Siberia’s Permafrost is Melting
by Jason GodeskyMetaFilter is discussing a report from the New Scientist that Siberia’s permafrost is melting. 250 million acres of permafrost are beginning to thaw for the first time in millennia, exposing the world’s largest peat bog and releasing billions of tons of methane gas.
Last December, John Roach wrote an article for National Geographic that highlighted concern over the fact that the Arctic was heating up twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Roach also highlighted specific arctic heat sinks, particularly Siberia. Roach wrote:
“There’s a great big hot spot over western Siberia,” said Larry Smith, an associate professor of geography at the University of California (UCLA), Los Angeles.
… Peatlands consist of layer upon layer of partially decomposed plant material. They play a crucial role in governing the atmospheric concentration of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, Smith said. Increased concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases can accelerate global warming.
… Calculations by Smith and his colleagues show that, over the long term, Siberian peatlands currently have absorbed more greenhouse gasses through plant growth and storage than they have released through decomposition. Thus, the peatlands currently absorb more carbon dioxide than they release.
However, if temperatures in western Siberia continue to rise, its peatlands could thaw and dry out. They would then essentially become giant compost heaps and begin to release vast amounts of carbon dioxide. This could potentially cause a slight acceleration of global warming, Smith said.
This is precisely the scenario we are now facing. The New Scientist article by Fred Pearce says:
The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
…Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3 °C in the last 40 years. The warming is believed to be a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical change in atmospheric circulation known as the Arctic oscillation, plus feedbacks caused by melting ice, which exposes bare ground and ocean. These absorb more solar heat than white ice and snow.
Methane has long been one of the primary culprits in global warming. Methane from herds of livestock extended our current interglacial, and continues to be one of the most harmful greenhouse gases. Even though it breaks down relatively quickly, it breaks down into CO2, another greenhouse gas that is much more difficult to deal with.
This is a prime–and frightening–example of the positive feedback loops that have so often set the course of global climate. As Chad Okere put it:
There’s a theory that says if you’re in a ’stable’ condition, even a little change can cascade and put you into another stable condition.
Mr. Okere understates the case. That “theory” is the prevalent understanding of how global climate works. For some five thousand years, the deforestation (that is, the destruction of carbon sinks) and livestock herds (that is, the production of more greenhouse gases) that go with agricultural civilization has struck a tenuous balance with the earth’s natural cooling trend as it tries to end the Holocene interglacial and return to the Pleistocene–the “ice age.” The Industrial Revolution was an innovation not in kind, but in scale–but with so tenuous an equilibrium, such a drastic increase on our side has shattered all semblance of balance. That slight change is now spiralling into a self-reinforcing, positive feedback loop. Global warming melts the arctic, changing the luminosity of the planet so we trap even more heat. Then it thaws the Siberian permafrost–possibly more than doubling the amount of methane in the atmosphere.
Humans are among the most adaptable species on the planet. It is likely that, as a species, at least some of us will survive. It is our agricultural civilization that is weak; it is our civilized life that is at risk.
Yet another reason why we need to reduce the scale of our cultural enterprise
Comment by Adam Hintz — 11 August 2005 @ 8:48 PM
And now this:
So the one kink in the case–the “cooling” of the tropics–was just a calculation error.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 August 2005 @ 3:00 PM
I’ve only just come across this group/blog/website (by accident) and I can hardly restrain my admiration of it. The articles (especially those on agriculture by Jason Godesky) are very informative and to the point (I can’t comment on others, because I haven’t read them yet - I look forward to that with pleasure).
I will certainly put a link to this site on my own, http://www.coconutstudio.com (which is about Seashore Foraging and Fishing).
On the Siberian permafrost melting: this is somewhat of a shock, but perhaps an even bigger one may be in the offing - I understand there are clathrate deposits (frozen methane, essentially) under the Siberian tundra and when they go they will explode.
Comment by Richard Parker — 13 August 2005 @ 7:15 AM
Wow, thanks for the effusive praise, Rich! I’m sure you’ll find that Giuli, Mike and Steve are much better writers than I, though. I write dry academic treatises; they’re writing really gives this place some flair, though.
You think the clathrate deposits will explode? Like, most of Siberia goes BANG? Criminey, that’s … a disturbing thought….
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 August 2005 @ 10:09 AM
Well, you deserve praise - you’re doing a damn’d good job.
