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Ticking Arctic Carbon Bomb May Be Bigger Than Expected
sciencehabit writes "Scientists are expressing fresh concerns about the carbon locked in the Arctic's vast expanse of frozen soil. New field studies quantify the amount of soil carbon at 1.9 trillion metric tons, suggesting that previous estimates underestimated the climate risk if this carbon is liberated. Meanwhile, a new analysis of laboratory experiments that simulate carbon release by thawed soil is bolstering worries that continued carbon emissions could unleash a massive Arctic carbon wallop."
Sitting at my personal computer, with another in my pocket, both connected to a world-wide network that allows formerly unimaginable near instantaneous communication, let me say that, "Scientists don't know nuthin' - they're just shills in it for the big bucks and I don't believe a word that they say!!!11!"
There's just no chance that the people with money who pay the people with guns will be able to see beyond their lust for more power and more money. This means things will go to hell with large amounts of certainty.
If there were profit in saving the world [from those who put us there] then they would be interested in saving the world. They have no interest in that. They might entertain the notion if they were guaranteed to come out on top and in control once the crisis was averted, of course, because this is all about giving up power and control.
I am an army of one. I cannot make a difference. But if I saw an army of many marching down the street, I would be inclined to join.
And beyond this, the denial is STILL out there being preached. First they said "it's not real!" Then they said "it's not our fault! It's nature!" Yet in any of this none are willing to make changes or do anything about it. But I don't blame the businesses entirely. It reminds me of the economy of slavery.
There was a town near New Orleans which abolished slavery before Lincoln did. The surrounding areas, of course, did not. Before long, local business could not compete with outside business. This town was forced into allowing slavery once again. Lincoln was successful because it was a unilateral decision. Individuals cannot make an effective change. Small groups cannot make an effective change. It takes unilateral change in order to work.
So even if the whole US stopped CO2 and other emissions today, it wouldn't matter because China and others are simply not going to change.
So you see, the kind of change we require is simply impossible without world war. And that kind of war is simply not going to happen.
And so I say, I'm ready for things to go to hell. I can't imagine a way out that is likely.
I'm recovering with a flu so I might have missed something when reading TFA, but this CO2 release seems to be in addition to the expected massive release of methane from frozen Siberian permafrost.
If so, we're fucked^2 I see no way we can avoid the positive feedback loops of AGW. Sandy will be a pleasant memory from the past, to the citizens of NYC.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
This is nothing other than egghead research "scientists" trying to keep the gravy train going and looking for more of our (yours and mine) money to sit on their asses and debate the issue.
Roight, guv. Basic scientific research is so much more profitable than shilling for Big Oil. The National Science Foundation has so much more money and so much less to spend it on than ExxonMobil, the Koch Brothers and Fox Izvestia.
(You forgot to mention AAAAALLLLL GOOOOORRRRRE!)
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
the methane in the oceans is much more of a threat. but we could harvest that and burn it off, which would solve two birds with one stone. It is much better to fear-monger over things we can't do anything about.
Global warming is bad because the result is ultimately less habitable land, for both people and food production.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
If they wanted money, they would be medical researchers. Environmental science doesn't pay well and doesn't generally involve very large grants.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The way you're talking you seem to have a spare Earth, can I come too?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't see what's so bad about global warming, especially looking out my window right now and seeing snow on the roofs of the outbuildings.
And when we have record breaking Summer temperatures that "disproves" what you say?
Even assuming the earth is warming (and we aren't confident we know why), the earth has been through many warm spells.
Yes. And? Were they as dramatic as they are now? And what was the result? Extinctions for one.
Better to spend the money trying to figure out ways to live and thrive in a warmer climate.
Yep. Fuel prices will go through the roof. Cities will flood. Crop yields will plummet, Poor people will starve - not a problem for some: they're poor for a "reason" after all and deserve it!
The sooner we realize this, the better off we'll be.
We already realize it but nobody is willing to do anything or they bury their heads in the sand. Nothing will be done until it's too late, I'm afraid.
Think China and India might stop using coal? Think they'll stop building coal-fire power plants?
Actually yes, they will. You see, the Chinese leadership made up of scientists and engineers (and I think one "lowly" economist) and they see the writing on the wall. And as it is now, they are concerned about pollution and air quality.
We need to get real about this. NOW.
Yes we do. Folks need to stop listening to the pundits who have no science background let alone one in climatology and who offer no counter evidence or data and only offer ad homminem attacks on the climatologists. If one has a real criticism about human caused climate change or global warming, I wish they'd offer evidence with data to counter the claims.
Yeah, it does support life, but keep in mind, that 3km underwater also supports life; just not *human* life.
Discussing you disgusts me.
