Climate science has been stymied as Russia continues its war in Ukraine. The stalled work threatens to leave the West without a clear picture of how fast the Earth is heating up.
Climate science has been stymied as Russia continues its war in Ukraine. The stalled work threatens to leave the West without a clear picture of how fast the Earth is heating up.
This can happen
This is a bunch of words, but not something that we’re actually facing.
The permafrost wasn’t so much a methane sink, as a place where carbon got stored. When it warms up, the decay process can generate methane, which can then be released. Under some limited conditions, you can actually even burn it when released from natural sources like this, but that’s not usually what happens — it just floats off into the atmosphere.
The atmosphere as a whole will not ignite.
As far as I understood, it’ll leak into the atmosphere, where it’ll cause 80 or 100 times more warming than CO² for a decade or so, before breaking down into good, old CO², causing further warming for centuries / millennia.
Not sure, but I think I’ve also read that in the process of breaking down into CO², the ozone layer gets damaged.