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.
