Catastrophic $60 Trillion 'Arctic Methane Burp' is a Hyperbolic Geoengineering Lobby Scare Tactic

Bubbles of methane emerge from sediments below a frozen Alaskan lake.

The science journal 'Nature' has published an article 'Vast Costs of Arctic Change' that says methane released by melting permafrost will have global economic impacts. Of course, i'm always glad to see the IPCC's underestimates and dim-witted conventional modeling process being discredited, the more black swan scenarios being brought forth by the mass media the better. Plus, it's true that the Arctic methane release feedback loop, though not included in almost all climate science models, is one of the biggest longterm dangers our short term thinking consumer culture faces.

My first thought about this was: Here we are faced global environmental disaster and all that science and the media can think about is how it will impact their bank accounts. Then my reasoning turned into: This article is great. It frames the issue in a way that even the consumer assholes can understand.

Then i started looking into this report and found a whole lotta scientists who don't agree with the underlying assumptions at all and for a lotta good reasons. So, if the report published in Nature, and being republished widely, isn't 'science', what is it? Well it's promotional, it's lobbying as part of the geoengineering bullshit. Geoengineering lobbies are predicated on the assumption that we can solve the problem of global warming by masking the effects of fossil fuels rather than by eliminating their use.

Ever heard of the 'Arctic Methane Emergency Group'? It's the source of this hyperbolic economic report designed to scare the shit outta folks enough so they'll think that geoengineering is their only hope [conservation, consuming less, is the only real alternative]. AMEG says on their website they are "investigating all possible options for developing the capacity to safely cool the Arctic within a couple of years." They go on to say on a different page that, "Geoengineering techniques for cooling the Arctic have to be applied by spring 2013 to reduce that risk [of runaway global warming becoming inevitable - ed.] as far as it is possible to do so." Adding, "Emergency intervention is needed both to save the Arctic sea ice and to reduce the risk of catastrophic global warming from a sudden large emission of methane."

More and more recently i'm coming around to agreeing that we're past point of no return, that no amount of tinkering, no regulations, can turn the consumer capitalist train around. Maybe the only hope we humans have left is some sorta geoengineering crap. The trouble here is using science to disguise self-interest. AMEG, like almost all geoengineering groups, has suspicious links with fossil fuel interests, investment funds and military interests.

This faux-science argument framed in terms of the potential damage to economies overlooks the global ecological damage that poses a far more serious risk -  the survival of ALL species - than the capitulation of capitalism. Fuck every living thing only profits count. Some geoengineering scheme MIGHT slow global warming but it won't do shit to stop all the other insults the biosphere is suffering from extractive capitalism and it MIGHT cause far worse damage globally than even our dim-witted leaders could cause without it.