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

Double-Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Wednesday, July 27th, 2016 8:52am PDT - doublepromote requested by newtboy.

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by newtboy.

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.

Related :

https://robertscribbler.com/2016/07/18/scores-of-city-sized-siberian-wildfires-spew-2500-mile-long-plume-of-smoke-over-northern-hemisphere/

http://www.flassbeck-economics.com/how-climate-change-is-rapidly-taking-the-planet-apart/

Well. I won't be having any children.

Excuse me, I have to get back to my bread and circuses now.

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.

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.

Not really a counter argument, because it presumes that there has been no human based change to the climate. Human based change to the climate has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. I know people love to quote the 3% of scientists that believe there is either not enough information or that the other 97% are involved in a secret global conspiracy to make people believe in climate change, but lets be realistic. If you went to a doctor and he said there is a 97% likelihood that you will die if you do not change your lifestyle, would you be willing to bet on the 3%?

When you have people that have devoted their lives to studying a branch of science getting choked up with emotion at the likelihood that we will have a catastrophic incident in the next few decades, should you ignore them or try to come up with reasons why they might have a statistical gap of 3% of being wrong?

You can't get 100% of people to agree on anything, it's impossible simply due to human nature. But if you have a scientific result that is within a -3 percent of certainty, it's illogical to prevaricate.

I think it's more like going to 100 doctors and having 97 say you're definitely going to die soon without treatment, and 3 podiatrists who say the results aren't certain or proof positive that you have brain cancer and you should do nothing until they are 100 percent sure, because treatment is expensive.

Really even much worse than that if you stick to doctors that treat your specific disease.

Nice to know the russians still make fabulous scientists.

But maybe this is what we need ...the worlds scientists breaking down in tears.

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)

Nah man, I'm pretty sure the only option is perma-death. Game is over and then start a new game!

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.

There have been some interesting suggestions to solving the methane hydrate issue, but the none are very realistic. The closest thing to a possible plan would be that we introduce particulate, natural or man made, into the atmosphere to partially block the solar heating cycle. That would seal the methane back into the permafrost and give us time to try to reverse the effects of climate change or find another method of neutralizing it.

That is the main issue. We don't have a way to remove the methane safely. Basically the situation is primed, we have a methane bubble that is going to happen at some point, there is no stopping that without removing the methane deposits in a safe fashion.

But....we already do that.
Pollution; soot, sulfur, etc, already cause global dimming, which is exactly what you're describing, blocking 10% or more of sunlight and mitigating as much as 5%, but averaging 2-3% of warming already. I have said repeatedly that instantly switching to real clean energy would actually accelerate global warming exponentially because of this little known effect. That makes most plans to do something actually worse than doing nothing in the short term, and now in the long term too because that rapid temperature rise would absolutely accelerate methane releases (among other cycles) which starts feedback loops, possibly turning us into Venus.
Sadly, because of the size of the areas where the methane is escaping, there's no way possible to capture it. You would have to cover about 1/5 of earth with a sealed plastic sheet or something. It's not possible to tap the deposits and siphon them off, they are not centralized gas pockets for the most part.

Siberian Methane Bubbles Increasing as Permafrost melts has been added as a related post - related requested by Mordhaus on that post.