Scientists have their own way of putting things. This is how Dr. Oerjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University announced the approach of a climate apocalypse in an e-mail sent recently from the Russian research ship "Jakob Smirnitskyi" in the Arctic Ocean.

"We had a hectic finishing of the sampling program yesterday and this past night. An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface."

Gustafsson's preliminary report, published in "The Independent" of Sept. 23, is a development far more frightening than the current financial crisis, although it will get only one-thousandth of the coverage. The worst that the financial crisis can bring is some years of recession. The worst that massive methane releases in the Arctic can bring us is runaway, irreversible global warming.