Methane is coming. Lots of it. That;s what this report says: Leaking Siberian ice raises a tricky climate issue. Throw out the computer models and predictions and all those lovely numbers and start again. The Luddites intuition may have been better than all that. These changes are what we should have expected had we really been as smart as we think we are. Non-linear amplification and unexpected consequences. The right wing nuts can criticize science but not because they overestimated. Read on Below for the details.
It is sickeningly ironic that the report starts as a narrative:
CHERSKY, Russia – The Russian scientist shuffles across the frozen lake, scuffing aside ankle-deep snow until he finds a cluster of bubbles trapped under the ice. With a cigarette lighter in one hand and a knife in the other, he lances the ice like a blister. Methane whooshes out and bursts into a thin blue flame.
Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — at a perilous rate.
Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.
"Here, total carbon storage is like all the rain forests of our planet put together," says the scientist, Sergey Zimov — "here" being the endless sweep of snow and ice stretching toward Siberia's gray horizon, as seen from Zimov's research facility nearly 350 kilometers (220 miles) above the Arctic Circle.
Methane has been underplayed in all this all along but this tilts the scale. The question is to idendify what other surprises are in store.
Before I get "but methane has been factored in" in comments, the question is "how much?" I have not seen estimates even close to these.
Most climate scientists, with a few dissenters, say human activities — the stuff of daily life like driving cars, producing electricity or raising cattle — is overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that trap heat, causing a warming effect.
But global warming is amplified in the polar regions. What feels like a modest temperature rise is enough to induce Greenland glaciers to retreat, Arctic sea ice to thin and contract in summer, and permafrost to thaw faster, both on land and under the seabed.
Yet awareness of methane leaks from permafrost is so new that it was not even mentioned in the seminal 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned of rising sea levels inundating coastal cities, dramatic shifts in rainfall disrupting agriculture and drinking water, the spread of diseases and the extinction of species.
"In my view, methane is a serious sleeper out there that can pull us over the hump," said Robert Corell, an eminent U.S. climate change researcher and Arctic specialist. Corell, speaking by telephone from a conference in Miami, said he and other U.S. scientists are pushing Washington to deploy satellites to gather more information on methane leaks.
There's more and you should read it. Here's the punch line:
Curbing man-made methane emissions could slow this process, said Walter Anthony.
"We have an incentive to reduce our fossil fuel emissions. By doing so, we can reduce the warming that's occurring in the Arctic and potentially put some brakes on permafrost thaw," she said.
Always too little and too late. A government in grid-lock here. What better elsewhere? This looks pretty bad to me.