salaries are low, unions are weak, and workers are expendable...." Foreign Affairs

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