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Faster Global Warming From Permafrost Melt
jc42 writes, "A recent study published in Nature documents the accelerating release of methane from melting permafrost. Methane is a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so this may signal more rapid warming in the near future. If you don't subscribe to Nature, the Guardian has a good summary of the piece." It's not just Siberian permafrost. One of the major concerns is bogs — they account for a relatively small percent of total surface space, but have a large amount of carbon locked up. No one is sure if the greenhouse effect will cause them to lock up more, or to release more carbon.
You can bet your last dollar that, if it's happening in Siberia, then it's happening in Canada.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Panic!
Rearely a thing beats reflectiveness of the snow, but perhaps we could use a ...say..., fire extinguish foam or something?
Or else, just sow dry ice (solid CO2 powder) over it, (provided we use atmospheric CO2 to make it).
Coming up next: american scientists denial of global warming. New device to dig head-sized hole in the ground now for sale at Wal-Mart.
One of the major concerns is bogs -- they account for a relatively small percent of total surface space, but have a large amount of carbon locked up.
They also have a fair number of bogmen in them. Thanks to the highly acidic and low oxygen environment of bogs, the softer parts of animals (skin, hair, organs) remain intact while the bones dissolve. What you end up with is essentially a nice "sack of meat." Totally offtopic, but pretty fascinating stuff, imho.
This guy's the limit!
Open Passive Solar Project
Cananda will become one of the wealthiest countries in world because of their water. Water wars? Will the US have to liberate Canada so that the water will flow?
Arrr.. let's start reproducing, mateys!
I propose we figure a way to extract the methane from the athmosphere and burn it, thus creating less catastrophic gases :-)
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
You know that, when the ozon is destroyed and the fish die, they will say "It was everybody's fault. We didn't do anything to stop it". They won't say it was George Bush's fault, or McDonalds fault.
And they will be right. The only way to stop it is to slow down the circulation of money.
The scientists release the facts - that the permafrost is changing. Then the people who pay the scientists say 'Why should we care, why should we pay for your expensive field trips?' and the scientist replies 'Because we need to know, we need to find out what's going on, so we might have a chance of surviving (and me keeping my job)'
So, to sum up, scienists have released some facts - there are significant changes in the permafrost which are yet another significant pointer to global climate change. Furthermore, the released the fact that we don't know what significance this change will take.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
It seems that pollution is the cause. Specifically, soot lands on snow, the snow becomes less reflective than it was, absorbing more sunlight energy and melting more. This is causing major environmental damage (i.e. to glaciers throughout the world). Methane release is a consequence of this, but will now have its own consequences as well.
The die is cast. Humans have majorly polluted the planet and the planet is fighting back, however gradually. I predict the final score will be planet 1 : humans 0.
I come here for the love
Hmmmmmmmm... permafrost melt.... :P~~
If permafrost melts, what ever will become of Lady Vox? Long as she doesn't hook up with Nagafen, we'll be alright...
The Guardian says "This means that a kilogram of methane warms the planet's atmosphere 23 times as much as the same amount of carbon dioxide."
A gas can not warm the planet. The sun is the main heat source for the planet. We have to assume that the planet's own heat is constant. Increase the sun's output by fractions of a percentage to produce very dramatic warming on the earth. Greenhouse effect only relates to how much (or how little) the earth cools after it's been heated by the sun. Even man's exhaust from all sources can not warm the first 500 feet of the ocean anywhere close to what the sun does. The oceans and its currents affect weather far more than anything man does or at present can do.
I note that the study was purposely trying to find locations on a lake and lakes that spew larger amounts of methane. So the intent was to find more gas. The intent was to collect it better than previous studies. With out satelite confirmation over the same areas, it is a biased study.
Agreed.
/. title of the post.
And notice the
Faster Global Warming From Permafrost Melt
Shouldn't it be more like "Faster Global Warming Possible From Permafrost Melt?" or "Major Climate changes could happen from Permafrost Melt".
