0.8 degree increase in 100 years. We've come from the 1915 and WW1 days when cars and planes where futuristic dreams, and not dying from tetanus or basic infections was a major concern. Today 100 years later we are thriving by comparison, in spite of the 0.8 degree increased temperature. IPCC best estimates for 2100 are about 1.5 degree increase, so another hundred years and increase that is about twice as bad. Of course, it's twice as bad as what we saw the last 100 yeas and not only survived, but thrived under. It's a problem to be sure, but it's also no catastrophe either. Switching to electric cars within 20 years will reduce emissions alot and is likely inevitable no matter what. Adopting non-emitting power is possible today if people accept nuclear as France did years ago, and would be a good idea if we could only sell environmentalists on the idea. Barring that we are waiting another 20-40 years for alternatives like solar, wind and hopefully Fusion to undercut the costs of running on coal. That said, without any special moral or government mandate we should be cutting our CO2 emissions radically long before 2100 of our own accord.

Bottom line, don't panic, it's a manageable problem and we got this. In the last 100 years we've come from not having cars or planes or space craft or computers or modern medicine to taking all those things entirely for granted. It's really hard to say that 100 years from now our descendants will be crying for their inability to cope.

See, this is why it needs to be shown the rise in joules, and a total energy rise in the entire planetary system, not just some arbitrary surface temperature rise....because people like you (no insult intended here) genuinely see the small relative figure and think...eh its no big deal.

Its a huge deal.

We are losing gigantic chunks of the otherwise permanent ice shelf in south and north arctic areas.

With those gone, we have otherwise what would have been massive mirrors, which reflect light...now acting as big old heating blankets (the water is effectively a black body to sunlight, absorbs it like no other..).

That right there is called a positive feedback loop. You start with something small, and within no time (geologically speaking), its in runaway growth.

The frozen tundra in greenland is home to enormous pockets of trapped methane....not for much longer. (source: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v8/n1/abs/ngeo2305.html)

Methane's impact on global warming (i.e. energy RETENTION within our planetary weather system) is 25 times greater than an equivalent amount of C02. (source: http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html).

Further to this video, when you heat up the ocean systems beyond a certain threshold, the natrual pumping systems which circulate warm surface water to the deeper parts of the ocean for cooling, just flat out stop working. (source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19895974), leading to the slow heat-death of a vast swath of temperatue sensitive biomes....which, when they are active and growing healthily, actually contribute to c02 depletion (carbon based lifeforms 'use up' carbon to be 'made').

...I could go on, but you see....even just a cursory glance at some of the 'smaller' impacts is pretty compelling enough to consider the phrase 'no big deal' a bit of a misnomer.

Do your research....it is catastrophic, and it is likely to happen in your lifetime (if you are under 30 atm).

Your grandchildren and great grandchildren will be living in a drastically different global environment.

No biggie though, cause we got electric cars coming online in the next 30 years or so

@charliem,

Energy is absolutely a better measure and marker of climate change than temperature. I started there since the video did. In reality though, everything in climate change is solely about the energy balance at the Top Of Atmosphere. More TOA energy in and temps go up in the long term, less and temps go down. It's the very foundation of climate change.

The climate models that your links look to for projections of things like methane thresholds are based on modelled temperature predictions. The IPCC notes the following on the state of the art in climate models:
For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The Models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL.pdf
It's in Box 9.1

So, climate models currently FAIL to predict TOA energy accurately and hand tuning is required for modelling temperatures into the known past in order to avoid unrealistic states because the TOA energy is wrong. Maybe we aught not panic just yet on extrapolations from that base. I'm not calling climate models garbage, rather they are a learning tool for climate processes and one lesson is that we have a long ways to go in understanding the central component of TOA energy balance. If you go to google scholar and lookup the references from the IPCC assertions you'll find that the modellers acknowledge that most models still either leak or create energy from nothing. As in, even conservation of energy is imperfect in them still.

Your cursory glance approach is a problem, the devil is in the details.

Looking at energy further from NASA's numbers also tells us that the net contribution to TOA energy trapping from the CO2 we've added in the last 100 years is about 3W/m-2 globally. The global TOA energy imbalance is about 0.5W/M-2. In other words, if we could magically remove all the CO2 we've added to the atmosphere, we'd suddenly have a global energy imbalance at TOA of -2.5W/M-2. That brings two things to mind.
1.The enormous energy imbalance you want to call a catastrophe is 0.5W/M-2, but merely rolling back to 1900 CO2 concentrations today would yield a negative energy imbalance 5 times as large.
2.Of the 3W/M-2 that our actions have pushed on the planet, natural factors(warming and other unknowns) have already balance out 2.5W/M-2 of the imbalance, today.

You also might wanna check how much energy is in the oceans on the whole. If you take the increase in energy as a percentage of OCH instead of straight joules you'll find the trend is << than 1% annually.

Wait, wait, wait

@charliem,

Please correct me if I'm wrong on this as I can't get to the full body of the article you linked for methane, but here's the concluding statement from the abstract:
We conclude that the ice-free area of northeast Greenland acts as a net sink of atmospheric methane, and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under future warmer climatic conditions.