You confuse "global warming proponents" (by which I assume you mean lobbyist and such who are trying to convince the world that global warming is real) with "climate researchers".
The latter have reached an overwhelming consensus that anthrogenic global warming is real, and to deny that that is a "reasoned scienctific view" is right up there with denying evolution or the germ theory of disease, saying they're all just political movements.
It is true that there are some in the political area who have cried wolf or who have oversold things. But to deny the utter and overwhelming reality of the results of vast quantities of climate scientists (including some who came in skeptical when they started, but realized that, hey, the data say what the data say) is simply wrong.
I will "keep that in mind" as I point out that during the Paleogene, when the average global temperature was the same or higher as during the Cretaceous, mammals flourished and came to dominate. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was indeed very good for mammals. Were it not for that time period, Plesiadapis would probably not have come to be so successful, and humans today would not exist as a result.
Honestly. I am _ALWAYS_ buried into oblivion when this topic comes up without receiving a single honest response. I worked at a small soda bottler for a while and we had multiple semi tankers FULL of carbon dioxide delivered every week. If carbon dioxide is so damaging what about all of it that we're pumping into sodas? "Save the Planet but don't touch my cola"?
What the fuck do you think the methane will break down into?
Amen. But these kinds of people assume everyone else must be as equally self-serving as themselves, so they can't accept that someone might be motivated by something other than money.
One thing that's readily apparent and not disputed is that our planet's temperature takes wild swings. It's seldom stable, which it seems to have been for several thousand years now. Perhaps our resolution isn't good enough or there's too much noise in the historical data, but it would seem that we live in exceptional times. For the whole system to be able to oscillate that widely, and on relatively short timescales, it MUST be sensitive to positive feedback loops. Runaway processes are apparently the rule rather than the exception.
This is not to say anything one way or the other about the forcing mechanism. I do believe humans have had an awful lot to do with it this time around. What we didn't realize is that it's like Sisyphus rolling the stone uphill. Either he's rolling it slowly and steadily upward, or it's inexorably moving downhill when he loses control. It may start slowly at first, but once it gets going it's nearly impossible to stop.
I don't think we as a species are totally fucked, but I do think a whole lot of people are going to die before this all settles out.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I recognize that global climate is going to warm up no matter *what* we do, and suggest that we should prepare for it (while debunking the claim that it's bad for "life" or farmland), and that makes me a fool? Sorry, but no. The fools are the ones that think anything we do can *stop* the coastlines from being put underwater. It's going to happen, and it does not matter if mankind causes it or not. We should be spending our limited time and resources preparing for something that is inevitable rather than trying to prevent something that is inevitable.
Even worse still, there's a lot of methane trapped in permafrost, which is starting to thaw and release it. Methane's something like 20 times worse than carbon dioxide for global warming effects.
Katey Walter has been doing demonstrations for 5+ years to try and get it to sink in with people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa3M4ou3kvw
Then there are the gigatons of frozen methane caltrate which are destabilizing: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/24/14670511-climate-changing-methane-rapidly-destabilizing-off-east-coast-study-finds?lite
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that we've long since fucked ourselves over - and the explosion of industrialization in China and India is just sealing the deal. Even if you ignore China and India, we appear to have built up so much momentum that even if we drastically curtailed our carbon and methane outputs (like from the cattle industry) instantly, we're still screwed.
Time to start planning for the worst.
Please help metamoderate.
I don't see what's so bad about global warming, especially looking out my window right now and seeing snow on the roofs of the outbuildings.
The eastern USA and NW Europe may be in for another snow-intensive winter because of global warming. If you'd like to take a break from your knee-jerk denialism and actually learn something interesting, pick up a copy of the current Scientific American and read about the mechanism.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If you are just concerned about 'life' flourishing, then it doesn't really matter what the climate is or will be. Life will find a way. If, however, you are concerned about keeping the majority of human beings, and especially 'first world' human beings safe and snug in their high tech cocoons, then you should be very concerned about any abrupt change in any one of a number of critical environmental variables - climate, water, air, fossil fuels, food.
If you haven't noticed, our current civilization doesn't like abrupt change. One little hurricane causes significant damage. A multi year drought causes food prices to rise which causes food riots. A modest rise in fuel costs slows the economy down to much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth.
And those are tiny little disruptions in the grand scheme of things. Now, dramatically change how and where crops are grown, change how and where water falls and rivers rise and fall. Change major weather patterns. Displace a billion people, And add that to the stresses the system is under.
