Solution, no. Semi-mitigation....possibly if it could be done, but there would be tradeoffs, it wouldn't be a simple 'now it's only CO2' solution....as if that was a solution, there's still too much CO2 too.

I'm intrigued by the engineered bacteria idea...at this point it couldn't be much worse than just releasing all the methane (OK, it could), but it's like that one time I went to the lake to bone my girlfriend, but the mosquitos were going crazy and she said there is no way. By the time people decided it was worth the risk and started developing them, it would be too late anyway, but we might mitigate the extinction event for the insects....who knows?

Um....uninhabitable for 100 years? How do you figure? It's likely that when the ocean temps rise enough, and are acidic enough, most sea life dies, sinks, rots, and releases massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide killing anything that's left.
(WIKI-Kump, Pavlov and Arthur (2005) have proposed that during the Permian–Triassic extinction event the warming also upset the oceanic balance between photosynthesising plankton and deep-water sulfate-reducing bacteria, causing massive emissions of hydrogen sulfide which poisoned life on both land and sea and severely weakened the ozone layer, exposing much of the life that still remained to fatal levels of UV radiation.)
Along with all the other damages of climate change, and the apocalypse that >7 billion people will cause on the way out, it's going to be way longer than 100 years before humans can live off nature if ever....way way longer.

We are hard to kill, but we aren't extremophiles. We'll die, or become mole people, but some other life will continue.

So Newtboy, would attempting to burn all this methane as it is released(converting to CO2) be a possible solution, assuming it was possible from an engineering point of view? Apart from that, maybe bioengineered organisms designed to eat the methane could make an impact.

I'm not hopeful, but I'm pretty sure there are enough ultra-rich people with the resources to save a small portion of humanity while the earth in uninhabitable for 100 years, that humans will not die out. Viruses are hard to kill(according to Agent Smith)

Your video, Climatologist Emotional Over Arctic Methane Hydrate Release, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

The simplest counter arguments to your dismissal are, 1) it's not a single degree, it's a number of degrees in a short time, releasing massive amounts of methane at once instead of over a few millennia. 2) it's exactly what happened 250 million years ago when climate change happened rapidly enough to release massive methane deposits in a short time frame, causing massively more climate change and a mass extinction event. Since then, there has not been the same kind of rapid mass increase in ocean temperature since the methane deposits were replaced.

It's about the speed of the temperature change, not just the amount of temperature change. Methane is short lived in the atmosphere, so if a change happened over 1000 years, the same total amount of methane might be released as a 100 year change, but only 10% of it will be in the atmosphere at a time. Consider, we've raised the temperature fast enough that the permafrost is melting at the same time as ice at the bottom of the ocean. That's a fairly unique situation that releases two enormous deposits of methane at the same time.

Our understanding does not need to be "complete" to be scientifically valid, or right. We may not know everything we need to know about the climate, but what we do KNOW is how methane reacts in the atmosphere, and how methane hydrates melt at certain temperatures/pressures, and we are near those levels in the deep oceans and permafrost areas today....so close that there are massive methane pockets bubbling out of the northern oceans and recently frozen ground worldwide.

The simplest counter argument to your catastrophic prediction is the stability of the paleo-temperature record. If there has been a methane 'time-bomb' just sitting there waiting to be set off anytime the temperature got an extra degree warmer then temperatures wouldn't be stable as they have been over the last millenia. The gradual shifts from ice-age to global rain forests wouldn't have been gradual at all, and likely wouldn't have been reversible either.

The more likely answer is our understanding of climate functions and things like just how much methane is likely to escape in a certain time frame is incomplete.

I don't know why we don't have people screaming this information on TV and the internet non-stop. I have to admit, this video was the first I had heard of how bad it actually is. If this methane releases in a burst due to seismic activity or continued ice melt, doomsday could actually happen in my lifetime.

The crazy thing is, we have multiple countries looking into under the arctic ice drilling for oil and other minerals, which could exacerbate seismic activity and/or ice melt.

These methane clathrate (methane hydrate/hydromethane) deposits have been releasing both under the ocean and from permafrost melt for years now...with the rate of their melt release increasing exponentially.
Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH4 on climate change is more than 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.
For those of you who are religious....this is the 'burning seas' you would expect from the apocalypse, because the pockets of gas coming from the ocean are highly flammable, even explosive.
This is why I have said for over a decade that there's absolutely no chance to avoid human extinction along with a world wide extinction of most of life. Once the methane started bubbling up from the sea floor, any chance of stopping the change was gone, and that was a while ago and we've done absolutely nothing but increase the amount of greenhouse gasses we produce. The ocean responds quite slowly to climate change, so there's nothing that can be done now that it's warm enough to release the methane, even if we stopped producing all greenhouse gasses today.