As for clathrates - google Thomas Gold - he’s (sorry - WAS - died last year) the (very nearly) Nobel prize winner and a very bright old boy. He thought that hydrocarbons (oil) were continuously being percolated from very deep regions of the earth, and even tested this by drilling below a continental shield granite area in Sweden, and finding oil (or something a bit like it).
Which is why I believe Dick Cheney’s narrow, ex-Wyoming telephone-rigger’s culture, focussed on the Ayrabs (and thinking about his Halliburton rewards to come) has ventriloquized your Great & Good President’s somewhat vacant mind, probably by blackmailing him about all the cock-ups he made in the oil businesss.
Sorry to insult Americans like this, but, in the Philippines, where I live half of each year, every foreigner is known as an ‘Americano’ - ‘Hey Joe!’ is still, after 60 years, a normal greeting. I don’t want, really, to be lumped into a single, world-wide Whitey category.
regards
Richard
Comment by Richard Parker — 14 August 2005 @ 10:49 PM
Ah yes, I’ve heard of this. I didn’t research it very thoroughly, and only in the context of Peak Oil. Many were claiming that this process meant that oil reserves are, for all intents and purposes, limitless. However, even if the process is real (and there’s some debate on that point), it still doesn’t happen on nearly the scale we need. To say nothing of the fact that it is lower quality, making the refining process more expensive.
I don’t think anyone here identifies themselves by the imaginary lines they’re boxed in by. We tend to take a rather hostile view of “patriotism” around here. I carry U.S. citizenship due to birth, and because in the world of nation-states the one with no citizenship anywhere is thoroughly screwed. But if you ask me who I am, I’ll tell you many things in descending order of their importance to me. “American” will come very far down on that list.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 August 2005 @ 10:31 AM
And now this: From The Independent Friday Aug 19 2005
Global warming: Will you listen now, America?
Two of the leading contenders to contest the next US presidential election have delivered an urgent warning to the United States on global warming, saying the evidence of climate change has become too stark to ignore and human activity is a major cause.
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
Published: 19 August 2005
On a high-profile and bi-partisan fact-finding tour in Alaska and Canada’s Yukon territory, Senators John McCain, a Republican, and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic senator for New York, were confronted by melting permafrost and shrinking glaciers and heard from native Inuit that rising sea levels were altering their lives.
“The question is how much damage will be done before we start taking concrete action,” Mr McCain said at a press conference in Anchorage. “Go up to places like we just came from. It’s a little scary.” Mrs Clinton added: “I don’t think there’s any doubt left for anybody who actually looks at the science. There are still some holdouts, but they’re fighting a losing battle. The science is overwhelming.”
Their findings directly challenge President George Bush’s reluctance to legislate to reduce America’s carbon emissions. Although both senators havetalked before of the need to tackle global warming, this week’s clarion call was perhaps the clearest and most urgent. It also raises the prospect that climate change and other environmental issues could be a factor in the presidential contest in 2008 if Mrs Clinton and Mr McCain enter it. Mrs Clinton and Mr McCain, who represents Arizona, are among the leading, and the most popular, likely contenders.
That they chose Alaska as the stage from which to force global warming on to the American political agenda was not a matter of chance. In many ways, this separated US state is the frontline in the global warming debate. Environmentalists say the signs of climate change are more obvious there than perhaps anywhere else in the US.
Dan Lashof, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defence Council, a respected Washington-based group, told The Independent: “People in Alaska are starting to freak out. The retreat of the sea ice allows the oceans to pound the coast more, and villages there are suffering from the effects of that erosion. There is permafrost melting, roads are buckling, there are forests that have been infested with beetles because of a rise in temperatures. I think residents there feel it’s visible more and more, more than any other place in the country.”
President Bush’s administration has repeatedly questioned the evidence of global warming and the contribution of human activity to any shift. Mr Bush, who in 2001 refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty on global warming weeks after he took office, has repeatedly been accused of doing nothing to enforce tighter controls on emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases”. But this summer, the US National Academy of Sciences - and the scientific academies of the other G8 nations as well as Brazil, China and India - issued a statement saying there was strong evidence that significant global warming was happening and that “it is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities”.
They called on world leaders to recognise “that delayed action will increase the risk of adverse environmental effects and will likely incur a greater cost”. Mrs Clinton, who must first win her re-election to the US senate next year if she is to enter the 2008 White House race, said at the press conference that she had spoken to scientists as well as native Alaskans during the trip.