But instead, they assume "Global Warming" and they assume the world is going to melt away. No bias here, just scientists at work.
The title to the story is "Faster Global Warming from Permafrost Melt" yet TFA & even the extract say
"No one is sure if the greenhouse effect will cause them to lock up more, or to release more carbon"...
Sensationalist titles like this are why I still have my doubts about global warning. Every time any climate data is released, the global warning crowd comes out with another sensationalist global warning blurb.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Here we've got a positive feedback loop. The warmer it gets, the more CH4 is presumably released from permafrost.
There are also negative feedback loops. The warmer it gets, the more water evaporates, the more clouds there are, and clouds reflect sunlight. On the other hand, clouds can also hold heat in, and water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
If you want to make forecasts you have to put numbers on all those effects, and they have to be fairly precise numbers or you get hit by the uncertainties of (approximate large number minus other approximate large number). You've also got to account for discontinuities, things that only start happening at threshold temperatures (permafrost melting) or that stop happening after some amount of C)2 gets absorbed (oceanic absorption).
That's where all your tax money is going. It's paying to send highly trained people to uncomfortable places to get hard facts.
That also tells you that it's taken a huge amount of field data to get general agreement on what our CO2 output does to climate.
Make energy expensive.
http://www.whynot.net/ideas/2195
People in hot areas will start adding insulation, whitewashing their houses, adding trees and ivy people in cold areas will start adding insulation, heat pumps etc.
Deleted
No one is sure if the greenhouse effect will cause them to lock up more, or to release more carbon.
Oh, well, case closed then!
Furthermore, the released the fact that we don't know what significance this change will take.
Fact is a pretty strong word in science. Instead you'll generally see "consensus" or "strongly suggests" or "the theory supports". Facts tend to be only used when discussing measurable data, and even then they discuss margin of errors and possible problems in taking the readings.
If I jump off a building, a group of scientists would cheerfully predict when I'll hit the bottom and with how much force, though they'll admit that they can't account for confounding variables like wind speed and the possibility that Superman might wander by. There might be one chap who scoffs at the others and says it's worthless making a prediction as we can't tell if I has a parachute tucked away somewhere.
I see global climate change the same way. It's a complex issue and there's lots of details that still need to be sorted out. Still, if you ask a bunch of scientists their opinion on it, the consensus is that it's real, man-made, and will likely hit the bottom with a loud splat sooner rather than later.
You win this Slashdot story.
It's almost as bad as those evolutionary biologists who don't bother examining if their are any effects from God's guiding hand when documenting a species' genetic make-up. How dare scientists base their research on extremely well researched facts and not on the views of American right-wing fundamentalists.
This is more like "scientific fact, long ago known, by anyone who's followed global warming", not "News". What's next, a Ric Romero story about how the oceans store tons (literally) of CO2?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Let me get this straight. Globabl warming is caused by farts from Siberian snow?
There's a bad Soviet Russia joke in here.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
Let's see, Hydrogen monoxide and nitrous sulphur? I don't think any of those are even stable. Oh, and you must have expected this reply on /. .
The title deals only with permafrost, while the comment from the editor deals with bogs, something that has nothing to do with permafrost aside from being another kind of terrain common in more nordic regions. If the editor had stayed on track, there wouldn't be any confusion.
As for the articles, the only thing remotely close to disagreement is the comment that if if it gets hot enough for all the permafrost underneath the lakes to melt then the water will be able to sink into the ground and you won't have a permafrost lake anymore. (Although I'm not sure how saying that once the permafrost is melted we don't have to worry about excess greenhouse gasses from permafrost is in any way reassuring.)
Many different types of people have come from many different angles to take global warming seriously. They seem considerably less orchestrated than the "denialist crowd". If all you meant by "crowd" was "great numbers of people" then I have no problem with your terminology, which seems dismissive at first read.
The title to the story is "Faster Global Warming from Permafrost Melt" yet TFA & even the extract say
/. submitter, who is in any case referring to uncertainty over bogs, not the melting permafrost.
