Warming hits 'tipping point'

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

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

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.

-----------------------

There's no such thing as global warming, this is completely normal.

So this area has a change in temp of 5 degrees fahrenheit and its the end of the world???

Like most environmental warnings, this one is pretty alarmist. Not to say that there's nothing to be alarmed about, but you have to take into account the natural rise and fall of global tempurates. It's been happening for eons and and will continue to for many many more regardless of whether humans are here or not. I'm sure our presence has more than helped accellerate the process, but i highly doubt if it's entirely responsible.

Thought you like to see the effects of the permafrost disapearing in Siberia

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsro ... g_id=16986

Apparently the polar bears like it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/06/opini ... erney.html

The Good News Bears

RESOLUTE BAY, Nunavut

The polar bear has become the new poster animal for environmentalists, and I can understand why. When it comes to "charismatic megafauna" - the term used by marketing experts at conservation groups - the bear is a giant improvement over the giant panda.

The rotund panda may be cuddlier, but it is really more of a poster animal for gluttony and sloth. In the wild, it eats 12 hours a day and spends the rest of the time sleeping or hiding. In captivity, it can barely stir itself even to mate - Mei Xiang had to be artificially inseminated to produce her new cub at the National Zoo.

Yes, Mei Xiang can draw crowds to the zoo, but does her lolling inspire much zeal for preserving the species? The message she sends is, "I don't care, so why should you?"

Polar bears are mammals with a mission, whether it's Gus obsessively swimming in the Central Park Zoo, or the mother and her cub that I once followed during a dogsled expedition here in the Canadian high Arctic. We watched her with awe and kept our distance, especially after coming across the bloody remnants of her seal dinner on the ice. The message I took home was: "You mess with my habitat, and I'll mess with you."

Besides their natural charisma, the bears have another crucial asset for a poster animal: location. Because the Arctic is projected to feel the effects of global warming sooner and more severely than temperate regions, the recent shrinking of sea ice in the Arctic has been promoted as a grim harbinger for the planet.

The polar bear has become, in the words of the WWF conservation group, "an ambassador for Arctic nature and a symbol of the impacts that global warming is increasingly having around the world." Conservation groups and scientists have been making headlines in the past year, warning that shrinking sea ice could make wild bears extinct by the end of the century, possibly within just 20 years.

Right now, though, Inuits like Nathaniel Kalluk here in Resolute Bay aren't exactly worried. "There are a lot more bears now than before," said Mr. Kalluk, who is 51 and has been hunting since childhood. "We'll spot 20 to 30 bears on a hunting trip. Twenty years ago, sometimes we didn't see any at all."

This is not an isolated trend. Although the bears seem to be hurting in some places, like the Hudson Bay region south of here, their numbers have increased worldwide. In Canada, home to most of the world's polar bears, the population has risen by more than 20 percent in the past decade.

The chief reason for the rise is probably restrictions on hunting (for which conservationists deserve credit). In this village of fewer than 200 residents, Mr. Kalluk and the other hunters are limited each year to three dozen bears, which they allocate by drawing names out of a hat.

But the increase might also be related to the recent warming, which could be helping bears in some places. After all, the bears have thrived in warmer climates than today's. In the 1930's, the Arctic was as warm as it is now, and in the distant past it was even warmer.

The doomsday reports of the melting Arctic have focused on the rise in temperatures compared with the late 1970's, but that was a particularly cold period. So the bears can cope with some global warming, which would increase the diversity of species in the Arctic - and maybe the number of humans, too.

Today only 30,000 people live in Nunavut, an impoverished Canadian territory the size of Western Europe. Ecotourism during the summer is one of the few promising industries in places like Resolute, but the cold and ice keep out all but a few affluent adventurer travelers, scientists and journalists.

Personally, I like the high Arctic just as frozen and empty as it is now. But I can see why Mr. Kalluk doesn't mind the idea of a little climate change.