Now, unless there is a huge nuanced wording that I'm missing, sinks in this context are things that absorb something. A methane sink is something that absorbs methane. More over, if the sink is enhanced by warming, that means it will absorb MORE methane the warmer it gets. So it's actually the opposite of your claim and is actually a negative feedback mechanism as methane is a greenhouse gas and removing it as things warmers and releasing it as things cool is the definition of a negative feedback.

There MUST be a miswording there, or bold faced, outright lie.
As temperatures rise, frozen underwater methane (methyl hydrate)is melted and RELEASED, not trapped. Not only that, as the ice on land disappears, it exposes permafrost that, as it melts, also emits methane. It's been happening for a while now, and is accelerating. Methane is FAR more damaging to the atmosphere than CO2, for longer times, so once this cycle takes off, we can expect exponential increase in the temperature rise.
It's POSITIVE feedback loop, not a negative one.
EDIT: Perhaps they mean when the Atlantic currents are disrupted and the lower ocean becomes colder...at that point it will have the ability to store more methane, but not the ability to capture it from the atmosphere since the upper ocean will be far warmer.
As for your misunderstanding of CO2, removing all CO2 production tomorrow won't remove any in the atmosphere, it will be there for quite some time before it could be absorbed in the ocean/forests, and that time period extends daily as the ocean becomes more acidic (making it impossible for diatoms to use the CO2 to make their shells) and the forests are removed. Once the ocean stops absorbing CO2, even the amount naturally created will be far too much for the atmosphere, and temps/CO2 levels will still rise even if we produce absolutely none. The tipping point was in the 70s-80s when we could have stopped CO2 production and made a difference. Now, it's too late unless we find a way to trap CO2 and keep it trapped. The systems are quite slow to react.
As for people "thriving", that's just ridiculous. There's been a food shortage world wide for quite some time now. The water shortage is becoming a bigger threat, and that's expected to increase exponentially as glaciers, snow packs, and aquifers rapidly disappear. Ocean harvests have drastically decreased, as have natural foods. We are thriving in the same way locusts 'thrive' when they swarm...but note that 99.9% of them die of starvation in the end.

@newtboy,
as the ice on land disappears, it exposes permafrost that, as it melts, also emits methane.

More from charliem's article's abstract:
Arctic tundra soils serve as potentially important but poorly understood sinks of atmospheric methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Numerical simulations project a net increase in methane consumption in soils in high northern latitudes as a consequence of warming in the past few decades3, 6. Advances have been made in quantifying hotspots of methane emissions in Arctic wetlands7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear.

The article he linked IS saying that they've identified regions up north where the soil absorbs more methane the warmer it gets. They note this is a relatively unknown area as opposed to northern regions that emit methane. Charliem just didn't read the reference he pulled out at is it is counter evidence to his and your own statements.

As for your point:
As for your misunderstanding of CO2, removing all CO2 production tomorrow
I never said anything about that, I said:
if we could magically remove all the CO2 we've added to the atmosphere
As in I was talking about not merely ending our emissions, but also sequestering and pulling out of the atmosphere all the CO2 lingering there from us over the last century as well. That's pushing CO2 concentrations back down from nearly 400 to under 300. Re-read my statements in the correct context and they'll make more sense.
As for people "thriving", that's just ridiculous. There's been a food shortage world wide for quite some time now.
Again, context matters doesn't it? I'm describing how a person from 1915 would not look at our world today and wish they could go back to their time, end all CO2 emissions and avoid the catastrophic consequences we're suffering in 2015. If you want to talk about food distribution, your right and we've had problems with it forever. If you want to talk food production though, it's never been higher, if you go look at global agriculture output it's a steady increasing line as surely as the instrumental temperature record.

For the record, I absolutely state that the evidence throughout the entire instrumental record is a warming planet since records began in 1900. I absolutely state that the evidence is irrefutable that CO2 contributes to warming. I absolutely state the the evidence is irrefutable that we are raising global CO2 concentrations with our actions. Where I diverge from those like you is I do NOT see the scientific evidence declaring the results are catastrophic. It's simply not there to be found, in many cases it is in fact contrary to the limited evidence we DO have on it as well.

@newtboy,

Oh, and thanks for the 'I disagree with your opinion' down vote, that's super.

Perhaps in some minor 'unknown' areas for unknown reasons that could be true, but overall it's far from true. The rotting material creates exponentially more methane than any mechanism could trap. You and they don't even mention the mechanism that traps methane at all, the methane being released is from bacteria eating thawed organic material.

EDIT: Actually, your study quote did not say that "they've identified regions up north where the soil absorbs more methane the warmer it gets"...it said "numerical simulations predict" they exist, "but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear." This means places where methane capture outpaces release, or happens at all, have not been found-'location unclear'.