She said that, flying over the Yukon, she saw forests devastated by spruce bark beetles, believed to be increasing at an unprecedented rate because of warmer weather. She also talked of what a 93-year-old woman at a fish camp at Whitehorse told her. The woman said she had been fishing there all her life but now fish have strange bumps on them.
“It’s heartbreaking to see the devastation,” Mrs Clinton said. Mr McCain, Mrs Clinton and Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine, also went to Barrow, the northernmost city in the US. There, they spoke to scientists and Inupiaq Inuit. They also saw shrinking glaciers in Kenai Fjords National Park.
Mr McCain - with Senator Joe Lieberman - is behind proposed legislation that would require power-generating companies to reduce carbon emissions to their 2000 levels. Mr Graham, a Republican, said he had been moved by what he had seen. “Climate change is different when you come here, because you see the faces of people experiencing it. If you go to the people and listen to their stories and walk away with any doubt that something’s going on, you’re not listening.”
Mrs Collins, a Democrat, was even more convinced. She said the evidence in Alaska represented the “canary in the mine shaft of global warming crying out to us to pay attention”.
On a high-profile and bi-partisan fact-finding tour in Alaska and Canada’s Yukon territory, Senators John McCain, a Republican, and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic senator for New York, were confronted by melting permafrost and shrinking glaciers and heard from native Inuit that rising sea levels were altering their lives.
“The question is how much damage will be done before we start taking concrete action,” Mr McCain said at a press conference in Anchorage. “Go up to places like we just came from. It’s a little scary.” Mrs Clinton added: “I don’t think there’s any doubt left for anybody who actually looks at the science. There are still some holdouts, but they’re fighting a losing battle. The science is overwhelming.”
Their findings directly challenge President George Bush’s reluctance to legislate to reduce America’s carbon emissions. Although both senators havetalked before of the need to tackle global warming, this week’s clarion call was perhaps the clearest and most urgent. It also raises the prospect that climate change and other environmental issues could be a factor in the presidential contest in 2008 if Mrs Clinton and Mr McCain enter it. Mrs Clinton and Mr McCain, who represents Arizona, are among the leading, and the most popular, likely contenders.
That they chose Alaska as the stage from which to force global warming on to the American political agenda was not a matter of chance. In many ways, this separated US state is the frontline in the global warming debate. Environmentalists say the signs of climate change are more obvious there than perhaps anywhere else in the US.
Dan Lashof, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defence Council, a respected Washington-based group, told The Independent: “People in Alaska are starting to freak out. The retreat of the sea ice allows the oceans to pound the coast more, and villages there are suffering from the effects of that erosion. There is permafrost melting, roads are buckling, there are forests that have been infested with beetles because of a rise in temperatures. I think residents there feel it’s visible more and more, more than any other place in the country.”
President Bush’s administration has repeatedly questioned the evidence of global warming and the contribution of human activity to any shift. Mr Bush, who in 2001 refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty on global warming weeks after he took office, has repeatedly been accused of doing nothing to enforce tighter controls on emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases”. But this summer, the US National Academy of Sciences - and the scientific academies of the other G8 nations as well as Brazil, China and India - issued a statement saying there was strong evidence that significant global warming was happening and that “it is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities”.
They called on world leaders to recognise “that delayed action will increase the risk of adverse environmental effects and will likely incur a greater cost”. Mrs Clinton, who must first win her re-election to the US senate next year if she is to enter the 2008 White House race, said at the press conference that she had spoken to scientists as well as native Alaskans during the trip.
She said that, flying over the Yukon, she saw forests devastated by spruce bark beetles, believed to be increasing at an unprecedented rate because of warmer weather. She also talked of what a 93-year-old woman at a fish camp at Whitehorse told her. The woman said she had been fishing there all her life but now fish have strange bumps on them.
“It’s heartbreaking to see the devastation,” Mrs Clinton said. Mr McCain, Mrs Clinton and Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine, also went to Barrow, the northernmost city in the US. There, they spoke to scientists and Inupiaq Inuit. They also saw shrinking glaciers in Kenai Fjords National Park.
Mr McCain - with Senator Joe Lieberman - is behind proposed legislation that would require power-generating companies to reduce carbon emissions to their 2000 levels. Mr Graham, a Republican, said he had been moved by what he had seen. “Climate change is different when you come here, because you see the faces of people experiencing it. If you go to the people and listen to their stories and walk away with any doubt that something’s going on, you’re not listening.”
