Good news, bad news
Sep. 30th, 2008 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenLast week, there was the first private spacecraft to reach orbit - SpaceX's Falcon 1. And, marginally less impressively, since they're the world's largest country and the quickest-growing economy, as opposed to Elon Musk's privately-funded company -- China's first EVA from the Shenzou VII.
"This is big-league stuff, Arthur... Be the envy of other major governments!"
The fact that Musk bankrolled this out of his own pocket is really rather impressive. Not every tech billionaire is like a kid with toys. (Beware, PPT link, but it captures the vessel's, well, awesomeness. Seven tenders! The biggest is independently registered! Two helicopters! Private submarine!)
Meantime, sadly, the maiden flight of Eve, the lifter of Scaled Composites' SpaceShip 2, has been delayed, while as of July, SS2 itself hadn't been worked on in a year, following the tragic accident that killed 3 of Scaled's staff.
But that's not the bad news I had in mind at first. That is... rather bigger.
Forward-looking environment scientists have been pointing out that the big threat is not industrial CO2 release, it's the effects of that release. One of the big ones I was expecting was that melting permafrost across the northern Arctic and subartic regions would release large amounts of methane. Permafrost is permanently-frozen soil. Because it's frozen, plant matter in the soil doesn't decay into humus - this only happens glacially (ha!) slowly in the top few centimetres in summer. Thaw the permafrost, the plant matter rots anaerobically, and releases lots and lots of methane. Millions and billions of tonnes of it, and it's 20x more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Looks like the sea-floor clathrates are going first, though. It's probably been happening for ages, but new plumes of methane are being spotted.
This is really remarkably bad news. Vegetable matter rotting in the taiga would result in slow release, by biological action. Clathrate release is physics - once the pressure drops or temperature rises, the stuff melts, basically. It happens much much faster.
If the seabed clathrates are really starting to let go, and not just being noticed because people are looking for it now, then the results could be seen in decades. The scare-mongering that the north polar icecap would be gone by 2012 might have just gone from wild extrapolation to just a bit exaggerated. After the north pole goes, Greenland follows, and then probably the thermohaline circulation stalls and all climatic hell breaks loose.
Anyone wanna buy my house? I feel a sudden yen to live up a mountain.
"This is big-league stuff, Arthur... Be the envy of other major governments!"
The fact that Musk bankrolled this out of his own pocket is really rather impressive. Not every tech billionaire is like a kid with toys. (Beware, PPT link, but it captures the vessel's, well, awesomeness. Seven tenders! The biggest is independently registered! Two helicopters! Private submarine!)
Meantime, sadly, the maiden flight of Eve, the lifter of Scaled Composites' SpaceShip 2, has been delayed, while as of July, SS2 itself hadn't been worked on in a year, following the tragic accident that killed 3 of Scaled's staff.
But that's not the bad news I had in mind at first. That is... rather bigger.
Forward-looking environment scientists have been pointing out that the big threat is not industrial CO2 release, it's the effects of that release. One of the big ones I was expecting was that melting permafrost across the northern Arctic and subartic regions would release large amounts of methane. Permafrost is permanently-frozen soil. Because it's frozen, plant matter in the soil doesn't decay into humus - this only happens glacially (ha!) slowly in the top few centimetres in summer. Thaw the permafrost, the plant matter rots anaerobically, and releases lots and lots of methane. Millions and billions of tonnes of it, and it's 20x more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Looks like the sea-floor clathrates are going first, though. It's probably been happening for ages, but new plumes of methane are being spotted.
This is really remarkably bad news. Vegetable matter rotting in the taiga would result in slow release, by biological action. Clathrate release is physics - once the pressure drops or temperature rises, the stuff melts, basically. It happens much much faster.
If the seabed clathrates are really starting to let go, and not just being noticed because people are looking for it now, then the results could be seen in decades. The scare-mongering that the north polar icecap would be gone by 2012 might have just gone from wild extrapolation to just a bit exaggerated. After the north pole goes, Greenland follows, and then probably the thermohaline circulation stalls and all climatic hell breaks loose.
Anyone wanna buy my house? I feel a sudden yen to live up a mountain.