OK, you did say 'if we magically remove all the CO2 we've ever produced' (ignoring methane and other greenhouse gasses) in your second post. I missed the 'magic removal' part. My mistake, but that makes it a silly argument since we can't do magic. If we could, there would be no problem....and if I crapped diamonds I would be rich.

Well, in the context of talking to a person from 1912, if you explained to them that the 'progress' (by which I guess you mean population explosion and technical advancements) of the last century comes at the cost of the environment, nature, and may destroy the planet over the next century (at least for human survival), I would bet anyone with an IQ of 90+ will say 'selling (or even gambling) our permanent future for temporary industrial progress is a terrible idea, no thanks'.

Well, you must see that some of that great 'food production' is actually corn and grain for livestock, bio fuels, palm oils, etc., not human food stuffs. In order to make that 'food', forests are destroyed, removing entire eco systems that provided 'bush taco' (natural foods) which wasn't included in the equations about overall food production. Food HARVESTS of natural foods have declined rapidly worldwide, just look at the ocean. It may be unfishable in 15-20 years at current acidification rates. Kill the base of the food web, and the web falls apart. It's a rare place today that can support a human population without industrial agriculture and food importation, both of which have failed to solve starvation issues to date.

You can only be ignoring that data about it being catastrophic. I referenced it earlier. Just to mention ONE way, by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage. In most cases, there's absolutely no way to fix this. For instance, Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade, and that rate is expected to continue to accelerate. With no water, industrial agriculture fails instantly, and people die in 3 days or so. There's NO solution for this disaster, not a plan, not an idea, nothing. There are already immigration problems worldwide, how to solve that when the immigration increases exponentially everywhere?

The downvote was not for your opinion, it was for your dangerously mistaken estimations and conclusions, and insistence that, contrary to all human history and all scientific evidence, this time humans will find and implement a working solution to the problem in time (already too late IMO) that's not worse than the problem was, and so we should not be bothered by the coming massive shortages and upheaval that comes with them, because somehow in that upheaval we'll find and implement massive global solutions to currently insurmountable issues. We can't even slow down the rate of increase in CO2 emissions, it's unbelievable to think we'll turn that to a negative number in 20-30 years even if the tech is invented (which still leaves us in Mad Max times at best, IMO), much more so to think we could erase 100 years of emissions in that time. EDIT:...and I find that kind of dangerous unrealistic suggestion insulting.

@newtboy,

How about great big citation needed. Your making a lot of assertions and about zero references to back anything, your just one step shy of claiming because I say so as your proof.

The rotting material creates exponentially more methane than any mechanism could trap.
Citation required.

your study quote did not say that "they've identified regions up north where the soil absorbs more methane the warmer it gets
The abstract is only a paragraph and the charliem gave the link up thread, just go and read it already, they did numerical estimates AFTER going in and directly measuring the actual affects. And I must additionally add, it's not MY link but was instead the ONLY claimed evidence in thread of your catastrophic methane release.

Let me start us off, the IPCC once again summarizes your problem as follows:
However modelling studies and expert judgment indicate that CH4 and CO2 emissions will increase under Arctic warming, and that they will provide a positive climate feedback. Over centuries, this feedback will be moderate: of a magnitude similar to other climate–terrestrial ecosystem feedbacks
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter06_FINAL.pdf
From FAQ 6.1

There are caveats prior to the above quote about unknowns and uncertainty and the possibility the affects will be less or more, but the consensus is, don't panic. Like I said.

As for bringing that person from 1915 in today, you don't get to tell them the environment will be destroyed 100 years from 2015 in the year 2100 as a result. You have to prove that first, which you have merely asserted, not proven. On the other hand, my evidence was bringing our visitor from the past showing them the year 2015, and the consequences of rising global temperatures by 0.8C since his time in 1915. Then I say we ask him if abandoning coal power, airplanes, satellites, and cars to prevent that warming is a better alternate future he should go back and sell the people of 1915 on. I'm thinking that's gonna be a hard sell. I'm additionally pointing out that the IPCC projections for the next 100 years is 1.5C warmer than today, so we'll be going up by 1.5 instead of the 0.8 our visitor from the past had to choose. The trick is, I don't see how you can claim that panic should be the natural and clear response. You need a lot more evidence, which as stated above you've failed to provide, and more over what you've posited is contrary to the science as presented by researchers like those at the IPCC.

It may be unfishable in 15-20 years at current acidification rates.
citation needed.

by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage.
citation needed, and you need to tie it to human CO2 and not human guns and violence creating the misery.

Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade
citation needed

The downvote was not for your opinion, it was for your dangerously mistaken estimations and conclusions...
, says you. If you don't use any evidence to refute me it's still called your opinion...

OK
#1. Your study quote which said no mechanism had been discovered.
#2. "but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear."...LOCATION UNCLEAR MEANS NOT FOUND.
#3...this does not make sense, "this feedback will be moderate: of a magnitude similar to other climate–terrestrial ecosystem feedbacks" is self contradictory, since many terrestrial ecosystem feedbacks are NOT moderate...depending on the definition of "moderate". If less than 10 deg C is moderate, then they're right.
#4. You can tell them 98%+ of scientists in the field of climatology say side effects of industry/technology will cause "X" at a minimum in 100 years, and it has already caused "Y" (warming, weather changes, ocean acidification, environmental pollution, rising cancer rates, water shortages, other indisputable factors), send him back with proof of those effects, and I think same result..."no thanks".

