4.5 Billion people could die from AGW causes by 2012

A recent scientific theory called the "hydrate hypothesis" says that historical global warming cycles have been caused by a feedback loop, where melting permafrost methane clathrates (also known as "hydrates") spur local global warming, leading to further melting of clathrates and bacterial growth.
In other words, like western Siberia, the 400 billion tons of methane in permafrost hydrate will gradually melt, and the released methane will speed the melting. The effect of even a couple of billion tons of methane being emitted into the atmosphere each year would be catastrophic.

http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/F ... 01291.html

Rockdoc Franz wrote: More BS. If that were true there would be major extinctions or die offs associated with each ice age. No such relationship is observed in the fossil record (Paleontologic or anthropologic). Aside from that this sounds like another attempt to have anything but the most parsimonious explanation (i.e. solar radiation) account for global warming. Let's face it, if methane or CO2 were driving forces how do you account for their increase when the globe is wrapped in ice and methane is not being released? It's simply unbelievable the lengths some go through without really thinking about the obvious.

Science Chic wrote: I saw this and wondered who wrote such crap (by the way, this is a recycled story originally from 2007, it wasn't true then either). This isn't what the scientists are saying. The author's not doing his homework if he can make a statement such as this:

By the way, the "hydrate hypothesis" is a weeks old scientific theory, and is only now being discussed by global warming scientists.

and a simple search reveals this:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/286/5 ... b7659bf95b
A Smoking Gun for an Ancient Methane Discharge
Richard A. Kerr
Science 19 November 1999:
Vol. 286 no. 5444 p. 1465
DOI: 10.1126/science.286.5444.1465

Proposed less than 5 years ago, the “methane burp” hypothesis gets its most direct support yet on page 1531 of this issue of Science. “It's real good, consistent evidence” for the hypothesis, says paleoceanographer Timothy Bralower of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “It's not 100% proof, but it's compelling.”

Charles Paull of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California, agrees. A specialist in methane hydrates, he finds the sea-floor methane hypothesis “absolutely fascinating, but I wonder about whether or not it's correct.” Among his doubts: whether the hydrate deposits 55 million years ago contained enough methane to drive the climate shift and whether a deepwater warming could have penetrated far enough into the sediments to decompose the deep hydrates that could cause landslides.

and a book published by the American Geophysical Union in 2003
https://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/agubooks?book=ASSP0542960
Methane Hydrates in Quaternary Climate Change: The Clathrate Gun Hypothesis
James P. Kennett, Kevin G. Cannariato, Ingrid L. Hendy, and Richard J. Behl
Special Publication Vol. 54, 2003. 216 pages softbound, ISBN: 0-87590-296-0 AGU Code: SP0542960.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... -the-move/
Arctic Methane on the Move?
— david [archer] @ 6 March 2010

What’s missing from these studies themselves is evidence that the Siberian shelf degassing is new, a climate feedback, rather than simply nature-as-usual, driven by the retreat of submerged permafrost left over from the last ice age. However, other recent papers speak to this question. (see article for references)

For methane to be a game-changer in the future of Earth’s climate, it would have to degas to the atmosphere catastrophically, on a time scale that is faster than the decadal lifetime of methane in the air. So far no one has seen or proposed a mechanism to make that happen.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... l-warming/
Methane hydrates and global warming
— david [archer] @ 12 December 2005

The atmosphere currently contains about 3.5 Gton C as methane. An instantaneous release of 10 Gton C would kick us up past 6 ppm. This is probably an order of magnitude larger than any of the catastrophes that anyone has proposed. Landslides release maybe a gigaton and pockmark explosions considerably less. Permafrost hydrates are melting, but no one thinks they are going to explode all at once.

There is an event documented in sediments from 55 million years ago called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, during which (allegedly) several thousand Gton C of methane was released to the atmosphere and ocean, driving 5° C warming of the intermediate depth ocean. It is not easy to constrain how quickly things happen so long ago, but the best guess is that the methane was released over perhaps a thousand years, i.e. not catastrophically [Zachos et al., 2001; Schmidt and Shindell, 2003].

So, in the end, not an obvious disaster-movie plot, but a potential positive feedback that could turn out to be the difference between success and failure in avoiding ‘dangerous’ anthropogenic climate change.

(see article for more references)

http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/repr ... te_rev.pdf
Methane hydrate stability and anthropogenic climate change
D. Archer
Biogeosciences, 4, 521–544, 2007
http://www.biogeosciences.net/4/521/2007/

I don't know what this author's goal was in writing this piece, but it certainly wasn't to represent the current state of scientific data and projected changes.