Permafrost Loss Greater Threat Than Deforestation 272
Pierre Bezukhov writes "Emissions from thawing permafrost may contribute more to global warming than deforestation this century, according to commentary in the journal Nature. Arctic warming of 7.5 degrees Celsius (13.5 degrees Fahrenheit) this century may unlock the equivalent of 380 billion tons of carbon dioxide as soils thaw, allowing carbon to escape as CO2 and methane, University of Florida and University of Alaska biologists wrote today in Nature. Two degrees of warming would release a third of that, they said. The Arctic is an important harbinger of climate change because the United Nations calculates it's warming at almost twice the average rate for the planet. The study adds to pressure on United Nations climate treaty negotiators from more than 190 countries attending two weeks of talks in Durban, South Africa that began Nov. 28."
Re:And half the Arctic countries don't care (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because both politicians AND industrialists just see lots of fast profit from permafrost thawing, namely more usable land (and whatever might reside beneath).
What would happen with the planet 100 years from now is irrelevant to them; they will be all dead at that time.
Re:I don't even read these stories anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
There really isn't any point.
1) The majority of people are split across party lines and anti-science.
2) Religious nutbags are everywhere that have the sole justification that climate science is wrong because scientists calculated the age of the Earth incorrectly, and that Man could not possibly affect God's creation.
3) The absolutely ludicrous position is put forward constantly that business and economic considerations must be factored in. That's like arguing on a sinking ship about the value of the cargo.
Irrational and illogical behavior coupled with outright greed and shortsightedness makes it impossible to affect change through legislation. I honestly could not give a fuck about any further research. It does not take a rocket scientist (or a climatologist) to figure out that we have an affect on our environment through our actions with 7 billion people on the planet.
There is one person that I control. Myself. To that end, I do what I can to minimize my own footprint on this planet, and that is all I can do.
Talking is bullshit because nobody is capable of listening, and anyone that does actually listen, is marginalized and has practically no effect. You nailed that. Social will is non-existent. Basically, no one is willing to suffer to get things back to where they need to be. That goes for a lot more than the environment.
I can explain, politely, why it is such a bad idea to buy bottled water, etc. but friends and family still do it anyways because of convenience. I actually got asked why I did not have bottled water from a guest like I was a bad host. I pointed to the glasses and the RO system and this person was indignant because that seemed like more work than getting a bottle from the refrigerator.
Technology and science is not our problem. We are the problem because of how we act globally as a group.
Re:2 week vacation in South Africa (Score:4, Insightful)
If nothing else, soft-science and government types get a taxpayer paid trip to South Africa for 2 weeks. Do you think they really want to FIX global warming?
Don't you ever get tired of your mindless, knee-jerk cynicism?
I think maybe at one time it might have been clever and refreshing to groundlessly accuse people of having a selfish ulterior motive for everything they do. But now that every single freaking person on the Internet automatically responds that way every time anyone does anything, it's just tedious and depressing.
Re:And half the Arctic countries don't care (Score:5, Insightful)
Somebody [wikipedia.org] is conspicuously absent from the Kyoto Protocol.
America, fuck yeah.
In Germany you are taxed to death (by 'merkin standards) and the price of petrol is over 12$US per gallon - yet they have among the highest standard of living and the most robust economy in Europe.
When the people in Washington DC hear about raising the cost of petrol, so people won't waste it so stupidly on SUVs in the city and frivolous trips in the auto, they howl that it will destroy the American Way of Life and the Economy.
Fucking daft, scared "leaders" America is dynamic and can adapt, same as Germany did. Charge $10/gal at the pump and people will stop depending so heavily on petrol that the country has to go to war over it.
Re:Northwest Passage (Score:4, Insightful)
As the globe continues to warm, eventually the Northwest Passage will be a viable route for less ice-hardy vessels more times out of the year, providing economic benefit for those who could utilize the shipping routes.
Yes, but a Northwest Passage is a lot less meaningful today than it would have been when Lewis and Clark were looking for it.
I imagine there are lobbies that would love to see this happen. This is speculation, for I do now know if people actively encourage warming.
With a national population of 300 million, I am virtually certain that there are lobbies that would love to see almost anything happen. The trick, as a representative of your constituents, is to only listen to those lobbyists who are pushing an idea that will benefit the majority of your constituents without completely screwing some of them. At the national level, this is generally too complicated to evaluate by a mere Congressional staff office, thus explaining the propensity of our representatives to support lobbies that support their re-election campaign instead.
Looking at the CO2 data and its positive correlation to the mean global temperature increase, it seems we may see that route in our lifetime.
Looking at the "consensus curve" of warming estimates since 1990, I don't see any oscillations or pullbacks, only continuous upward revision across the board. I can only surmise that future estimates of future warming will, based on this meta-analysis of the estimating trend, be higher than today's estimates for some time to come.
Living in Florida and expecting my children to die around the year 2080, I'm most interested in sea level rise estimation. Sadly, it does not look like my children will be enjoying my parent's waterfront property in their later life.
Also as the permafrost disappears, another side affect is a cascading result in the loss of surface ice/snow pack. As the surface area of the snow/ice/arctic shelf shrinks, the Earth's regional albedo will be reduced, ie there will be less radiational cooling and more energy absorbed by the surface. Cycles such as this create feedback loops in the environment that cause these affects to amplify. Lower albedo -> less permafrost/snow/ice/glacier coverage -> more heat -> lower albedo -> ad inifinitum.
