A significant portion of Copenhagen coverage has been about what's happening in the Arctic.
Old ice forms are melting and forming slush, and biologists say polar bears are threatened by changes to their ecosystem.
Those are the surface changes getting attention. But other worrisome prospects lurk beneath the surface.
I'm talking about what climate scientists call "positive feedbacks" -- system loops that add to global warming and then repeat themselves.
Melting ice cover on the Arctic Ocean produces one kind of positive feedback. That's because ice reflects most of the sunlight that hits it back into space, but liquid ocean water absorbs most of the sunlight and converts it into heat.
Then there's an even more worrisome positive feedback, presented by escaped fossil methane hydrate.
A greenhouse gas, methane hydrate has been trapped in Arctic ice for a very long time. But as that ice melts, the gas will be released into the atmosphere and it will have an accelerating effect on global warming -- which will, in turn, mean more ice melting to release more methane hydrate.
The process is, in fact, already happening. Scientists have observed methane coming out of "melt lakes" in Arctic Canada and Siberia.
To add another positive feedback to our list of worries, there's also a lot of fossil carbon dioxide trapped in the Arctic. It too will escape as the climate warms.
My main information source for this post is Gwynne Dyer's Climate Wars.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
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5 comments:
That imbecilic Sarah Palin, the Chinese government, and U.S. Republicans and industrial polluters should have this info dyed inside their corneas so they see it constantly every day---their stupidity and greed is a threat to us all.
"Climate Wars" is as good a place as any to begin but the really good stuff is on YouTube and similar sites where you can actually see methane bubbles percolating up from the thawing seabed hydrates. There's a lot more methane and CO2 in the permafrost also.
Even scientists don't like to dwell on these things because they represent the global warming equivalent of a runaway freight train.
Once we heat the planet enough to release these greenhouse gas deposits the change is catastrophic and utterly beyond our control.
The Germans estimate there's a two out of three chance of avoiding this sort of runaway global warming if we can keep within the 2 degree C "guard rail." If not, it's over the side and down the ravine!
Dyer's bet is that we're going to "blow right through" that 2 degree target and likely reach 4 degrees of warming. Of course, as he points out in his book, global warming will probably trigger the next World War long before the environmental fallout gets us.
He's probably right. We don't hear much about it but right now the Indian and Chinese armies are squared off along India's northern border. This is the headland of some major glaciers which both countries will desperately need and China refuses to recognize India's claim to its northernmost province.
I do tend to follow these things and can tell you that there's a major arms race underway in the south and east-Asia region. India and China are furiously developing their blue water fleets. India has just launched its first, made in India nuclear missile sub. Both China and India are also modernizing their air forces and land-based missile systems.
Scary stuff that could lead to huge famines and fresh water shortages. Mound of Sound makes sense with his prediction of war. I wish I had something snarkey to lighten this up but there isn't anything jovial about it.
Stimpson, such dare I say inconvenient facts you have listed will get you nothing but ridicule and loathing from the very people Jack mentioned.
Because while certain statistics can be manipulated by global warming deniers what you listed is the very knife to our throats. Especially the methane, that is the one that can keep you up at night. A Scientific American article a few years back speculated that a runaway greenhouse effect caused by a massive volcanic episode millions of years ago raised the global temperatures enough to melt massive amounts of seabed hydrates that brought about the worst extinction event in planet history.
You're right, Beach, the people Jack lists are dismissive of the mountains of evidence on global warming. And worse still, Palin's ignorance seems positively viral.
Mound points to terrible possibilities. As Truth says, nothing funny about it.
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