Jesus is going to whisk them away from a dying planet. They are the ones who know they can't escape, so that's their GetOutOfHellFree or EscapeTheTribulation coupon.

They are told by demagogues that if they vote to restore to enforce their ancient family values on everyone and support Israel to the death, they alone, TheElect, will be spared. The rest of us can go to Hell as far as they're concerned, the sooner the better to bring the Messiah back.

The second are the Randians, who don't believe in the SuperNatural, they believe that with enough money they will take off on a private space craft or otherwise be protected from catastrophe, on their floating cities which are already in operation that will travel the seas and only dock for provisions like the pirates of old, or hide in expensive underground bunkers, also already in place. I think that Romney is among that group and is looking to the long view.

And then there are the beer swilling, flag waving Teabaggers who think nothing is ever going to change as long they do as they're told by the other two groups. You'll note that probably only the first two groups, despite their public pronouncements to the contrary, do know that something's afoot.

that warming or change that could be extreme would happen over a fairly long period of time. As an example ocean rise is talked about that a 3 inch rise would happen over 10 years. By flip I mean that there could be a 1 foot rise in a couple of years. Or that temps could get dangerously higher than they are now in just a year or two.

The fact that some event now are surprising scientists may be causing them to wonder if they couldbe wrong about their predictions.

I just wasn't sure about the phrase, but I'm hep to the possibilities for catastrophic positive-feedback.

Methane in tundra worries me the most right now.

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1967

Scientists are notably cautious. The cannot say anything that the data and their theories and models do not support. They are so used to having to account for every word in their claims, they are very reticent to go beyond the data.

The reason why they don't talk about flipping the atmosphere is that nothing they see indicated that will happen.

However, when you read between the lines of this year's climate press, it shows that the climate scientists are increasingly alarmed about the apparent acceleration of warming effects.

James Hansen is now claiming that the drought in the Midwest and other places around the world are a result of anthropogenic global warming. Two years ago, he would not have said that because "weather is not climate". The fact that climate scientists are changing their song on this is a big move in the dialog.

If they start talking about flipping, we will be in a huge amount of trouble.

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I'm very concerned.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112723047



As we reported two years ago, an international group of scientists, the Arctic Methane Emergency Group has been sailing into the Arctic waters around Norway and Russia to take samples of methane bubbling from ocean clathrates — frozen methane deposits on the sea floor. Some of their findings, very preliminary, are now making their way into the blogosphere, but like many, we await peer-review published articles or discussion in the next IPCC report — AR5 — due in 2014, before we draw hard conclusions.

EDIT

Some arctic sea regions as large as one kilometer in diameter are indeed “frothing” from massive gas releases from previously frozen CH4 deposits. Beginning in 2010, Igor Semiletov of the Russian Academy of Sciences said his research team discovered more than 100 plumes, and estimates there are “thousands” over a wider area, extending from Russian mainland to East Siberian Arctic Shelf. “Earlier we found torch-like structures, but only tens of meters in diameter. This is the first time we found continuous, powerful, impressive seeps more than 1,000 meters in diameter. It’s amazing. We carried out checks at 115 stationary points and discovered methane of a fantastic scale—on a scale not seen before,” Semiletov said.

In our March 2010 post, “Various Bubblings,” we wrote: "Of course, as we have noted here before, warmer oceans, methane from permafrost and clathrate bubblings are all tipping points that accelerate climate change and are multiplicative - 2 or 3 orders of magnitude times anthropogenic emissions, once their threshold is crossed. Earth, meet Venus. The toxic gas fireballs rolling across Kansas, destroying and poisoning everything in their path, are described in Peter Ward’s book, Under a Green Sky. As Wallace Broecker says, “The climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks.” Atmospheric CH4 concentrations have risen more in the past 4 years than in the previous 20. Methane has a much shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than CO2, but it is 50 to 70 times (in the short term 100x) more potent as greenhouse gas. It doesn’t go away when it decays, either. It oxidizes into CO2.

EDIT

A recent item from New Scientist highlighted the clathrate issue but unfortunately provided more smoke than light. The August 17 report described research led by Graham Westbrook of the University of Birmingham and Tim Minshull of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2009GL039191). Their team sailed into the west of the Svalbard archipelago, which lies north of Norway, where they found CH4 plumes being heated by the West Spitsbergen current, which has warmed 1 °C over the past 30 years. The methane being released from hydrates in the 600 km2 area added up to 27 kilotons/year, which suggests that the entire hydrate deposit around Svalbard could be releasing 20 megatonnes a year. Globally, extrapolating to all shallow, cold ocean areas, that translates to around 0.5-0.6 GtC/yr, or about 10% of fossil fuel emissions.

EDIT

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-09-04/game-over-or-overtime

Link to Arctic Methane Emergency Group: http://www.ameg.me/index.php

Link to Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (w. current CH4 data): http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html