This is game over, people, game over. A massive methane release will have almost immediate effects and could double the entire temperature rise since the industrial revolution almost overnight. When (not if) that happens, say goodbye to nature both on land and in the seas.
The above number, 80% of life on earth vanished, is misleading. 80% of species were lost completely forever, 98% of all biomass died, so of the 20% of species that were left, only 10% of their population survived. Humanity won't.
*doublepromote
*quality

That's not just garbage burning.
Is that a methane-powered vehicle?
That looks like some sort of pressured gas fire..... (?)

Makes winter seem way more fun...but why is there methane at this lake?

Your video, Massive Methane Leak-Ecological Disaster In California, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

It's sounding like this is a 'storage facility' where natural gas, methane, and other gasses are pumped to 'storage tanks' over 8000 ft below ground (and I'm fairly certain the term 'storage tank' means 'a gas pocket we sucked dry 45 years ago', not an actual tank. This means this is not the only 'tank' at the facility, and blowing one up isn't a good idea, blowing them ALL up would be pretty disastrous, and probably release far more gas than the current disaster.

Methane being so much worse than CO2, maybe someone should light a match and help minimize the problem...

Works with farts...

They're able to keep it quiet because methane is invisible. Or it was, until now. Good on the EDF for capturing and releasing this footage.

Self *promote because HOLY CRAP!!! This hasn't even made the news here in N California, and it certainly should have.

Methane is 25 times more damaging to the atmosphere than CO2 over a 100 year period, even though it's quite short lived compared to CO2. I don't think that is taken into account when claiming 2.3% of the carbon footprint, they're just measuring the carbon by the ton. If you want to measure the damage over the next 100 years, you need to multiply tonnage of CO2 by 1, and tonnage of CH4 by 25.
CH4 makes up about 10% of greenhouse emissions in the US, making it FAR more damaging than all the CO2 we produce. An extra 21% CH4 (2.1% of all greenhouse emissions) should cause the same damage as adding something like >50% more CO2...which everyone agrees would be disastrous.
Why is this not front page, leading story news? Cover up, or just terrible and irresponsible reporting all around?

EDIT: Thanks to @eric3579 for the heads up on this story.

Yes, you did say all that, but you also said none of that is a problem, at least not one to be really worried about. To me, that sounds a lot like climate change denial 3.0, where 1.0 was 'it's not happening at all, don't panic', 2.0 was 'it's happening, but it's natural and normal, don't panic' and 3.0 is 'it's human caused, but no problem, don't panic'. All of those are arguments designed to stall, not to be correct. If I'm reading you wrong, I apologize, but I've heard that argument before from those definitely in that camp.

If the IPCC says it won't be disastrous, yes, we would disagree, because I say it already is, and so have they in their summaries of their last few reports. Just abnormal drought alone is disastrous in many places worldwide already, as is increased flooding in some areas. I did not read the entire PDF's, only what you quoted because they were only linked as downloads/files, and I don't download files from sites I don't recognize.

I linked the first google search pages that came up with water/glacial data, not the other dozen that said the same, or near the same thing, not the NOVA on glacial retreat that said the same thing, not the movie on the same topic with photographic proof of the retreats-Chasing Ice. You ignored that they did list their source for the 2/3 of Chinese cities low on water and the 50% loss of glacial mass per decade as the Chinese military and claimed they were source less so easily dismissed.
As for the diatoms and shellfish, I've seen numerous studies on them, and again just grabbed the first one that came up in a search with data. You seemed to dismiss it as well, but it's not alone. In one snail study I saw, the woman said the last few years it had become nearly impossible to get measurements because the snail shells literally turn to paste in her fingers and weighed nearly nothing! I'm glad to read now that you don't disagree that it's an issue, you only think it's not severe?

I'm not holding my breath on fusion or fission, we've heard the 'we're only 5 years away from fission/fusion' line before about as often as 'Iran is only 2 years away from having a nuclear bomb', but we can agree on wind and solar, except I say it is great for base load, you just need to pair it with micro hydro storage (pump water uphill with surplus solar/wind, then run micro hydro at night). Small solar/wind also decentralizes production, safeguarding from terrorism, and is quite cost effective. Mine paid for itself in well under 10 years.

My issue with your position is that what we do today just with CO2 production reduction won't really effect the atmosphere for 20-200 years (the accepted lifespan of 65-85% of atmospheric CO2, the remaining 15-35% takes thousands of years to be trapped) and that's only IF the ocean CO2 sink continues functioning, so we're already well past the point of avoiding moderate climate change. Without quick action, feedback loops like methane and/or ice sheets melting make the problem exponentially larger and difficult/impossible to manage at all. It may already be too late even if we cut to zero CO2 tomorrow, but it's certainly too late to avoid more, massive, unsolvable global issues if we don't even mitigate them before 2050.

Let's not get into the quagmire of global dimming from sulfur in coal actually mitigating a large part of expected global warming by reflecting sunlight. I've yet to hear a plan or study involving that variable.