"The ice is always going to freeze in the winter," he said, "but it would be better for us if we had a longer summer. We'd have more time to use our boats. There would be more jobs and a longer tourist season." The bears would be still around, and their charisma would be making more money for the locals, not just for the WWF fund-raisers down south.

I've decided not to try and refute every global warming scare that's mentioned here. Instead I'm adopting a new attitude; I'm hoping, praying, begging that the worst possible scenarios will occur.

Massive coastal flooding, starvation on a staggering scale, ice age in Europe, millions upon millions dead. I hope like hell the entire coral reef dies, and quick. I want to see a mass extinction of the Permian scale. I'm talking Day after Tommorrow times 10.
...I think it's pretty much what we deserve.

As long as we stay positive

"The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing."

It's always nice when scientists editorialize in their articles.

*science correspondent
ie. 'journalist'

Yet its 90 degrees in Florida, but 100 in Chicago. Must be the end of the world.

Look at the bright side, if the coasts flood, then Ohio will be on the East Coast. And maybe then Pearl Jam would play there on their mini tour.

Arizona will finally have a beach. Yeah!

We're still emerging from an Ice Age folks, remember that.

Okay, so human activity is causing global warming, which will now lead to more natural global warming. Do I have that right?

I've always wanted to visit Arizona Bay!

in the sense that that's what the article says, yes.

in any other sense, probably not.

Global warming brings earlier spring thaw to Great Lakes

The Great Lakes of the US, the planet's largest concentration of fresh water, is thawing earlier each spring, according to an analysis of ice break-ups dating back to 1846.

Barbara Benson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and colleagues studied the timing of ice break-up on 61 lakes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Ontario between 1975 and 2004, during which time the average global air temperature rose by 0.4 °C. The team gathered the dates from government databases, lake associations, newspapers and local residents.

On 56 of the lakes the spring thaw showed an earlier trend, occurring two days sooner each decade on average. Though the thaw has been happening ever earlier since 1846, the calculations show the rate of change is now more than three times as fast as it was before 1975. Benson says the date of ice break-up has "marched northward 100 kilometres per decade" in that time.

"What's happening around us is big enough and so far out of our control that it is affecting the whole Great Lakes region," says team member John Magnuson.

The team presented its findings at the Ecological Society of America's meeting in Montreal, Canada, last week.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7876

Most people do not disagree with the concept of global warming, they just disagree with the cause. Some believe it is man made, and others believe that it is a natural shift. Personally, this is the nicest summer I can remember in the history of Texas. Doesn't mean much to the melting ice up north, but thanks for the cool air.

The problem with the whole debate as I see it, is the people who want to fix the "man made" problem do not actually do anything to fix it. They just point and say "look." If all the global warming pimpers would just get together and stop talking about global warming, and lobby to make huge energy changes in this country, it would solve the problem. Looking at gas prices now, this is the fucking time to strike.

Lobby the government and the auto industry. The auto industry doesn't make much off of oil, they make money off of parts, and if they are the ones creating hydrogen/electric/ solar fuel cells they are the ones who stand to gain. Plus if you lobby the government, you can get them to subsidize and even do the research themselves for the auto industry. Trust me, the auto industry, the American people, and the engineering talent have more money and more sway then even the oil industry. Include the airline industry in there, who is paying over 10 dollars per a mile flown in gas. I guarantee you Delta is looking for an alternative to gas. The oil industry is 30 years from bankruptcy as it is.

It's the same with all lobbies. The anti-poverty lobby, the anti-hunger lobby. All they want to do is point a finger say "look what YOU have done. If YOU only would have obeyed ME this never would have happened."

If people where smart, they would be building sea walls, desalinization plants, and more fresh water storage facilities. Instead it all just devolves into finger pointing. Think of all the jobs we could create preparing for the effects of global warming! It's inevitable at this point, we might as well try to buy ourselves time by limiting the impact on humanity.