ant, you're obviously a greenie alarmist; your links stink. Take the first one about the horror of a methane eruption from Santa Claus's backside. It typifies the disconnect from reality of alarmists. In this instance even the ultimate source of AGW agitprop, the IPCC, says a clathrate methane eruption is very unlikely [go and look at AR5-Chapter 12. Table 12.4 page 78]

And current levels of methane are decreasing:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12129.html

So we have declining CH4, as close as a disavowal of any catastrophe from CH4 as you will get from that pack at the IPCC, a biotic mechanism which keeps CH4 in check and does that stop the ratbags of AGW from yelling out, the world is going to end.

No, of course not. AGW is not science, nor even a belief; it is a pathology, a neurosis. It is so wrong that this illness has cost the world so much.

cohenite "On March 9, 2014, Arctic sea ice area was at a record low for the time of the year, at only 12.88731 square kilometers."
The Royal Society 2014 says: " As another example, Arctic warming could destabilise methane (a greenhouse gas) trapped in ocean sediments and permafrost, potentially leading to a rapid release of a large amount of methane. If such a rapid release occurred, then
major, fast climate changes would ensue."

All the evidence I have seen about methane in the Arctic region, and for that matter Antarctica, say that methane levels are increasing. You gave a reference talking about growth on the tundra,; however,the tundra is a vast area with little vegetation and in the warmer period lakes areas have been developing that were not previously there. The tundra had not been thawring to the same extent in the past during summer.
Greenland is melting at an a fast rate, there had been an article in the SMH (17/03/2014) about a huge chunk of ice breaking off allowing a speeding up of ice to move. The site below refers to "ice streams":
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/10/3237551/global-temperatures-rise-rapidly/


You might like to research methane release in the Gulf Stream as well.
Climate science deniers are a bit like terriers, snap at the heels but do little damage. The data that shows climate change has been happening through melting of the ice sheets. Climate change deniers cannot stop the ice sheets decreasing which has been the case for many years.

You said, ant, that I had not gone to all the links which you supplied.
If you say there is a link to science showing a measurable effect by human emissions on climate and specify the link, I will go to it. That is the only basis on which you can rely,to justify the assertion of AGW, and the nonsense links you have supplied, and which I have sampled, are irrelevant.

We are talking two methanes here, I think.

Prospective methane from the organic carbon decomposition, it appears, can be kept in abeyance by plant growth benefiting from nitrogen release, which may even result in nett CO2 uptake, perhaps by peat formation but this is not mentioned in cohenite's link to an abstract. However this is in the long term.

But extant methane, vast amounts tied up in clathrates especially, is another matter. Permafrost is keeping a lid on this, in the short term.

To me, cohenite's argument is like saying coal and oil will sequest carbon dioxide faster than human caused out-gassing, but kudos to him for referring to a decent information source on this occasion.

No Luci, it's not another matter; CH4 is claimed to have a much greater Greenhouse effect than CO2; but has a MUCH shorter atmospheric life than CO2 which is why this winner is grinning:

http://theclimatescepticsparty.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/clean-coal-and-gassy-money-and-wasted.html

The potential eruption of the clathrates has long been a favourite disaster scenario of the alarmists; it isn't going to happen; apart from the link I provided to the role of vegetation in mopping it up, there is no CH4 underneath the Antarctic ice sheet, which ant seems to think is the case, and in any event, the Antarctic ice sheet is INCREASING.

More importantly it was warmer over the last 3000 years in the Northern part of the globe and there was no clathrate eruption then:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379110002891

Alarmists often point to the PETM as an example of the catastrophe which can occur when CH4/CO2 is released in a 'bomb'. But no ones knows what caused the PETM and prior to and after the PETM global temp was already 10C above today's temps.

I'm really sick of these doomsday scenarios which, as I said, even the IPCC is not supporting.

Why don't the alarmists concentrate on REAL potential disaster scenarios like asteroid strikes or volcanic eruptions?

You must be a lawyer cohenite. Every thing you write is almost the opposite of what really happened. I am happy for others to read that thread where you showed you had a poor idea of what was really in Stockwell and Cox, got the explanation for Figure 3 completely wrong, despite the explanation being in the figure legend, failed to recognise that the statistical test was performed incorrectly, that the approach would result in Type I statistical errors and that all the reasoning was post hoc. But then math and statistics are clearly not your strong point.

Even your claim that the paper made waves, despite not being published, is wrong. It has been universally ignored – except by you. Predictably, the only uses of the article has been a further unpublished article by Stockwell and Cox that resides on viXra – the place where articles that are too forlorn for arXiv sit, and yet another unpublished article by Stockwell. When the authors of an article are the only ones mentioning an article, you know it has sunk without trace.

So now you claim that McKitrick made good use of the principles in Stockwell and Cox. This is also untrue. McKitrick and Voglesang, do no such thing. They took an entirely different approach whose only similarity was to come up with a step change in the temperature record at a different time. McKitrick and Vogelsang produced another version of the climate escalator http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47 What they produced makes no sense at all, as they are proposing an instantaneous increase in global temperature of 0.3 C happened in 1977 – and no one noticed at the time. Remember 1977 was the time when climate scientists were supposedly claiming the Earth was headed for an ice age.

You can take some solace cohenite from the fact that imajulianutter likes your current and referenced information, even if the rest of the world recognises it as bunk.