No, it's not the end of the world, however it may be the end of the world as we know it. The US can't even effectively deal with two large cities (New York, New Orleans) getting inundated in the space of a decade. Now, imagine doubling or tripling the problem. Doesn't look pretty. So yes, the planet has survived larger climate shifts. You, on the other hand, might not be so lucky.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Shift the North American grain belt a few degrees latitude north and all if sudden the US's food security is pretty much in a foreign country's hands.
Not doing something about this soon means massive geopolitical shifts in a century.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So because reality disagrees with your political ideology, reality gets the boot. How are you any different from a Lysenkoist?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Totally wrong. How about "all that arable farm land in the middle of the US will be parched desert and the thin, acidic boreal soils of Canada will be warmer, thin, acidic non boreal soils. And the Canadians might have a less than encouraging view of Iowa trying to annex Alberta.
Even more important - Northern Europe / Northern Asia might feel somewhat put out if several billion Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakastanis and various other refugees tried to come north. And so on.
It is no where as simple nor as anywhere as benign as abandoning coastal human settlements and moving them uptown. You see how much trouble is involved in siting a few million people in the Middle East (the Israeli - Palestinian dispute)? Try that worldwide. Try that worldwide and having the ground rules (so to speak) change over the course of a couple of decades.
THE MAJOR PROBLEM ISN'T THE FACT THAT THE PLANET IS CHANGING. It is that the carrying capacity for Homo Stupidicus is limited and we appear to be bumping up to those limits. We aren't there yet, but we are definitely moving along at a brisk pace. As you do that, your OPTIONS BECOME LIMITED. Moving into your neighbor's house may not go over well with your neighbor. We aren't doing such a stellar job at managing civilization at present, even without a whole lot of hard constraints.
There is a reason that the old prayer 'May no new thing arise' is just that - a prayer.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"The resource we will run out of is useful land."
Apparently you've never looked at a map.
Water is the resource at minima.
Need Mercedes parts ?
The summary is missing the fine print, namely that this is 13% more than previous estimates and amounts to about 2 years of human carbon emissions. So, whatever is going to happen is going to happen two years earlier. Sure, it's an interesting scientific result, but hardly big news.
A someone who used to live in Alaska I can tell you the summers are wetter and cooler even if the winters are milder. Cold wet rains hurt food production in Alberta. You might have more hot summer days where that never occured decades ago but the cold rains that normally would be spread further south hurt as much as the shorter growing season in the past.
http://saveie6.com/
By the definition that cryologists and climate scientists use an ice age is any period when there are significant ice sheets on the Earth. Like Antarctica and Greenland. Within the ice age there are cycles of glacials when the continental ice sheets advance and interglacials when they retreat. /pedant
But in the popular vernacular ice age refers to a glacial cycle so it's an easy mistake to make.
It's not the over-all temperatures that are what is the concern, although that does have an effect. The main concern is the melting of the polar ice caps and other glaciated regions. Adding a lot of fresh water to the worlds oceans is affecting the oceanic Gyres, the most critical currently being affected is the north Atlantic Gyre. Since the arctic ice caps started melting at a previously unprecedented rate the current has measurably slowed down. We currently cannot prove 100% that this isn't a natural cycle, but there are strong indications that this is caused by climate change.
You might wonder why the Gyre is so important ( other than ocean health and bio-balance )... without that Gyre England and other European countries would not have the nice climates they have now. England would have roughly the same climate as Nova Scotia / northern Canada / Greenland. This would affect ( shorten ) the growing season of the Russian steppes as well - one of the worlds bread baskets for grain production.
The fact is a warmer climate such as that found during the Cretaceous(~ +4C) is beneficial to life.
The reason the Cretaceous period was so populous was because where the life was most abundant the continental masses had all been situated in the tropical and subtropical zone. That is the sweet spot for life, seasons don't change a whole lot, there is no real "winter" with snow and freezing weather. Life can flourish when hunting / gathering / grazing can be done year round with no compelling reason storage or the requirement for adaptations to colder climates for at the very least part of the year. Today there is not very much landmass ( comparatively ) situated in those zones, and even less that is situated near those zones that isn't dependent on current weather patterns that would be changed if the climate was significantly warmer or cooler.
Much of the world would either die off or use all and in most cases orders of magnitude more of the current energy usage just for heating and growing what food would be possible, the weather patterns would be drastically different as well as being much more violent ( the Cretaceous period has records of huge wildfire cycles as well as floods that make anything in recorded history look like trickles ) and basically the world would be a drastically different place.
I don't get how so many otherwise smart people think we're living on a world that has the absolutely perfect climate, and that any change warmer or cooler results in disaster for mankind.
The climate warming / cooling is not the concern. The Earths climate naturally does that in long, slow cycles that generally allow ecological adaptation. What is concerning is how fast it is happening, several orders of magnitude faster than ever seen before - even from environmental dating done to hundreds of millions of years ago, fast enough that the ecological strata cannot adapt fast enough.