"No one is sure if the greenhouse effect will cause them to lock up more, or to release more carbon"...
Um no. First of all, you obviously haven't read TFA because it doesn't say this. It was apparently written by the
Sensationalist titles like this are why I still have my doubts about global warning.
You decide whether or not to accept scientific studies based on Slashdot headlines? We're in more trouble than I thought.
HUh, oh....argh..LOL...you are joking right..ah ? I have to slow down and read /. at a better pace...
Ya almost had me going there..
Cheers
End of Line.
Seems pretty clear to me what the article says. Global warming will cause the lakes to emit more methane, which will help increase global warming to the point that the ice below the lakes melts and the water drains off, presumedly carrying the rest of the methane with it. So in the ultra-long-term, the net contribution of the lakes to methane in the atmosphere is uncertain. But in the next century or so, depending on how fast the earth's temp goes up, the lakes will definitely contribute to global warming.
You wouldn't happen to be one of those energy-industry paid astro-turfers, would you?
Shouldn't it be more like "Faster Global Warming Possible From Permafrost Melt?" or "Major Climate changes could happen from Permafrost Melt".
/. has a rather small limit to the length of an article's title. So I went with a shorter one that didn't get truncated.
/. does allow longer headlines than just about any newspaper. ;-)
Well, I tried a few such headlines, but found that
(But
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The /. ideals must be upheld!
Seems pretty clear to me what the article says. Global warming will cause the lakes to emit more methane, which will help increase global warming to the point that the ice below the lakes melts and the water drains off, presumedly carrying the rest of the methane with it. So in the ultra-long-term, the net contribution of the lakes to methane in the atmosphere is uncertain. But in the next century or so, depending on how fast the earth's temp goes up, the lakes will definitely contribute to global warming.
You wouldn't happen to be one of those fossil-fuel-industry-paid astro-turfers, would you?
The weather man can not predict the weather 7 days in advance, why should I believe that weather predictions in the 10, 50, 100, or 200 years from now range are going to be right? I am sorry; I just can not swallow that one!
I know an easy way to make sure it's the second- use the melting tundra to grow pine trees.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I seem to remember watching a documentary on Discovery HD about how, in one of the past instances of global warming, methane was released from deep in the sea and caused a mass extinction. This news doesn't surprise me at all.
No, I will not work for your startup
WOn't ANYONE think of the Children !!! ..Actually why not in this case...
Doing nothing is in effect wagering our children's future..
(I can't beleive I just typed that...the new Simp season just started right ?)
End of Line.
Tell the world and washington that it is a terrorists attack and W. will fully fund halliburton and ch2mhill to do whatever it takes to stop it.
It used to be cold enough for wooly mammoths up there.
You're right, predicting the weather is hard, and so is predicting the climate.
However your conclusion seems to be, since we can't tell for sure what's going to happen, let's just keep throwing crap in the air (CO2 levels are higher than they have been for 800,000 years) and assume that it will all be fine. Common sense says that if we noticeably alter the composition of the entire atmosphere that probably *something* bad will happen.
Hard to predict doesn't mean "most likely there will be no effect".
"Facts do not change because they are ignored." -- Aldous Huxley
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
So what happened the last time it got this warm? Whether that was in 1940 or 8,000 years ago... a few things survived.
How much longer do we have to put up with the "weatherman" red herring. Climate is the long term statistics of weather, if you can't understand that then you are either a troll, willfully ignorant, or simply a wanker without a clue.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Should read: as silly as the GP's attempt to nitpick.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
For more on the effect of the release of methane and carbon deposits one can read Stephen Baxter's Transcendent.
'all siginifigant data shows trhat the permafrost melting will increase global warming.' would be more accurate.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Stories like this show why people can't rely on science to show the way forward with so many rumours and mis-ideas about global warming."
scare mongering media and politicos catering to ignorance cause rumours and mis-ideas about global warming, not science.
All sciences starts with observation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on