Some climate news...
Climate - Sept 10
by Staff
Lovelock Says This Time We've Pushed the Earth Too Far
Michael Powell, Washington Post
"It's going too fast," he says softly. "We will burn. Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return." ..
Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean.
"There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover." ..
Lovelock acknowledges the moral conundrum. But he sees no we-are-the-world solutions. The heat waves that kill millions, the powerful typhoons, the droughts that suffocate cities, will force a retreat to nationalism. ..
(2 Sept 2006)
Long article goes on to quote critics and supporters of Lovelock including Paul Ehrlich and David King, and a remarkable gem of truth from Brian Heap: "The poor aren't our problem," Heap says. "We're their problem.". –LJ
Siberian thaw to speed up global warming
Robin McKie and Nick Christian, The Observer
The release of trapped greenhouse gases is pushing the world past the point of no return on climate change
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The frozen bogs of Siberia are melting, and the thaw could have devastating consequences for the planet, scientists have discovered.
They have found that Arctic permafrost, which is starting to melt due to global warming, is releasing five times more methane gas than their calculations had predicted. That level of emission is alarming because methane itself is a greenhouse gas. Increased amounts will therefore accelerate warming, cause more melting of Siberian bogs and Arctic wasteland, and so release even more. 'It's a slow-motion time bomb,' said climate expert Professor Ted Schuur, of the University of Florida.
The discovery of these levels of methane release, revealed in a report in Nature last week, suggests that the planet is rapidly approaching a critical tipping point at which global warming could trigger an irreversible acceleration in climate change. 'The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it has to become a more vicious cycle,' said Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. 'That's the thing that is scary about this.'
(10 Sept 2006)
Methane Belches in Lakes Supercharge Global Warming, Study Says
Richard A. Lovett, National Geographic
Global warming is causing Siberian lakes to bubble methane, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere at an alarming rate, scientists say. Because methane in the atmosphere warms the planet, the Russian pools are intensifying the climate change that boosted their belching in the first place. It all adds up to a feedback loop in which warming begets even more warming. ..
What they found is that lakebed emissions are large enough that taking them into account increases the total estimated level of Arctic emissions by 10 to 63 percent. The scientists report their findings in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature.
The methane appears to be produced from the thawing of permafrost-what should be a permanently frozen layer of earth-due to global warming, says the study's lead author, Katey Walter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks's Institute of Arctic Biology. Overall, she says, there is as much organic matter buried in the Siberian tundra-rolling treeless plains with mucky soil and mosses at the surface-as is contained in all of the world's tropical rain forests. ..
(6 Sept 2006)
Published on 10 Sep 2006 by EB. Archived on 10 Sep 2006.
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