The possibility that climate change will be beneficial ( even in the long run ) is not zero, however from our best projections from extrapolating data from slower changes into a model with faster changes it will most likely be detrimental short term ( "short" being relative, meaning years to millenia ) and either detrimental or non affective long term.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
Trust me, "scientists" don't spend 8-10 years as a student (plus more as a post-doc usually), making no money to get rich. They are mostly just intelligent, curious people with a desire to know how the world works. Your typical "scientist" isn't hauling in the cash and most of them work at tenured jobs where they'd get paid regardless of what they publish. Besides, at this point you're not grabbing anyone's attention when you say that climate change is real and that humans are at least part of the cause. This is agreed upon. No one is "debating the issue".
You are correct on one point. We do need to get real about this. We need to convince the masses that science isn't out to get them. Science just measures the world and shares its results. (And not by looking out the window.)
We know that human life and advanced civilization can thrive in the climate the way it is.
We don't know that human life and advanced civilization can thrive in a Cretaceous-like climate.
Therefore we would like to see the climate stay as much the way it is as we can manage.
What the right wingers aren't getting is that this is the conservative position, at least as "conservative" used to be defined. We like the climate the way it is. A "progressive" position might be "CO2 supports plant life, higher temperatures are good, let's raise the temperature." No sane person believes that. The position of those who call themselves conservatives is "I want my Hummer, consequences be damned!" That's not conservative and it certainly isn't progressive. It's reckless.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
I don't think anyone thinks we can control *whether* coastal cities go underwater. We can just make it happen much more slowly by slowing the rate of warming. Many skeptics think that accepting AGW means thinking that we have complete and total control of the climate, which clearly isn't the case. We can control the part of climate change that is caused by human activities, which at this point seems to be most of the change in the past several decades.
Likewise, you're going to die some day, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be concerned about your health because you're going to die no matter what you do.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
And what if some don't want to cooperate, or want to put crushing conditions on it? What if canada decides they want to jack up the price of grain to extortionate levels?
If short term self interest dominates the AGW debate now, do you think those who hold the cards in 50 or 100 years will be any different?
Beyond that, why not start now? Do you think that once AGW is seriously fucking up the global economy and food supply that we will be in a better position? Or are we just going to foist this on to our grandchildren?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If right wing types would just accept the evidence for global warming, they could start coming up with right wing solutions for it. There's nothing about global warming which says it MUST have left wing solutions...it's just that left wing types are the only ones even putting forward solutions. This is perhaps the worst thing about the right wing refusal to face global warming...it's depriving us of half of the possible spectrum of solutions to the problem.
Because of cities and massive population on the coastlines?
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
How open with "Totally Wrong." and follow it up with a totally wrong statement? How... expected of you. How do I know your statement is totally wrong? Easy. During those periods of history when the NA climate was the most hospitable to life year round, it was warmer than even the worst AGW predictions expect it to get. Much warmer.
The worst case prediction from the IPCC report is an average temperature rise of 4.5C. The average temperature increase during the PTEM was 6C -- not above temperatures today, but above temperatures during the rest of the Paleozoic and Eocene period. Compared with today, global temperatures were about 11C warmer.
The fossil record [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum#Life]indicates that during this time[/url], deep sea creatures faired rather poorly, with nearly 50% extinction. However, plankton, plants, and land animals -- especially mammals -- had a huge population explosion, spreading and diversifying wildly. North America was a tropical to subtropical environment at this time, not the arid wasteland you seem to suggest.
Many people haven't gotten the memo, but Exxon Mobil CEO Rex TIllerson has now said that AGW is happening but that the best course of action is to adapt to it.
Since Exxon Mobil was funding the astroturf denialist organizations, it's surprising that the noise hasn't died out yet. Momentum, maybe?
Actually, no.
I am not under the misapprehension that the action of "too much" will only make the planet nicer. Obviously, excessive/misdirected resources spent on any problem X can mean less resources available to spend on other problems not X. However, while we might expand the table to take this into account, we are then expanding the scope of the matrix beyond X. This is an initial approach matrix, not a comprehensive systems analysis.
Secondly, you mention depopulation as a solution proposed by others that you find unacceptable. I also find it unacceptable - and since my post was not about specific solutions, and you do not mention any proposals that you do find acceptable, I caution you against the use of strawman arguments.
Nor is it implicit in my table that the measures taken are actually effective. Indeed, the opposite is true (the action "Not Enough" covers this). Finally, regarding consensus and genuinely effective measures, I again reiterate that this is an initial decision matrix, so consensus or the lack thereof on effective measures is irrelevant to it.