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Alaska's Permafrost Is Thawing (cnbc.com)
Henry Fountain reports via The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as other parts of the planet, and even here in sub-Arctic Alaska the rate of warming is high. Sea ice and wildlife habitat are disappearing; higher sea levels threaten coastal native villages. But to the scientists from Woods Hole Research Center who have come here to study the effects of climate change, the most urgent is the fate of permafrost, the always-frozen ground that underlies much of the state. Starting just a few feet below the surface and extending tens or even hundreds of feet down, it contains vast amounts of carbon in organic matter -- plants that took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere centuries ago, died and froze before they could decompose. Worldwide, permafrost is thought to contain about twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere. Once this ancient organic material thaws, microbes convert some of it to carbon dioxide and methane, which can flow into the atmosphere and cause even more warming. Scientists have estimated that the process of permafrost thawing could contribute as much as 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit to global warming over the next several centuries, independent of what society does to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels and other activities. In Alaska, nowhere is permafrost more vulnerable than here, 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in a vast, largely treeless landscape formed from sediment brought down by two of the state's biggest rivers, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. Temperatures three feet down into the frozen ground are less than half a degree below freezing. This area could lose much of its permafrost by midcentury.
Time to plant trees. Lots of trees.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Now I will consider moving there.
Challenge accepted!
We're entering the final stages of the Quaternary glaciation period. This is just the latest period of glaciation among many such ice ages. Between past ice ages there have been periods of time when glaciation has been less than even it is now, which has allowed fauna and flora to readily survive and flourish in environments that today are considered inhospitable frozen wastelands. This is why we can find plant and animal matter well under what are today layers of permafrost.
Some will wrongly claim that it's due to land that was formerly in warmer climates moving northward due to plate tectonics, but they misunderstand the geologic timelines we're talking about here. When discussing periods of glaciation, we're talking about the last 500 million to 1000 million years. While Australia, India and South America have seen significant movement, the Arctic regions have actually remained quite stationary for billions of years.
The most important thing to get out of this is that we're looking at cycles that take millions of years to complete. These cycles existed long before humans existed, and by extension, long before the Industrial Revolution that started a mere 300 years ago. Despite what politicians say, especially politicians who are eager to impose carbon taxes, humans have nothing to do with the temperature changes we're witnessing. They're merely part of long-running cycles of increasing and decreasing glaciation. We just happen to be nearing, in geological terms, the end of a period of glaciation, which is exactly when we'd expect temperatures to be rising in areas where glaciation has decreased. This is a process that has been going on for a long time, well before human involvement could have ever played any role.
Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.
The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.
We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
A category 4 hurricane just hit the Texas coast and our President still hasn't appointed anyone to head the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, or any of the agencies that deal with hurricanes.
Today, as he flew off on a golfing trip to Camp David, he was asked if he had a message for the people of Texas. His reply was, "Good luck".
http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
You are welcome on my lawn.
In 1500 there were 500 million people +/-. And except for nomads, all of them depended on farming.
Nomads are uncommon and very in number.
In the animal kingdom, all animals are nomads. None of them farm.
This is simple cause and effect that a species that uses farming is going to have a disproportionate population size. Deer populations starve themselves to death with overpopulation and eating all the available food in winter.
While Australia, India and South America have seen significant movement, the Arctic regions have actually remained quite stationary for billions of years.
No, the North American Plate has crossed the equator twice in the last half billion years, and even about 200 mya Alaska would have been at a similar latitude as New York or northern California.
However, it is wrong to say much of that organic matter comes from 500 mya, as the timeline for plant matter being trapped in permafrost is completely different than the geological timescales of the contents moving... but that also means it has nothing to do with cycles of hundreds of millions of years either.
Just because you can point at someone else as wrong and say something contrary to them doesn't stop you both from being wrong.
Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.
The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.
We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.
The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.
We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
It sounds like the permafrost melting thing is an unstable equilibrium: the more it melts, the more carbon and methane goes into the atmosphere, the warmer it gets, and the more it melts.
So, here's my question: if we are sitting on an unstable equilibrium like that, why hasn't there been runaway carbon dioxide warming in the past?
It would only take a degree or two of variation to trigger the runaway event, but that's never happened due to variations in sun activity?
The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.
Every morning I read Breitbart first, then MSM (via Google News). Breitbart to find out what happened, and MSM to find out why it was Trump's fault.
No, we're not talking about nominations that aren't getting through. We're talking about nominations that haven't been MADE.
You mean like Brock Long, head of FEMA?
