to cherry pick from the dark side, Arctic ice is going away soon, with predictably dire outcome. In the film professor Wadhams convincingly describes the mechanism driving the change. In an article for YaleEnvironment 360 he expands his views.
Professor Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University, suggested a major methane pulse was possible.
However he said this would be “maybe not apocalyptic, but catastrophic”.
“If there were a large methane release, which is now possible because of the instability of the methane hydrates underneath the Arctic continental shelves, the off-shore waters, that could quite easily give rise to a very large pulse,” Professor Wadhams said.
http://e360.yale.edu/features/as_arctic_ocean_ice_disappears_global_climate_impacts_intensify_wadhams
Loss of the ice is an event horizon. Once crossed, there's no going back. We don't know how it will affect our complex domestic arrangements but we do know there will be changes, extraordinary changes, and we expect that life will become more difficult for every living thing as a result. Is extinction a real possibility? Absolutley. A 50 gigaton methane pulse would definitely move us in that direction. My take away from the film is that we're at a tipping point that's going to mean bad things for life on earth and that change is imminent. Maybe that's just preaching despair. That argument would be more convincing if we were doing enough in the way of active mitigation to change the future. That is obviously not happening. If it were, atmospheric CO2 would be falling instead of rising. I don't see how anyone who followed the development of the IPCC report and the Paris Accord can see either one as non-political. Both were necessarily written in such a way as to keep the oil states on board.
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