I misunderstood I guess. If you did that, he would just be in a rubber room for claiming to be a time traveler, not seen as a visionary. ;-) If he could offer proof of the time travel, the state of the planet, and the environmental trends showing every issue is seemingly getting worse leading to cluster f*ck, it would not be a hard sell in the least, IMO. At least not to people with an IQ over 90. You don't have to abandon all those things (coal, yes), you would just have to design them better. Electric cars were often the norm before Ford in towns. Planes might be electric dirigibles, and satellites might be put in orbit by rail guns.
If you don't think 1/3 of the planet's population (a reasonable guess if water shortages continue the current trend) being migrant doesn't warrant 'panic' (which I never suggested, I will say it warrants concern even by those in the '1st' world) then I don't know what to tell you.
Citations:
#1. It may be unfishable in 15-20 years (I was off by 5 years) at current acidification rates.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/05/climate-change-threatens-crucial-marine-algae/
"By 2040, most of the Arctic Ocean will be too acidic for shell- forming species including most plankton. Significant areas of the Antarctic Ocean will be similarly affected, oceanographer Carol Turley from Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK previously told IPS."

#2. by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage.
http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/water/interesting-water-facts/
"Unless we change our ways, two-thirds of the world’s population will face water scarcity by 2025"

#3. Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade
http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/water/interesting-water-facts/
"Rapid melting will reduce the Tibetan glaciers by 50 percent every decade, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences
More than two-thirds of Chinese cities face water shortages"

@newtboy

#1 and #2, fine, if you won't go there to read it's now pasted in full for you:
Arctic tundra soils serve as potentially important but poorly understood sinks of atmospheric methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Numerical simulations project a net increase in methane consumption in soils in high northern latitudes as a consequence of warming in the past few decades3, 6. Advances have been made in quantifying hotspots of methane emissions in Arctic wetlands7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear. Here, we present measurements of rates of methane consumption in different vegetation types within the Zackenberg Valley in northeast Greenland over a full growing season. Field measurements show methane uptake in all non-water-saturated landforms studied, with seasonal averages of − 8.3 ± 3.7 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in dry tundra and − 3.1 ± 1.6 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in moist tundra. The fluxes were sensitive to temperature, with methane uptake increasing with increasing temperatures. We extrapolate our measurements and published measurements from wetlands with the help of remote-sensing land-cover classification using nine Landsat scenes. We conclude that the ice-free area of northeast Greenland acts as a net sink of atmospheric methane, and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under future warmer climatic conditions.

#3, regardless of if it make's sense to you, and regardless of if it means a 10C warming by 2100, the IPCC scientists collaborative summary says it anyways. If you want to claim otherwise it's you opposing the science to make things seem worse than they are, not me.

#4, To tell them those things would sound like this. The IPCC current best estimates from climate models project 2100 to be 1.5C warmer than 2000. This has already resulted in 2000 being 0.8C warmer than 1900. Summer arctic sea ice extent has retreating significantly is the biggest current impact. By 2100 it is deemed extremely unlikely that the Greenland and Antarctic iccesheets will have meaningfully reduced and there is medium confidence that the warming will actually expand Antarctic ice cover owing to increased precipitation from the region. That's the results and expectations to be passed on from the 5th report from an international collaboration of scientists. Whether that fits your world view or not doesn't matter to the scientific evidence those views are founded on and supported by.

You said the ocean's may be unfishable in 20 years, and the best support you came up with was a news article quote claiming that by 2040 most of the Arctic would be too acidic for Shell forming fish. Cherry picked by the news article that also earlier noted that was dependent on CO2 concentrations exceeding 1000ppm in 2100, and even that some forms of plankton under study actually faired better in higher acidity in some case. In a news article that also noted that the uneven distribution of acidity makes predicting the effects very challenging. If news articles count as evidence I then want to claim we'll have working fusion power to convert to in 5 years time from Lockheed Martin. I'll agree with your news post on one count, the world they talk about, where CO2 emissions continue accelerating year on year, even by 2100, is bad. It's also a bit hard to fathom with electric cars just around the corner, and if not solar and wind, fusion sometime before then too, that we'll still be using anywhere near today's emissions let alone still accelerating our use.

by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage.
And you link to a blog, and a blog that provides exactly zero references to any scientific sources for the claim. Better yet, even the blog does NOT claim that the access to water will be limited because of climate change, the blog even mentions multiple times how other forms of pollution are destroying huge amounts of fresh water(again with zero attributions).