The Brock Long that isn't incompetent?
The Brock Long that was confirmed in June?
I wish you'd call it a lie when Trump says it and acknowledge that people can be wrong without lying.
Whether Mr. Long is competent, or not, will be seen shortly, but I won't accuse you of lying if he isn't.
I wish you'd call it a lie when Trump says it and acknowledge that people can be wrong without lying.
Whether Mr. Long is competent, or not, will be seen shortly, but I won't accuse you of lying if he isn't.
I'm sorry that my response offended you.
Next time I'll remember to be polite and gentle responding to a leftist post, because those posts always are.
It's time to face reality and abandon Socialism. We knew the Alaska Permafrost Fund was unsustainable.
Seriously. Don't you get it? NOBODY CARES.
You squirted out all these kids, sang their praises and told yourselves they were the most important thing, and this is the legacy you give them. This isn't proof that humans are a dead-ender species? An evolutionary blip that doesn't know it's ass from a hole in the ground? You still believe in the myth of human progress? You'll be extinct in less than 300 years. And good riddance.
Just trash the place already and be done with it, you disgusting bunch of fucking knuckle dragging morons.
Also, Democrats are slowing down the confirmation process
Conservatives sure do like being hypocritical little twats.
Republicans engaged in similar procedural combat after Democrats made the 2013 change, tying up the Senate to slow President Barack Obama’s push to fill judicial vacancies.
Here's some light reading for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... with highlights:
The Washington Post has identified 587 key positions requiring U.S. Senate confirmation. Of those key positions, As of August 17, 2017, 117 of Trump's nominees have been confirmed, 106 are awaiting confirmation, and 0 have been announced but not yet formally nominated.
So.... of the 587 key positions, Trump has nominated 223 as of a week ago. Then, there's this other side of things:
http://www.politico.com/story/...
At least 17 of Trump’s nominees took more than a month to be officially sent to the Senate, at which point the vetting by senators and aides can begin in earnest, according to a POLITICO analysis. (One of the 17 nominations, Jim Donovan to be Trump’s deputy Treasury secretary, has since been withdrawn).
I get it... i really do understand; you conservatives are fucking hypocrites who have to play the victim all the time because you can't govern worth a shit. When you do get in power, the only fucking thing you do is to try to stay in power, instead of help the country.... oh... and whine, a lot.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
You have not figured out US politics yet.
Opportunity: Opposing party president needs to do something.
Step 1: Prevent him from doing it.
Step 2: Claim the moral and competency highground for your party.
Same thing happened to Obama. Guantanamo bay is still running 9 years after he said he was going to shut it down early in his presidency. Guantanamo Bay was Obama's border wall.
Only problem was the foreign prisoners could only be transferred to specific facilities and he had to get permission from the Governor having jurisdiction over those select detention facilities. It just so happened that every governor was a republican. They all said no. Obama's campaign promise was broken and the republican party got to point it out.
The democrats are no better, but they do run more press so we have to hear the spun consequence of their undermining the good of the country for the party's benefit more often.
Back when it was being built, our next door neighbor (a carpenter) went up to work on it. I remember at the time there was a lot of concern about how it was being built, directly onto the permafrost... you know, that frozen ground that had been frozen solid for tens of thousands of years. It's going to be one costly s.o.b. when the oil companies who have privatized most of the profit for decades leave the mess for the taxpayers to have to clean up.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Democrats are slowing down the confirmation process so that at the current rate, congress will get through all of Trump's nominations in 11 years (!).
That's the blowback from refusing to even hold hearings on a replacement for Scalia until "the right person" could make that appointment. Now that they've armed this loose cannon, they're going to be repeatedly shot with it -- and it serves them right. Always assume that your opponents will eventually get possession of the ball, and craft your rule changes accordingly. They didn't, this is what happens.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Hitler gassed millions of people, therefore I can gas millions of people.
(You logic)
You need to take that nickle you got from that last blowjob and buy yourself a dictionary; you clearly need to learn what words mean before you use them. I get it though, you're just a whiny little dipshit who doesn't see the reality of things. You bitch and complain about something democrats are now doing, that your side did a few years ago; and you're trying to place all the blame on them when the simple fact is that Trump is slower than shit getting their paperwork done.... which is also causing delays. Then there's the whole not even nominating people.