Sooner or later, we will also discover serious mitigating effects, such as increased algal blooms in the ocean that act to sequester carbon, or similar things.
I am not a meteorologist, but based on some cursory research these seem to be realistic eventualities.
I don't think the coming generation will escape the Chinese curses [wikipedia.org]: "May you live in interesting times," nor "May the government be aware of you." But since this generation (and the previous) has mostly experienced the worst one: "May your wishes be granted," the next generation or two may be spared that one.
Re:Clathrate gun hypothesis (Score:5, Insightful)
The ice core data also shows that CO2 and methane levels have been remarkably stable in Antarctica--varying between 300 ppm and 180 ppm--over that entire period and that shifts in levels of these gases took at least 800 years, compared to the roughly 100 years in which humans have increased atmospheric CO2 levels to their present high. "We have added another piece of information showing that the timescales on which humans have changed the composition of the atmosphere are extremely short compared to the natural time cycles of the climate system," says Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern in Switzerland, who led the research.
There have been several shifts from glacial to interglacial climates during that time. My view is that if massive methane releases were a threat now, then we would have seen something similar during one of these times.
Re:And half the Arctic countries don't care (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And half the Arctic countries don't care (Score:5, Insightful)
In the short term you may be right, but in the long term, oil is going to run out anyways. And if you think the worst case scenario is $10 a gallon for gasoline, then you're not considering what will happen to innumerable industrial and agricultural processes when we run out of easily obtained long-chain hydrocarbons. The absolutely most moronic, wasteful and short-sighted uses of oil is using it as the energy source for transportation. Nothing demonstrates the sheer awe-inspiring stupidity of the human race than the wasting of long-chain hydrocarbons by sticking them in a gas tank.
Re:And half the Arctic countries don't care (Score:4, Insightful)
America is still a very rich country. Even if we paid $10/gallon at the pump, we'd still be paying lower taxes than Germans (no VAT here and lower income and property tax). We paid very high taxes during WWII and certainly didn't 'dismantle' our modern civilization, quite the opposite actually.
That money doesn't just go 'poof'. In Germany, you can get a free college education (and by 'you', I literally mean you if you are fluent in German regardless of where you're from). They also have high-speed rail, a substantial industrial sector (largest in Europe), and relatively low unemployment.
If gas prices went up, consumption of gas would surely go down, meaning more money would stay in the American economy rather than going overseas.
No doubt it would be painful, but there's no painless way of digging out of the huge debt the US is already in.
Re:Clathrate gun hypothesis (Score:5, Insightful)
You see... I willing to bet the last 650,000 years didn't see an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico either.
You might lose that bet. A LOT of oil spills into the gulf every year naturally, and it wouldn't be surprising if there were a rupture after an earthquake that released a lot of oil at the same time.......at least once in the last 650,000 years.
Re:Clathrate gun hypothesis (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, my investment institution makes the point of "Past performance is not an indication of future performance" quite often, so I'm not quite willing to consider the question of "Why hasn't it gone off?" as a rebuttal... even though it does have a value as a question.
The point here is that Earth has gone through several very significant bouts of global warming in the past 650k years which more or less are similar to the situation that you are worried about. If there had been a history of methane spikes in the record, then your concerns would have merit. But scientists apparently do not see a record of that.
Unlike the financial performance of ephemeral investment brokerages, there really is a case for past performance indicating future performance.
Re:And half the Arctic countries don't care (Score:3, Insightful)
It used to be the atmospheric warming that concerned me, however ocean acidification is a bigger concern. I mean, four degrees warmer? Like you say, pros and cons, even if the weather'll get pretty wild in parts. But the ocean pH worsens by four? Marine life as we know it pretty much goes bye-bye. And even tiny changes in ocean pH is still bad news, since it's a logarithmic effect. Lot of coral reefs are already bleaching out.
Re:Clathrate gun hypothesis (Score:2, Insightful)
the only thing that is a perfect model of a system is an exact copy of the system, and we don't have a second Earth stashed away in the backyard.
Bullshit red herring.
I didnt ask that they use the perfect model. I asked that they use the best model they have.
Different models made different simplifying assumptions (use different cell size for the simulation, incorporate different feedbacks, use simpler couplings between ocean and atmosphere, and so on).
Irrelevant. One is better than the others regardless of how the models are implemented.
By using a range of different models, we get an idea of how much these simplifications affect the results.
What does that have to do with anything? I didnt ask that they measure how much a simplification effects the rests. I asked for the results of the best model they have.
So we get a range of results, which hopefully bracket the behaviour of the real system.
I didnt ask the range of results for models with varying levels of simplification. I am asking for the results of the best model.
Are you suggesting that they dont know which model is best, or likely best? Seriously?
Re:And half the Arctic countries don't care (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but I donâ(TM)t see the direct link between cost of gas and unemployment.
My country (Norway) has half the population density of the US, which I believe to be a better indication of the need for moving goods rather than the size of the country. At the same time we are paying approx. 11$/gal and have a unemployment rate at 3,6%.
This is of course in a fascist-liberal-socialist-communist-country; hence none of the above is applicable for the US.