Here's the IPCC best estimates for 2100 impacts regionally:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter14_FINAL.pdf

You'll find it's a largely mixed bag if you can be bothered to read what the actual scientists are predicting. Just bare in mind they regularly note that climate models still have a lot of challenges with accurate regional estimates. I guess your blogger isn't hindered by such problems though. If you don't want to bother I'll summarize for you and note they observe a mixed bag of increased precipitation in some regions, notably monsoons generally increasing, and other areas lowering, but it's all no higher than at medium confidences. But hey, why should uncertainty about 2100 prevent us from panicking today about more than half the world losing their drinking water in 10 years. I'll make you a deal, in ten years we can come back to this thread and see whether or not climate change has cause 2/3 of the world to lose their drinking water already or not. I'm pretty confident on this one.

Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade
Lost 50% since 2005? That'd be scary, oh wait, you heard that from the same blog you say? I've got a hunch maybe they aren't being straight with you...
Here are a pair of links I found in google scholar to scientific articles on the Himalaya's glaciers:
http://cires1.colorado.edu/~braup/himalaya/Science13Nov2009.pdf
I you can't be bothered to read:
Claims reported in the popular press that Siachin has shrunk as much as 50% are simply wrong, says Riana, whose report notes that the glacier has "not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years" Which looks likely that your blogger found a popular press piece about that single glacier and then went off as though it were fact, and across the entire mountain range .

http://indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/glaciers%20and%20climate.pdf
Here's another article noting that since 1962 Himalayan glacier reduction is actually about 21%.

If you go back and read the IPCC links I gave earlier you can also find many of the regional rivers and glaciers in India/East China are very dependent on monsoons and will persist as long as monsoons do. Which the IPCC additionally notes are expected to, on the whole, actually increase through 2100 warming.

I've stated before up thread that things are warming and we are the major contribution, but merely differed from your position be also observing the best evidence science has for predictions isn't catastrophic. That is compounded by high uncertainties, notably that TOA energy levels are still not able to be predicted well. The good news there is the latest IPCC estimated temps exceed the observed trends of both temperature and TOA imbalance, so there's reason for optimism. That's obviously not license for recklessly carrying on our merry way, as I've noted a couple times already about roads away from emissions that we are going to adopt one way or another long before 2100.

Time for large scale desalination factories all along the worlds coastline.

@newtboy,

I also noticed my point on CO2 forcing was missed earlier in thread still, I'll try one last time to express this.

In 1900 CO2 concentrations were under 300ppm, today they are nearly 400ppm. Climate model estimates place the impact of that extra 100ppm of CO2 as increasing the TOA energy imbalance by 3W/m-2. Observations of TOA energy imbalance are well agreed that the net imbalance is 0.5W/m-2. That means that natural processes(likely largely the 0.8C warming we've already had) have already cancelled out 2.5W/m-2 of that 3W/m-2. That is to say, 83% of the impact of increased CO2 concentrations has already been balanced out to date. How long it takes to get that all the way to 100% is part of the problems that climate models are trying to solve, but regrettably it's tied to TOA energy so models still don't have a great deal of veracity yet on that for us. Still, it's reason for a lot less gloom and doom than so many are calling for.

Interestingly with my global journal access through academia, not anywhere is the article I linked shown as peer reviewed media accessible through the common university publications...must just be a nature journal thing to want to rort people for money no matter what their affiliation.

At first glance, I read this article to mean that the area is a sink in so far as it contains a large quantity of methane, and its 'consumption' or 'uptake' rates are shown in negative values...indicating a release of the gas.

In checking peer reviewed articles through my academic channels, I come across many that are saying pretty much the same deal, heres a tl;dr from just one of them;

"Permafrost covers 20% of the earth's land surface.
One third to one half of permafrost, a rich source of methane, is now within 1.0° C to 1.5° C of thawing.
At predicted rates of thaw, by 2100 permafrost will boost methane released into the atmosphere 20% to 40% beyond what would be produced by all other natural and man-made sources.
Methane in the atmosphere has 25 times the heating power of carbon dioxide.
As a result, the earth's mean annual temperature could rise by an additional 0.32° C, further upsetting weather patterns and sea level."

Source: Methane: A MENACE SURFACES. By: Anthony, Katey Walter, Scientific American, 00368733, Dec2009, Vol. 301, Issue 6

Perhaps you amateur climate scientists could pay attention to the what the scientists say that study this issue. The consequences are serious. The effects are starting now. There are many positive feedback loops. We are driving the climate to a state it has not been in for the past several million years. (Oh, and that 'atomic bomb per second' is about 280kt/s these days.)

Again, I can't seem to pull up the full text of your article through google scholar. Even your summary though states an additional warming contribution of 0.3C by 2100. Sorry, but I don't class that as catastrophic. What's more, simply doing a google scholar search for articles on "permafrost methane climate" and taking the first four full articles give the following, with absolutely zero effort taken to pluck out ones that support my particular claim:

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/2/4/045016/fulltext/
According to our results, by mid-21st century the annual net flux of methane from Russian permafrost regions may increase by 6–8 Mt, depending on climatic scenario. If other sinks and sources of methane remain unchanged, this may increase the overall content of methane in the atmosphere by approximately 100 Mt, or 0.04 ppm, and lead to 0.012 °C global temperature rise.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010RG000326/full
It's a more sweeping assessment so it doesn't have a nice short quotable for our particular point. It's most concise point is in Figure 7 which I'm not sure how to link into here as an image. You can check for yourself though that even the highest error margins on methane releases touch natural emissions till long, long after 2100, matching the IPCC millenial timescale statement I cited earlier.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2003GL018680/full
A detailed study of one mire show that the permafrost and vegetation changes have been associated with increases in landscape scale CH4 emissions in the range of 22–66% over the period 1970 to 2000.

