Mind-numbing stupidity on parade

Alleged Methane time bomb ticking louder

At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, a Russian scientist who has spent the last 15 years tracking the release of methane from Siberia was asked if a huge surge he and his team detected this summer constituted "a global emergency."

Igor Semiletov did not say no, but did not challenge the premise of the question.
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...Semiletov thinks that if just 1 percent of the ESAS methane is released, it will push total atmospheric methane up to 6 parts per million, and he cites researchers such as David Archer in arguing that this would push us past the point of no return toward runaway global warming.

Leading climatologist James Hansen also gave a talk at the conference, to his usual throng of thousands, about the threat of runaway global warming and the need to phase out coal plants. He happened to mention that the global atmospheric record showed a slight fall-off in methane for 2008, so I asked him if he was less concerned about this particular threat to a stable climate. Hansen said that on the contrary, the paleontological record probably isn't a good guide to global methane release, because "even though evidence of releases might look like spikes on a plot, they still happened over thousands of years. Human forcings are happening so fast they don't allow for negative feedbacks."