Word: globalitis
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...methane, a greenhouse gas that is 30 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, is bubbling up from the continental shelf and leaking into the atmosphere. The estimated total: 8 teragrams - that's 8 trillion grams - per year. (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...climate change, however, isn't at all certain. Eight teragrams of anything, let alone a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, sounds dangerous, but as Martin Heimann of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, points out, the newly discovered methane leak represents a small piece of the overall global total of methane emissions - about 500 teragrams annually - from wetlands, termites and agriculture (including belching cows, rotting manure and rice paddies...
...Heimann. We have satellites that do a remarkable job of observing methane emissions from land, he says, but they're not very accurate over water. So while he considers Shakhova's data absolutely convincing, he's less convinced that these emissions are necessarily new. "In the context of the global methane cycle, has this been accelerating recently, or has it been going on for some time?" Heimann says. "It may be related to recent Arctic warming, but I don't know." (See the top 10 green ideas...
...perfect example of how climate science actually works, as opposed to the cartoon version bandied about by activists and politicians: you take data, acknowledge any uncertainties about exactly what it means, then go out and take more data to narrow those uncertainties. That's exactly why human-triggered global warming was widely acknowledged to be mostly theoretical a few decades ago - and why it's considered a scientific fact today...
...pictures of the effects of global warming...