Mrs Collins, a Democrat, was even more convinced. She said the evidence in Alaska represented the “canary in the mine shaft of global warming crying out to us to pay attention”.
Comment by Richard Parker — 19 August 2005 @ 2:53 AM
McCain and Lieberman’s camp sent me a letter about this just yesterday. I sent them $25 and signed two form letters that they’ll send to Santorum and Specter. They’re gonna send me a cool tote bag.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 19 August 2005 @ 9:51 AM
That’s very nice, Giulianna, of McCain & Lieberman to send you a cool tote bag.
When (sorry, ‘if’ - you know all about politicians’ promises) you get it, please take a cold, cool look at it:
Is it plastic ? - Oil
Is it natural cotton fibre ? - Fertilisers and insecticides - Oil
Nice logo ? - Printers ink - Oil
How did it get to you? - Mail? UPS? - Oil
Who’s going to defend Oil after the next election, if they win ? - McCain & Lieberman
Or, if she wins? - Clinton
I do hope Thomas Gold (The Deep Hot Biosphere) was right in suggesting oil seeps up from the deep earth, and will go on, more or less, forever.
It’s a shame he didn’t consider what might happen if we continued to burn the stuff, and incorporate its products into almost every single aspect of our daily lives.
regards
Richard
Comment by Richard Parker — 20 August 2005 @ 9:05 AM
Abiotic oil.
Ah yes, the “Creamy Nougat Center” theory.
Even though I think it’s just a result of the psychology of previous investment made manifest in a dubious scientific theory, I still hope and pray that there IS an end to oil. It’ll help bring the crash sooner, limiting the damage done to the world’s ecosystem, as well as severely limiting the capability of any one person’s imperial reach.
Comment by Chuck — 21 August 2005 @ 6:38 AM
I applaud Chuck’s enthusiam for the collapse of the oil-based economy, but would only say something like that saint (Augustine ?) who said
“O God! Please rescue me from my vices - but not just yet”
I would just like a bit more time to wean myself off dependence on transport, plastics, computers, books, electricity, imported flour and butter, and learn a bit more how to cook fish, rice, bananas and coconuts and make them so presentable that they would make island life in the Philippines a little more bearable without very much else to do.
If I had the opportunity, I would like to start a war, insert my own company to make huge profits out of it, and its accompanying wide-open field for corruption, fraud and general villainy, and assure myself a prosperous old age.
But I’m not your VP (Ventriloquist-to-the-President) Mr Richard Cheney.
regards
Richard
PRESIDENT, n.
The leading figure in a small group of men of whom — and of whom only — it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for President.
from: Ambrose Bierce - The Devil’s Dictionary
Comment by Richard Parker — 22 August 2005 @ 3:29 PM
As Bart Simpson said, ‘eah’.
We’ve got plenty of time. Though we’ll begin to feel the effects of a loss of oil within a few years, I’d guess we have a good decade and a half to make the mental transition. (That is, if you are (un)lucky enough to be living in America.)
Comment by Chuck — 22 August 2005 @ 5:11 PM
Here’s hoping you’re right Chuck! That gives me just enough time to establish the eco-village I want to be in…
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 22 August 2005 @ 6:06 PM
Obviously, Hurricane Katrina is going to provide a ‘wake-up’ call to America on climate change, and perhaps on other matters too, when its citizens find out that a large proportion of Lousiana’s National Guard, and most of their amphibious vehicles are in Iraq ’spreading Freedom & Democracy’.
I’m sure most Americans cannot really accept that a particular government of theirs can be positively evil, but my next post (about harassment of climate scientists) might be convincing…
regards
Richard
Comment by Richard Parker — 1 September 2005 @ 2:33 AM
“Republicans accused of witch-hunt against climate change scientists
Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Tuesday August 30, 2005
The Guardian
Some of America’s leading scientists have accused Republican politicians of intimidating climate-change experts by placing them under unprecedented scrutiny.
A far-reaching inquiry into the careers of three of the US’s most senior climate specialists has been launched by Joe Barton, the chairman of the House of Representatives committee on energy and commerce. He has demanded details of all their sources of funding, methods and everything they have ever published.
Mr Barton, a Texan closely associated with the fossil-fuel lobby, has spent his 11 years as chairman opposing every piece of legislation designed to combat climate change.
He is using the wide powers of his committee to force the scientists to produce great quantities of material after alleging flaws and lack of transparency in their research. He is working with Ed Whitfield, the chairman of the sub-committee on oversight and investigations.