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/36/14769.full
We attempted to incorporate in this study some of the latest mechanistic understanding about the mechanisms controlling soil CO2 respiration and wetland CH4 emissions, but uncertainties remain large, due to incomplete understanding of biogeochemical and physical processes and our ability to encapsulate them in large-scale models. In particular, small-scale hydrological effects (36) and interactions between warming and hydrological processes are only crudely represented in the current generation of terrestrial biosphere models. Fundamental processes such as thermokarst erosion (37) or the effects of drying on peatland CO2 emissions (e.g., ref. 38) are lacking here, causing uncertainty on future high-latitude carbon-climate feedbacks. In addition, large uncertainty arises from our ability to model wetland dynamics or the microbial processes that govern CH4 emissions, and in particular how the complicated dynamics of permafrost thaw would affect these processes.

The control of changes in the carbon balance of terrestrial regions by production vs. decomposition has been explored by a number of authors, with differing estimates of whether vegetation or soil changes have the largest overall effect on carbon storage changes (39–41). These results demonstrate that with the inclusion of two well-observed mechanisms: the relative inhibition of respiration by soil freezing (42) and the vertical motion in Arctic soils that buries old but labile carbon in deeper permafrost horizons, which can be remobilized by warming (3), the high-latitude terrestrial carbon response to warming can tip from near equilibrium to a sustained source of CO2 by the mid-21st century. We repeat that uncertainties on these estimates of CO2 and CH4 balance are large, due to the complexity of high-latitude ecosystems vs. the simplified process treatment used here.

And I was able to find the full PDF for your own original sink on the subject:
here
We conclude that the ice-free area of
northeastGreenland acts as a net sink of atmosphericmethane,
and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under
future warmer climatic conditions.

All of the above seem to fairly well corroborate my earlier citation to the IPCC's own summary of the current knowledge on permafrost and northern methane impact on future warming:
However modelling studies and expert judgment indicate that CH4 and CO2 emissions will increase under Arctic warming, and that they will provide a positive climate feedback. Over centuries, this feedback will be moderate: of a magnitude similar to other climate–terrestrial ecosystem feedbacks
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter06_FINAL.pdf
From FAQ 6.1

If you want to more simply claim that there exist studies, with noted high uncertainties, that under the worst case emission scenarios that show a possible significant release of methan prior to 2100 and possible catatrophic releases after, then I agree. If you want to claim that the consensus is we are facing catastrophe in our lifetime, as your first post claimed, then I most point to the overwhelming scientific evidence linked above that simply does not agree, once again chosen at random and with no effort to cherry pick only results that match what I want. I must note I lack surprise though as the IPCC had already been claiming the same of the literature and existing evidence.

pay attention to the what the scientists say that study this issue.
Thank you, that's been exactly my point in linking to the IPCC about 5-6 times already and more than a dozen other peer reviewed articles on the subject.
The consequences are serious.
Serious is different than catastrophic so depending on the definition of serious I'd agree. If we start to significantly reduce our emissions by about 2050 we track with the IPCC 4.5 scenario which is manageable through mitigation measures, accelerating emissions still to 2100 though is madness.

I'll just say I must expect if you're so certain, you must put your money where your mouth is, and are looking seriously into buying as much beach front property in Vanuatu as possible. Your mind is made up that there's no issue of ocean warming, rising, and/or acidification, so of course you will be taking advantage of those islanders that have been 'tricked' by the climate change frauds (oh, and also tricked by that water in their homes, the loss of snails, shellfish, fish, and the destruction of their reefs), and you'll be buying their properties at reduced rates, because the ocean rising is a fraud and you'll make a mint when everyone sees the 'truth' in 30 years...right? I have put my money where my mouth is, I have solar, I grow (most of) my own food, and I'm building a water catchment system.
Pay attention to what the scientists say, yes...but don't put too much stake in any single statement by any single group. Take the science as a whole, discard the crazed outliers, then examine and compare the remainder. After doing that, I always find that things are getting worse faster than nearly any study suggested it would, certainly more than the public 'consensus', in numerous ways that often re-enforce each other, and in ways that often were hidden under older study methods (such as the Greenland ice sheet, which is not only moving far faster than expected, but is also losing density much faster than expected, meaning older methods of measuring glaciers by size no longer apply...or the heating of the ocean where so much heat was 'hidden' in deep water, not found until recently so claimed to not exist, or the theory that certain diatoms might do better in acidic CO2 saturated water, but they found that that was wrong because in reality low light due to turbidity more than erased any positive effect.)

