Global warming thawing Siberia, scientists claim

Aug. 12, 2005
World Science staff

The vast land of western Siberia is thawing for the first time since its formation, 11,000 years ago, the BBC reported this week, quoting the New Scientist magazine.

“The area, which is the size of France and Germany combined, could release billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” the BBC reported. This could potentially act as a tipping point, causing global warming to snowball, scientists fear.

The situation is an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming,” researcher Sergei Kirpotin, of Tomsk State University, Russia, told New Scientist, according to the BBC.

The whole western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun thawing, and this “has all happened in the last three or four years,” he was quoted telling the magazine.

Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere on the planet, with average temperatures increasing by about 3C in the last 40 years, according to the reports. The warming is believed to be due to a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical atmospheric phenomenon known as the Arctic oscillation and feedbacks caused by melting ice, reports noted.

The 11,000-year-old bogs contain billions of tons of methane, most of which has been trapped in permafrost and deeper ice-like structures called clathrates. But if the bogs melt, there is a big risk their hefty methane load could be dumped into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming, the reports added.

Scientists reacted with alarm, warning that global warming predictions may have to be revised upward.

“When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it’s unstoppable,” David Viner, of the University of East Anglia, UK, was quoted telling the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper. “There are no brakes you can apply.

“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.”

The intergovernmental panel on climate change speculated in 2001 that global temperatures would rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees celsius between 1990 and 2100, the BBC noted. But these estimates only considered global warming sparked by known greenhouse gas emissions.

The Siberia situation hints new forces could exacerbate the warming, Viner said—feedback cycles in which the warming itself leads to events that cause further warming. When scientists devised their earlier estimates, he added, “they had no idea” how much this feedback would speed up to the warming.

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050812_warmingfrm.htm

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oh goddamn - add to that that the gulf stream slowing or stopping because of global warming, preventing the absorption of CO2 through that process, and we have a runaway, pissed off GAIA on our hands.

and we seem now to already be past the point where scientists still talk about being able to 'rein it in', or even 'slow it down'.

just as a matter of interest, how far above sea-level is cheyenne mountain? it would be nice to know that those fuckers will go with the rest of us.

Proof?

Increased temperatures linked to human activities.

There already exists a recent thread that deals with the scientific consensus behind this.

"The warming is believed to be due to a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical atmospheric phenomenon known as the Arctic oscillation and feedbacks caused by melting ice, reports noted."

There is no consensus.

Oh really? So, how is it then, a 50-50 siding?

We caused global warming as much as the Native Americans killed off all the megafauna that roamed this continent.

When global warming becomes a religion, it is best to question it. I would say that it is maybe 75/25 or so...just the same, macroevolution is a religion nowadays. You'd be best to question everything people tell you is true.

Consensus always struck me as meaning virtually 100%. Maybe it means something different in Scandinavia.

Here's the thing.

We know the earth is warming, we know C02 levels, methane levels, and other greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere are increasing, and we know that greenhouse gas causes a greenhouse effect.

So we know that if global warming is currently mostly natural, we don't want to make it worse.

Necrolyte: that is absolutely correct. But we don't know if the amount of greenhouse gases we add to the atmosphere are actually negligible...I don't know if its the consensus among scientists in general, but the absolute consensus among the stuff I read (which was a good amount, but I don't have the time or the patience to make myself an expert on the subject) was that we contribute a mere 4% or so. While this is a real contribution, its about one part in 25 of what's going into the air. Which actually seems like more than $% when put that way.

Spurious argument. How has it become a religion? Aren't the myriad of papers dealing with this issue not passed through the peer-review process? Aren't the models used constantly tested, changed and tinkered with? In what way is climate-change research becoming canonical dogma?



Off the top of your head or do you have any basis for these numbers?



Another spurious argument.



Good point. But when we act as sceptics, we must do so with well-backed arguments. Not hypothetical numbers taken off the top of our heads.



This is the last time I will post Naomi Oreskes article. And for all those still doubting the overwhelming agreement within the scientific sphere concerning human-induced climate change - read it!

BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER:
The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
Naomi Oreskes*

Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, "As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change" (1). Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.

The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" [p. 21 in (4)].

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).

The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.

This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.


Science 306 (5702): p. 1686




Zing! Lets leave the sarcasm to some other occasion

Because its effects are seemingly automatically assumed to be melting of the ice caps and other glaciers. No other potential considerations are made. Then again, I am not an expert on this subject and do not really care to be one.


Off the top of my head. If you want numbers like what I found with a simple internet search, it was more the other way around. However, internet =/= reality. I don't know reality. Do you?


The only argument i have is that the only number I saw was 4%. It might have been 2%, but whichever it was I never saw a different number.


Macroevolution, from what I know, is a dinosaur which has run out of fuel and now has turned into Dogma. Show me, in another thread, and I will show you.


They say scientists agree on this, but they don't say why.


I believe it...I read somewhere that according to climate models, the Earth should still be getting colder; this changed around ~1850.


That wasn't sarcasm.

Have you read any of the peer-reviewed material dealing with this matter? Ofcourse not, you galantly admit you are not an expert on this subject, but I assure you that the the link between global warming and melting ice caps (like Larsen) is based on more than simple corralations.



I gave you the Orsekes article to read. I believe that does a good job of dealing with this matter. Reality? Ofcourse not? A damn good approximation? You bet!



In my last post, the numbers I was referring to was your 75/25 approximation, concerning the pro/against stances in the scientific community concerning climate change.



There's plenty of other peer-reviewed material that deals with the "why". Oreskes paper set out to show something else.

Maybe little math could be a bad thing. NO good scientific studies can be published by using correlational experiment. Credible sources thus far have can take account of global warming and melting ice caps by isolating all variables. this is not absolute, but it is a far cry from correlation.

now, one needs not to be an expert to question the research behind climate change. but you must read those published papers in order to do so. i don't think it is fair to criticize their methodologies without reading them first.



the consensus is more or less established in the scientific community. if you want to question this possibility, it would be best to use a randomly generated number that you have provided. Whether or not it is 25, 4, or 2, NOT a single peer reviewed paper has yet dispute the existence of global warming is attributable to humans.
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btw, as Jon Steward said, the ice is not melting. it is the water that has been liberated.

And, if that is the case, it is then pointless to try and stop it.

I think he meant by using preventative measures. There are more options than that.