Posted on 08/10/2005 6:24:25 PM PDT by aculeus
Siberia feels the heat It's a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany combined, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas and, for the first time since the ice age, it is melting
A vast expanse of western Sibera is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn today.
Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.
It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.
The discovery was made by Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University in western Siberia and Judith Marquand at Oxford University and is reported in New Scientist today.
The researchers found that what was until recently a barren expanse of frozen peat is turning into a broken landscape of mud and lakes, some more than a kilometre across.
Dr Kirpotin told the magazine the situation was an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He added that the thaw had probably begun in the past three or four years.
Climate scientists yesterday reacted with alarm to the finding, and warned that predictions of future global temperatures would have to be revised upwards.
"When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it's unstoppable. There are no brakes you can apply," said David Viner, a senior scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
"This is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone. The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing."
In its last major report in 2001, the intergovernmental panel on climate change predicted a rise in global temperatures of 1.4C-5.8C between 1990 and 2100, but the estimate only takes account of global warming driven by known greenhouse gas emissions.
"These positive feedbacks with landmasses weren't known about then. They had no idea how much they would add to global warming," said Dr Viner.
Western Siberia is heating up faster than anywhere else in the world, having experienced a rise of some 3C in the past 40 years. Scientists are particularly concerned about the permafrost, because as it thaws, it reveals bare ground which warms up more quickly than ice and snow, and so accelerates the rate at which the permafrost thaws.
Siberia's peat bogs have been producing methane since they formed at the end of the last ice age, but most of the gas had been trapped in the permafrost. According to Larry Smith, a hydrologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, the west Siberian peat bog could hold some 70bn tonnes of methane, a quarter of all of the methane stored in the ground around the world.
The permafrost is likely to take many decades at least to thaw, so the methane locked within it will not be released into the atmosphere in one burst, said Stephen Sitch, a climate scientist at the Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter.
But calculations by Dr Sitch and his colleagues show that even if methane seeped from the permafrost over the next 100 years, it would add around 700m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year, roughly the same amount that is released annually from the world's wetlands and agriculture.
It would effectively double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming, he said.
Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said the finding was a stark message to politicians to take concerted action on climate change. "We knew at some point we'd get these feedbacks happening that exacerbate global warming, but this could lead to a massive injection of greenhouse gases.
"If we don't take action very soon, we could unleash runaway global warming that will be beyond our control and it will lead to social, economic and environmental devastation worldwide," he said. "There's still time to take action, but not much.
"The assumption has been that we wouldn't see these kinds of changes until the world is a little warmer, but this suggests we're running out of time."
In May this year, another group of researchers reported signs that global warming was damaging the permafrost. Katey Walter of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, told a meeting of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that her team had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia. At the hotspots, methane was bubbling to the surface of the permafrost so quickly that it was preventing the surface from freezing over.
Last month, some of the world's worst air polluters, including the US and Australia, announced a partnership to cut greenhouse gas emissions through the use of new technologies.
The deal came after Tony Blair struggled at the G8 summit to get the US president, George Bush, to commit to any concerted action on climate change and has been heavily criticised for setting no targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
The discovery was made by Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University in western Siberia and Judith Marquand at Oxford University and is reported in New Scientist today.
Dr Kirpotin told the magazine the situation was an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He added that the thaw had probably begun in the past three or four years.
"This is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone. The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing."
So it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, about the same time that the caucasoid Kenniwick Man appeared in North America. hmmmmm, think of that.
And Kerpotin just discovered that this has been happening for 3 or 4 years? Don't people live in Sibe ria that would have noticed right away?
Kerpotin says, "undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". Undoubtedly? "The causal effect is human activity." Undoubtedly!
Perhaps mother earth is only now reversing the damage Kenniwick Man caused.
http://www.heartland.org/archives/environment/apr02/humans.htm
Humans bring end to Ice Age disasters
by S. Fred Singer Ph.D.
During an Internet debate in February [2002], federal climatologist Michael McCracken (not a global warming skeptic) revealed that rising CO2 concentrations may have banished forever the disastrous Ice Ages that have bedeviled the Earth for the past few million years.
Scientists generally credit human activities, especially fossil fuel burning, for the atmospheric build-up of CO2. Plants need CO2, and synthesize their food from it.
So humans appear to be saving the planet not only from disastrously low levels of CO2 (which atmospheric concentrations approached at one point in the past few hundred thousand years), but also from the scourge of Ice Ages that have dominated climate for the most recent few million years.
Many moons. Long enough to see the entire transition from the global cooling scare to the present global warming scare.
The warming trend seems to be particularly intense in Siberia. The polar ice cap in summer now almost totally withdraws from the north Siberian coast, except in one spot. Soon in summer, it may become a navigable water way.
The best scene is when the dumbass ultra-liberal loudmouth Hollyweird actor who "plays the President on TV" is eaten by cannibals.
Too bad they won't be making a movie of this book.
lol! it's bush's fault ping
I'm sure they'd just hate it if their temperatures got above freezing in the winter. We are supposed to worry about this?
You don't hear about it because the enviro's can't further their political agenda if Bush didn't do it.
If I was a young man I would love to move there especially since it seems to warming up.
Ah, they really won't have a Summer, but a Mud season?
It's too darned hot right now. 78 in the shade. Even the mosquitoes are sheltering in the tall grass.
"The Polar Ice Caps are Melting" story comes out every few months. Some expedition goes out and measures the sea ice at some location they already have data from 5, 10 years ago for example and surprise, they announce with much fanfare, that the ice is 20% thinner than it was when they last measured it.
(Sometimes these guys are just kooks by the way. One highly noted study comes from a zoology professor who was working on a cruise ship lol.)
Anyway, here is a link to the latest animation from NASA's ICESat satellite of the North Pole sea ice (the best you will see) 1979 to 2004.
The polar ice moves back and forth so much and moves so much with the seasons that only a long-long-long-term satellite study with radar measurements can tell you anything at all.
If you can tell Siberia's polar ice is melting, let me know.
http://www.nasa.gov/mpeg/103496main_sea_ice2004_320x240.mpeg
I agree. Permafrost is a terrible thing to build on. Heated building tend to melt the ground under their foundations and then sink. Agriculture is immossible on permafrost. Once it stabilizes, the whole region will be more accessible for exploitation. If global warming happens like they worry about, then the northwest passage will be open for shipping and reduce shipping times by not needing the Panama Canal as much.
Great link, but you see lately it has receded. Here is a little anecdote. My brother has been doing bird tours in Barrow, Nome and St. Lawrence Island for about 20 years, in June. He hasn't seen any ice for about 10 years, and it was all ice before then.
It may indeed be thawing in places but for how long have records been kept ? Could it be something that happens every so often or is it truly a new event ?
Because then it would not be Bush's fault.
It would not be the United States fault.
You could not make a moonbat religion of fear out of that explanation.
Nor would it be profitable to tell the truth or use common-sense because moonbat religious tithing would be reduced.
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