Let me go back and make the bigger point....587 key position, Trump has nominated only 223 of them so far. Thing is, there's a total of 1212 positions that need nominations and senate approval.... yet, 223 nominations so far. It would take a clueless fucking idiot anonymous coward to not understand that; thankfully we have you filling that position to a T. You whiny little victims probably should put on your big boy pants, although considering your nuts haven't dropped yet, i doubt they'd help you not look like fucking idiots.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Short memory Kiddo, The republicans learned this stunt from us 16 years ago.
You forgot to call him Hitler.
I subtract 10 points from your screed.
It isn't very becoming.
Short memory Kiddo, The republicans learned this stunt from us 16 years ago.
I like how you talk shit but provide no citation. Classy! Thanks for helping make Slashdot grate! Lazy fuckhead.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Stop burning fossil fuels. Doesn't matter if you plant trees at 30gt/yr if you keep pumping out CO2 at 31gt/yr.
Best thing is that NOT doing something is cheaper and less effort than continuing to do it.
So, this carbon was captured only "centuries ago", yet its release back into the atmosphere is going to lead to unprecedented global warming that is going to destroy civilization, wipe out humanity, and maybe end higher life on the planet?
Somebody needs to get their stories straight.
The Milankovitch cycle (which is the relevant one here) means it should currently be cooling, which is what was happening for 8000 years until now. What process do you suggest that is stronger than this cycle, given you've just said this cycle is dominant?
In terms of human influence, please explain why the physics of radiation balance historically applies to CO2 from non-fossil sources, but not to that from fossil sources released by man?
Short memory Kiddo, The republicans learned this stunt from us 16 years ago.
I like how you talk shit but provide no citation. Classy! Thanks for helping make Slashdot grate! Lazy fuckhead.
Here you go: courtesy of then-Senator Joe Biden
It was rather aggressively reported by quite a number of media outlets, though I suppose the particular media outlets from which you consume news helpfully decided that this particular bit of information was not at all newsworthy.
wouldn't be offset with trees/plants finally growing in this region like it was before?
Bloody hell, that fat useless fuck APK has got internet access in the asylum again, and is dribbling his billious delusions.
Or you could attack the alleged problem - heat - directly.
Orbital sunshades can give you as much cooling as you want. But that's pretty high tech (though far cheaper than the economic damage of most of the current prescriptions.) But there are cheaper and easier ways.
For instance: You could change the albedo so the Earth, or large parts of it, turned black in the infrared window. This can be done with a number of materials, some of them very cheap (like 0.8 micron glass microspheres - about a tenth the diameter of red blood cells).
Such microspheres, embedded in a plastic film with the bottom side silvered for reflectivity, produce 93 watts per square meter of net COOLING in the direct noonday sun - and they work 24/7. That's good for 10 degrees C (18 F) - which is more than four times the temperature rise that the global warming proponents are saying is catastrophic. The material can be made for $0.50/square meter even with current processes.
Without the mirror coating and plastic film, just scattered over the existing surfaces, I'd expect them to do at least half as well (as long as they were on top), and be a hell of a lot cheaper. So if they aren't more of an inhalation hazard than desert sand, scattering them over things like the Sahara could both drastically drop its temperature and substantially reduce that of the planet, as well.
But you'd better be REALLY SURE the planet is actually warming up - rather than, say, falling into the next ice age in a few hundred years. Sweeping up those glass beads (or undoing a number of other "warming mitigations") might be more difficult than deploying them.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A better first step would be to turn off the machines that actively add carbon to the air.
So, you are gonna close your mouth hole? You are a carbon exhaust machine, maroon.
Fake news from the New York Slimes. One of the most leftist leaning newspapers in the country.
Time to plant trees. Lots of trees.
You could cover the entire planet surface with trees and it still wouldn't be enough. It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.
Okay. But until we have such machines, the most readily available carbon-sink, cost-effective and easily deployed with unskilled labour, is the tree.
OK, let's calculate. Here's a source talking about CO2 absorption by trees: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... , and here's a source saying "A tree can absorb as much as 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year and can sequester 1 ton of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 40 years old.": https://projects.ncsu.edu/proj...
This one says that trees absorb 40% of the 28 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted per year: World's forests absorb almost 40 per cent of man made CO2
If we take just that last figure, it's easy: we need to increase the number of trees to 250% of the existing number: plant an additional 150% as many trees as already exist on Earth.
Google tells me that 30% of the Earth's land area is covered by trees ( ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/0... ), so the quick estimate is that we need to plant enough trees to change this to 75%.
That's the blowback from refusing to even hold hearings on a replacement for Scalia until "the right person" could make that appointment.
