Re: "Deniers" a pejorative? I think not (@ itzman)
"The bad news is that this carbon sink is already failing"
Even before that stage, our ability to put carbon into the atmosphere has been outrunning the sinks' ability to absorb it for some time. A reduction in sink capacity(*) isn't really proven at this point but it doesn't need to be if we keep emitting at current rates.
The added factor of the risk of a few gigatonnes of methane burping out off the north coast of Siberia(**) thanks to incursions of warm water into the arctic ocean shouldn't be discounted. What's allegedly come out already is probably enough to account for the "mystery methane level increases" that have been recently reported (and blamed on farming) as methane watching satellite instruments haven't been looking that far north(***)
(*)An "Anoxic event."
(**) Leptav Sea methane emissions.(****)
(***) They are now, but the instrumentation has an extremely hard job seeing methane emisions on water (not enough contrast)
(****) Some US researchers are actively poo-poohing these reports, because there's no easy way of verifying Russian reports(+) - but they're also trying to discourage anyone looking to see if they can be verified.
(+) Russia makes life hard for its own scientists, let alone foreign ones wanting to come and verify observations and the researcher's reports are accused of being extreme exaggerations.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