Today, one can find a 'study' to show anything one wishes, complete with scientists, data, conclusions, and affluent backers. The study you quote actually claimed that there will not be a loss of ice cover in Greenland and/or Antarctica, contrary to current conditions where there already IS loss of ice cover and it's accelerating exponentially. If you wish to believe that simply slowing the rate at which we increase the amount of CO2 we create by 2050 is going to solve the issues, (issues that will be totally disastrous by then by most estimations, for tens of millions it already IS disastrous) I've got some swamp land to sell you in Florida. The same goes for if you believe China and India are going to DECREASE their emissions. To date, they have done nothing but ignore their own additions to climate change as far as their energy production is concerned, they have not put extra money into 'clean' energy, but instead consistently go for the cheap, but dirty methods. There's no reason to believe this will change in the next 35 years as they ramp up their energy use to first world levels, that goes double if people are convinced (as you seem to be) that there's really no big problem with the climate, nothing to worry about, and any small inconvenience will be solved by technology and intelligent governments doing the right thing, even though it's the more expensive thing that they normally avoid like the plague. Unfortunately, history does not show that this is how people or governments operate.

@newtboy
Your mind is made up that there's no issue of ocean warming, rising, and/or acidification, so of course you will be taking advantage of those islanders that have been 'tricked' by the climate change frauds (oh, and also tricked by that water in their homes, the loss of snails, shellfish, fish, and the destruction of their reefs), and you'll be buying their properties at reduced rates, because the ocean rising is a fraud and you'll make a mint when everyone sees the 'truth' in 30 years...right?

Well, I have to say that you'd have me beat if I'd said any of that...
I've already stated the planet is warming.
I've already stated that CO2 is rising.
I've already stated we are responsible for the CO2 rise.
I've already stated that the CO2 rise has caused the TOA energy imbalance.
I've already stated that TOA energy imbalance is causing temp rise.
It seems redundant, but I'll spell it out more as it seems you don't understand me.
The Ocean's are warming, they are in fact absorbing alot more energy than the rest of the planet, as water does that alot more quickly than air.
The additional CO2 is acidifying the ocean's, that's once again HS chemistry.
Sea level is rising, and has been for the last century or more at a relatively consistent and steady rate, and no doubt again is because of the energy increase/warming.
Shell fish and coral reefs are dependent on acidity levels in the oceans and shifts absolutely will impact them.

Now, with that all on the table, where my opinion diverges from yours is when you state:
by 2050 is going to solve the issues, (issues that will be totally disastrous by then by most estimations, for tens of millions it already IS disastrous)

I've pointed out the severity, as assessed by an international body of relevant experts in the IPCC, disagrees starkly with your opinion. The scientific community simply does not assign disastrous results right now for tens of millions from climate change, I'm sorry but that is contrary to the science. The scientific community simply does not predict the severity of these consequences to be disastrous by 2100, let alone your claimed 2050.

You've linked to blogs and a news blurp, and I've responded with direct links to the IPCC affirming my position, and at least a dozen scientific journal articles corroborating their position. If you want to claim any actual scientific veracity to your position back it up or lay off mis quoting and misrepresenting what I've claimed to try and make cheap points burning a strawman.

Or maybe we tackle this from 180 degrees.

As opposed to what is happening, or how likely, we may find common ground on what it is we should actually be doing.

I've already made the suggestion of electric vehicles and fission, fusion or renewables in place of coal as the road away from emissions. Specifically improving li-ion batteries as Tesla is doing is a major step. Researching sodium-oxygen batteries would be even better as they can hold 4-5 times the power and have cheaper materials and recent results have us close to making them viable, so I'd like to see gov money directed there.

For power solar and wind are currently only cost-competitive because the scale is small enough that we get away with treating coal plants like giant batteries covering our baseline. They simply aren't cost effective to scale up for base load yet, and not likely to be for another 10-20 years. We can have a lot of nuclear plants built in that time. With electric cars coming into the picture, we're also going to need that extra electric capacity. I again would strongly encourage more gov money going into French style large scale nuclear power deployment. China's already doing it, even they've had enough of their current coal literally blocking the sun in the sky on them and nuclear is part of their clean air push. We should be encouraging that and following suit out this way.

I also wasn't kidding about Lockheed-Martin's fusion research. A lot of new ideas are out there for fusion confinement plans and Lockheed has publicly declared their intentions to have a demonstration reactor in 5 years time. I'm hopeful, and if that pans out, the roll out of truly cheap and clean power will start in the next decade for the sole reason that fusion under cuts coal for price.

Part of me reason for these measures versus more drastic ones is we need to keep our economies growing because regardless of what we do the next 30 years, the oceans will continue rising that entire time and the mitigation measures we're going to gradually be spending more and more on are gonna required us to have the money to do them.

If anybody's got better suggestions I'm all ears.

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.

