Last month James Hansen sent to his mailing list  To Understand and Protect the Home Planet .  He said this effort will be published with several colleagues as co-authors in  Oxford Open Climate Change  as  Global Warming in the Pipeline .  The  New York Times  reported on this paper yesterday by David Wallace-Wells. He called Hansen the Godfather of Climate Science. In 1988 Hansen appeared before a U.S. Senate committee, beginning the era for climate alarm. Actually, I worked for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee from 1979-1982, and  Professor David J. Rose  of MIT presented a view about climate warming, which was totally ignored.  Wow, that was more than 40 years ago.  He soon thereafter retired and moved to Honolulu, where we had long discussions on the seriousness of this phenomenon.  Thus, when Hansen suddenly made headlines in the later 1980's I met with him to discuss solutions.  I had a few geoengineering thoughts.  There was a sense that the world needed to

I've long been paranoid about methane, which I consider to be more dangerous for the future of Humanity than carbon dioxide.  Much of my thinking came together when I wrote  SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth .  On 4 and 5 September 2008 I had a two part posting on this gas in the 15 part series on  THE VENUS SYNDROME ,  a book I am writing.    These are shown here for completeness.   You can skip them and just move on to the analysis after the asterisk line.          THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT METHANE  (Part 10) The chemical nature of this book has thus far mostly dealt with hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, including carbon dioxide, CO2. The simplest fossil fuel is a gas, methane (CH4). Natural gas is mostly methane. When cows flatulate and burp, methane is produced as the primary gas. In fact, a State of California study reported that dairies were the number one source of San Joaquin Valley smog. Not necessarily tongue in check, with the respect to the Kyoto Protocol, it was suggested t

Private donors have pledged   $41 million   to the Woodwell Climate Research Center to monitor thawing of permafrost in the Arctic.   Buried beneath the Arctic Ocean are 60 billion tons of methane and 560 billion tons of organic carbon.  This carbon is more than humans have released into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.  The problem is that global warming is causing the   permafrost to thaw , and 140 million tons of carbon dioxide and 5.3 million tons of methane are already escaping into the atmosphere. The danger is really methane, as molecule for molecule, this gas is from 20 to 100 times more dangerous for global warming than carbon dioxide.  Thus, those 60 billion tons of methane are the equivalent of at least 1200 billion tons of carbon, compared to the current estimate of 560 billion tons of carbon. Further, there is a  lot more methane stored as methane hydrates in the ocean than on land.   There is more potential fuel contained in these methane deposits than all