Why the jury's still out on the risk of Arctic methane catastrophe | Nafeez Ahmed | Environment | theguardian.com
Why the jury's still out on the risk of Arctic methane catastrophe Can scientists overcome huge uncertainties to pin down how close, or far, we might be to a tipping point? arctic iceberg Photograph: Delphine Star/getty images About a week ago, climate scientist Michael Tobis wrote a critique of my ' Seven facts about the Arctic methane time bomb ' following a twitter exchange with him and Chris Colose, author of an article at Skeptical Science arguing that the core scenario of a new Nature paper by Gail Whiteman et. al on the economic costs of Arctic climate change is extremely unlikely. Much of this debate kicked off because the said Nature paper advances a hypothetical scenario for an abrupt Arctic methane release over either a decade or several decades of about 50 gigatonnes (Gt), and argues specifically that such a scenario is "likely." My own attempt to understand the literature convinced me that the scenario shoul...