ExxonMobil had the Bush administration lobbying strongly to replace the chair of the IPCC with a more agreeable alternative, which we know about because of a leaked memo. So let us not pretend that the IPCC are above the skepticism of being politically influenced. The name "intergovernmental panel" says it all, in my opinion; i had assumed the I stood for Independent.

I don't apologise for not reading the entire thread because i noticed that in your first post you said the following, and it gave me cause to doubt your take on the science in the rest of the thread. I've been in too many discussions in which i spent hours researching only to find out people were completely wrong, and i spent 45 mins on your first paragraph already. Anyway here is the quote again:

"IPCC best estimates for 2100 are about 1.5 degree increase, so another hundred years and increase that is about twice as bad. Of course, it's twice as bad as what we saw the last 100 yeas and not only survived, but thrived under."

Firstly, the planet's flora and fauna have most certainly NOT thrived during that time. Humans have flourished by exploiting nature, so yes we have 'thrived'. In the same way that if i were to steal money from a dozen old ladies, i might say i was thriving even though i was out of work during the economic downturn. Pretty much every source agrees that the one thing the ecosystem is not doing is thriving - we are in or on the verge of the sixth mass extinction on the planet. So this is an inspiring yet futile "hurrah for us!" bravado that ignores the truth; we stand on the deck of a galleon around a big bonfire, ripping up planks and chopping up the boat, throwing it on the fire and going "we're all lovely and warm!" as we sit lower and lower in the water.

Secondly and in my opinion most significantly, according to the IPCC conclusions on page 8 you have used the term "best estimates" to mean "best case scenario" rather than "most reliable estimate" - which is why i have downvoted that comment, as it is misleading and incorrect. I would say it's cynically misleading, but i suspect you've lifted that from a cynical source rather than being cynical yourself.

I don't know if you realise, but you referred to only one result out of four, the rest of which strongly indicate a greater than 2 degree rise. Your reference is to RCP 2.6 which assumes CO2 emissions peak between 2010 and 2020. A decade in which the most populous countries on the planet are developing and a decade in which we must start to reduce global emissions so that we have a good chance of your best case scenario happening. We are already half way through it, and according to Mauna Loa observatory and every other source i could find (including EPA, NOAA and IEA) we are still increasing our CO2 emissions year on year including this year, where we've broken the 400ppm milestone, 120ppm greater than pre industrial times, half of which occured since 1980 (Pieter Tans).

So in fairness, you might have underplayed the IPCC report (which you seem to get almost all of your information from) in as much as newtboy might have overestimated the dangers and rapidity of climate change. I think you're out on a limb by telling him that the scientific community disagrees with him and he's using dodgy sources, when you've cherry picked one quarter of a conclusion from one source (the IPCC) to argue for your best case scenario which you refer to (unscientifically and incorrectly) as the "best estimate".

However, i do at least appreciate that despite your doubts (and in my opinion, slight confusion over the results, i don't think you're being intentionally misleading) you are very much behind changing our behaviour and using resources that are more appropriate... and that's what really matters right now is that people recognise the need to change.

@dannym3141,
tl;dr is always the risk when trying to also provide actual backing to something complicated, I understand the temptation, but by skipping over what I've said you've not understood me.

On the IPCC scenario, I used the RCP4.5 scenario, the one that is most widely quoted by them as their best estimate. It also the estimate they use when comparing model projections to observations, and the observations track well within it's error margins, albeit on the lower end of the RCP4.5 spectrum.
The IPCC says on temperatures by scenario in Chapter 12 of AR5:
global mean surface temperatures for 2081–2100, relative to 1986–2005 will likely be in the 5 to 95% range of the CMIP5 models; 0.3°C to 1.7°C (RCP2.6), 1.1°C to 2.6°C (RCP4.5), 1.4°C to 3.1°C (RCP6.0), 2.6°C to 4.8°C (RCP8.5). Global temperatures averaged over the period 2081–2100 are projected to likely exceed 1.5°C above 1850-1900 for RCP4.5
My sighting of 1.5C for 'best' from IPCC is derived from classing the 4.5 scenario as their best guess and I disagree with you that I'm materially misrepresenting or understanding them on it.

You also said:
... let us not pretend that the IPCC are above the skepticism...
Then later
I don't apologise for not reading the entire thread
I understand the thread is long, if you go back though you'll find I've made numerous references to additional peer-review journal articles backing and corroborating claims from the IPCC to make sure I'm not just cherry picking what might have been a politicized summary or assessment. So forgive, me but when you conclude with :
when you've cherry picked one quarter of a conclusion from one source
You are simply put, flat wrong.

Would you mind weighing in with your own position rather than a simply sitting on the fence calling us both too far on either side? I've been here refuting the notion that the scientific evidence tells us we face catastrophe prior to 2100, and even from some posters claims, catastrophe by 2050. I'm merely taking the stance that the science's best guess as approximated in IPCC RCP4.5, we aren't facing catastrophic collapse worthy of an action movie by 2100. I've said multiple times up thread we are facing problems, it's the severity I claimed by others that I am calling out for not being supported by evidence.