The scientific work they are investigating was important in establishing that man-made carbon emissions were at least partly responsible for global warming, and formed part of the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which convinced most world leaders - George Bush was a notable exception - that urgent action was needed to curb greenhouse gases.
The demands in letters sent to the scientists have been compared by some US media commentators to the anti-communist “witch-hunts” pursued by Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.
The three US climate scientists - Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University; Raymond Bradley, the director of the Climate System Research Centre at the University of Massachusetts; and Malcolm Hughes, the former director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona - have been told to send large volumes of material.
A letter demanding information on the three and their work has also gone to Arden Bement, the director of the US National Science Foundation.
Mr Barton’s inquiry was launched after an article in the Wall Street Journal quoted an economist and a statistician, neither of them from a climate science background, saying there were methodological flaws and data errors in the three scientists’ calculations. It accused the trio of refusing to make their original material available to be cross-checked.
Mr Barton then asked for everything the scientists had ever published and all baseline data. He said the information was necessary because Congress was going to make policy decisions drawing on their work, and his committee needed to check its validity.
There followed a demand for details of everything they had done since their careers began, funding received and procedures for data disclosure.
The inquiry has sent shockwaves through the US scientific establishment, already under pressure from the Bush administration, which links funding to policy objectives.
Eighteen of the country’s most influential scientists from Princeton and Harvard have written to Mr Barton and Mr Whitfield expressing “deep concern”. Their letter says much of the information requested is unrelated to climate science.
It says: “Requests to provide all working materials related to hundreds of publications stretching back decades can be seen as intimidation - intentional or not - and thereby risks compromising the independence of scientific opinion that is vital to the pre-eminence of American science as well as to the flow of objective science to the government.”
Alan Leshner protested on behalf of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, expressing “deep concern” about the inquiry, which appeared to be “a search for a basis to discredit the particular scientists rather than a search for understanding”.
Political reaction has been stronger. Henry Waxman, a senior Californian Democrat, wrote complaining that this was a “dubious” inquiry which many viewed as a “transparent effort to bully and harass climate-change experts who have reached conclusions with which you disagree”.
But the strongest language came from another Republican, Sherwood Boehlert, the chairman of the house science committee. He wrote to “express my strenuous objections to what I see as the misguided and illegitimate investigation”.
He said it was pernicious to substitute political review for scientific peer review and the precedent was “truly chilling”. He said the inquiry “seeks to erase the line between science and politics” and should be reconsidered.
A spokeswoman for Mr Barton said yesterday that all the required written evidence had been collected.
“The committee will review everything we have and decided how best to proceed. No decision has yet been made whether to have public hearings to investigate the validity of the scientists’ findings, but that could be the next step for this autumn,” she said.”
Enough said
regards
Richard Parker
Comment by Richard Parker — 1 September 2005 @ 2:36 AM
Obviously, Hurricane Katrina is going to provide a ‘wake-up’ call to America on climate change, and perhaps on other matters too, when its citizens find out that a large proportion of Lousiana’s National Guard, and most of their amphibious vehicles are in Iraq ’spreading Freedom & Democracy’.
I hope so. I really do. But why does that sound so improbable? At the least, I think it’s a decent indicator of things to come, on a very small scale. Whether the rest of the country takes heed or even notice is debatable.
Roxy
Comment by Raku — 1 September 2005 @ 11:33 AM
Fun website.
Comment by Alaska Joes Fishing Trips — 26 January 2006 @ 1:29 PM
Nice article.
Only problem is that the facts aren’t true.
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20050822/41201605.html
“”The Russian Academy of Sciences has found that the annual temperature of soils (with seasonal variations) has been remaining stable,” reported the August 22 Russian News and Information Agency. “If anything, the depth of seasonal melting has decreased slightly.”
“Unscrupulous scientists are exaggerating and peddling fears about permafrost thawing and swamp methane becoming aggressive,” Professor Nikolai Alexeyevsky, doctor of geography and head of the land hydrology department at Moscow State University, told the Russian News and Information Agency.”
Comment by Patrick Henry — 4 July 2007 @ 6:22 PM
That story sounds really fishy. Seeing it right next to “A Tribute to Milton Friedman” makes me even more suspicious. And sure enough, it doesn’t take much digging to find some serious problems with this.
So, the facts in the original post here are true. It’s your refutation that’s faulty.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 July 2007 @ 2:36 PM