JAMES. John James (climate change activist) (2014): “For a long time scientists have been concerned that there would be a sudden eruption of methane from melting permafrost and from deep clathrate structures under the ocean. This has happened in the past in enormous eruptions. Each has been many times larger than the sum of all the pollutants we have emitted over the past couple of centuries.On at least eleven occasions in the geological past there have been sudden bursts of methane, and each time they have within a few years rocketed the Earth’s temperature by many degrees. Recent research has shown that on one occasion it took only thirteen years to raise the Earth’s temperature by 5oC.1 The trigger for the methane has been the CO2. Such a temperature rise could eliminate our species. We have to act quickly to limit fossil fuel use, or sit back and wait for armageddon to strike when it will. As you will read, this could be very soon… There are such vast quantities of methane locked in permafrost and clathrates that if just one percent was released it would have the same greenhouse impact as all the carbon dioxide released this century. As above figure 7 shows, the total methane burden in the atmosphere now is 5 Gt. Over half of that has been added since the 1750s. The most recent estimate for the amount of carbon stored in hydrates around the world is 63,400 Gigatons.11 The Siberian Arctic shelf alone holds some 1700 Gt. A whopping 50 Gt of this is ready for abrupt release at any time, as mentioned above” (John James, “Methane, the Gakkel Ridge and human survival”, Planet Extinction, 2014: http://www.planetextinction.com/documents/Methane,%20the%20Gakkel%20Ridge%20and%20human%20survival.pdf ).