First of all, what is Methane clathrate’s?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_hydrate

About Canadian & Russian permafrost and Arctic Sea Ice.
http://www.ucar.edu/ news/ releases/ 2008/ permafrost.jsp

And then this.
The methane time bomb at
http://www.independent.co.uk/ environment/ climate-change/ exclusive-the-methane-time-bomb-938932.html?startindex=110

So we already have ‘chimneys’ under the ” the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres, amounting to millions of tons of methane ” and the Russian tundra is melting too, creating small ‘lakes’ from which methane is released in the process.

As for using it as ‘energy’:)
Well, wouldn’t you say that we would need it frozen first?
It doesn’t seems to cooperate here. does it.
It seems that mother Earth has a different opinion of us than we our self have.
Not so much masters of our Earth as locust, without thinking ability but with an insatiable greed.

There is enough methane in bogs in tropical zones, the Tundra, permafrost and shallow seas to pose huge dangers in addition to CO2 release / feedbacks and ice melt / feedbacks.

People often forget it is the SYNERGY of all these processes which is the point.

The mid-Pliocene (3 Ma) is the closest to the “experiment” Homo “sapiens” is conducting at present. CO2 rose to about 400 ppm, tempratures by 2 – 3 degrees, sea lelvels by 25+/- 12 metres. It is not clear to what extent methane was released at that stage.

Homo enerctus appeared in the wake of the mid-Pliocene climate upheaval. It remains to be seen (not by us) what kind of species would appear in the wake of the Anthropocene???

First, the scientists dismiss “gloom and doom” scenarios out of hand.

I say not so fast. and here’s why.

Hydrates form along a gradient defined by temperature and pressure. So what? Well, that means a great deal of them are in relatively shallow — but cold – seas and even on land in perma-frost.

In fact, estimates are that more than 10% of the world’s hydrates are located on-shore in arctic permafrost; and a sizable — although not quantified — amount are in relatively shallow arctic seas. These are susceptible to melting from warming. And as we know, the polar regions are warming faster and will get hotter than the global average. So a sizable amount of the methane trapped in hydrates is vulnerable to release by warming.

Even the deep sea stuff isn’t immune to releases — there are two confirmed large scale releases of methane from deep sea hydrates in the geologic record: One off the coast of Norway, one off the coast of North Carolina. More are suspected.

So, any geologist worth his beans who glibly dismisses “gloom and doom” scenarios associated with hydrates either doesn’t know what he or she is talking about, or they are more amenable to playing craps with the planet than they should be.

Second, since hydrates are quite dispersed and extremely volatile when disturbed, it will take extremely sophisticated technologies to recover them without substantial leakage. And we can’t afford releases of methane — a GHG 23 times stronger than CO2 — into the atmosphere. In the long run, attempts to exploit this “resource” in an environmentally safe manner are likely to be so complex and expensive that they would render it an economic dog.

Third, we don’t need to recover the stuff. With a full court press on efficiency and renewables, we can leave the stuff where it is.

The evidence from both the Permian mass extinctions and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum is pretty clear: Once started, methane hydrate releases can become self-reinforcing. No do overs. No going back. Just a giant Whoops.

So, I would suggest that folks are grossly underestimating the danger posed by hydrates. But even if they weren’t, the danger they pose falls into the category of unlikely, but potentially cataclysmic. As Pascal noted, the only rational response to such risks is to act as if they were certain and do all we can to avoid them.

Including letting this particular sleeping dog lie.