Warming hits 'tipping point' (please read) : Melbourne Indymedia

Ian Sample, science correspondent
The Guardian
Thursday August 11, 2005

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. [...]

Comment: "...it will lead to social, economic, and environmental devastation worldwide." So what are our governments doing to prepare for the coming cataclysmic changes? Why, they're rewriting all the laws so that they will have dictatorial control over all of us when things get really rough. Oh, and they built some underground bunkers for themselves...

Many psychopathic leaders no doubt view the coming changes as an opportunity to empower and enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us. You can't really blame them, though. After all, someone needs to maintain the status quo through the coming turmoil, right?

But I warn you, you will get few comments here. Mention Jews just once in an article and Melbourne will swamp a swamp.

I have no doubts about the gravity of the situation, unbelievable though isn’t it? And there are half the oil pipelines in the artic circle supported by the very soggy ground you point out. Those thousands of KM’s of steal reinforced brittle concrete pipes filled with millions of barrels of oil, were designed to run unbroken over permafrost with no safeguards should the ice thaw.

Shortly there will be some awful news from the artic, awful in the true meaning of the word, full of awe.
It will Strike fear, but will not inspire any action.

Our leaders can not deal with this kind of thing, in all examples of threats to economic viability they prepare plans to stop the accident only after it has occurred. Global warming like terrorism has no known antidote, its already happened. While the powers that be scratch their heads and ponder what to do while creating more mess.

Of corse limiting today’s green house gas from adding to the blanket seems advisable, but its also quite pointless.
200 years of burning prehistoric geosequestered fossilised co2, intensive farming, intensive clearing of forests and 6.5 billion people poised to take industrialisation into a new age of consumerism through globalisation makes it pretty much a certainty that you and I will see the fruits of human labor.

In our life time

Global warming has already happened, it has'nt just started, the present climate change is irreversible and as a result all we can do is move as conditions locally make life unbearable.
Buy a better air conditioner, encourage the government to build desalination plants, fund the war on terror so that we can at least still afford to drive a car.

In the end humans will fight far harder to do as we have always done, than admit to the fact that we have destroyed any chance that we could do better.

Thankyou for this alert. It is well known that in many
parts of the world there are record cold temperatures.
This is due to vast amounts of melting ice taking
enormous amounts of heat out of the atmosphere. When ice melts the change of state causes this. This will continue as heat increases. Paradoxically this will,
in turn produce plunging temperatures. It is not so
well known that the melting of ice IS NOT IN THE
EQUATION that calculates whether or not global
warming is occurring. This enables many corporate
based experts to argue that global warming is a
hoax (without this variable there is only miniscule
global warming). It is important to alert the world
as to what is happening - it is basic science but few
are aware.

Look up Super info by pass, in local, Simons finest. for your warning falling upon deaf ears.
We traded our way into Global Warming and we shall encourage our buisness leaders to trade our way out.

I also do classes in nailing jelly to the cieling, hows your smelling, you'll need it, my spelling? Fine.

thankyou for votre respondez Mais I am scratching
my Mira and stamping my thinga trying to understand
it. But as any good Toltec knows the unkown always
eclipses rationality and so I regard your words as only
a glimpse of a higher reality to which you are pointing.