Well, no. Your very own article points out the fundamental difference: "Democrats are requiring that Republicans check all the procedural boxes on most nominees, even those they intend to eventually support ."
So they're not doing it because they think the appointees shouldn't be confirmed, and they have no expectation that their behavior is going to change the outcome. They're doing it purely to delay.
Fucking moderators are such cunts! Modding people down for telling others not to worry about bullshit, and that they should be happy and grateful to be alive.
Bitch!
AGW was first proposed in 1896, and discredited for the next five decades. During the period 1950-1970 the growing body of evidence was sufficient to reverse the consensus, and since then all of the evidence is pointing towards, "Yes, this phenomenon is real and behaves as we expect." Denying this has become a symbol of ideological purity for a current political party, but there's only so far one can take that tactic.
The science is really pretty simple. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Originally, we did not think that it could build up in the atmosphere, and we thought that it could not contribute any more to warming than [a] what it was already doing, and [b] what water vapor was doing. After we became better able to observe the upper atmosphere, it was realized that, yes, there was a bit of a gap for CO2 in the H2O spectrum, but more importantly, the CO2-dense part of the atmosphere extends quite a bit higher than the tropopause. But what does that matter if it's already completely opaque at lower CO2 concentrations?
The effect of a higher partial pressure of CO2 is to push the CO2-dense region of the atmosphere further out into space, increasing the effective 'top-of-atmosphere'. This means that outgoing radiation must take a longer path out of the atmosphere, which effectively traps heat in the lower atmosphere. The "no-feedback forcing" can be relatively straightforwardly calculated to be ~3.7 W/m^2 per doubling of atmospheric CO2, which is equivalent to about 1 degree C of global temperature change.
Now, that in itself is not a huge deal. The issue is that H2O is a strong greenhouse gas and you may have noticed that there happens to be some rather large reservoirs of that stuff lying around just itching to be part of the atmosphere. We've spent quite a bit of time looking for ways that the H2O feedback won't end up being a huge issue. And I think that I'm maligning anyone to suggest that Dr. Lindzen has had the most credible alternate hypothesis in decades, which sadly he has not been able to find credible evidence for. Some major flaw in the physics of H2O is about all that would save us at this point.
AGW is a theory that we've been trying to disprove for more than a century. We've known for about 150 years that CO2 was a greenhouse gas and that many human activities release large amounts of this substance, but the initial assumption was that climate was cyclical and that warm years would balance out cold ones. The theories of AGW and climate change have at every step had to fight for acceptance among people who (reasonably enough) were not prepared to believe in them.
And then in more recent history there is a crowd of conservative voices who have -- being generous -- rejected empiricism in favor of a more rationalist epistemology. Truth is not what you measure -- measurements can be biased, measurers can lie -- truth is what you can prove with logic and reason. It's not like science can measure God, and those scientists are all leftist eggheads anyway. Those elitists don't have a monopoly on truth. Which is all well and good, and certainly an internally consistent philosophy, but if the tragedy of empiricism is never being sure of anything, the problem with non-empirical philosophies is that they are under no obligation to be consistent with observable reality. Politicians at the moment find it useful to take up an anti-empirical position, and rather sensibly they've picked a topic which to date has yet to make much meaningful impact on the lives of most Americans. (I'm from Alaska; the glaciers and permafrost melting has been fairly readily apparent there, since the bulk of these effects has been at the lower alpine/tidewater icefields and the edges of the permafrost fields -- the most visible and accessible areas.)
At this point the Republicans seem a bit screwed. Their constituency won't allow them to walk this one back -- supporting climate science has been a great way to lose Republican primaries in recent years. Symptoms of warming are (consistent with other conspiracy the
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Here is your actual proof:
Ice core cample results
Here, too
IIUC, Antarctica *HAS* been relatively stable in it's position for an extremely long time. Back through the Jurassic. I also doubt that the North American plate has crossed the equator twice...unless you mean a projection from it crossed the equator and then retreated. The major continental drift has been away from what is now the central Atlantic ocean, though there was certainly a lot of rotational movement as well, and India moved quite rapidly away from Africa and is now ploughing into Asia.
It *is* true that Africa and Australia were once (LONG ago) connected via Antarctica, and that Antarctica was relatively warm at that time. (Temperate forest.) But the days in that forest were about 6 months long, so it was in the same position. I presume that it was warmed by ocean currents the same way Iceland, Ireland, and the west coast of North America are.
But the continental drift happens on a different time scale that the growth of vegetation in the permafrost area. What probably happened (this is a guess) was that the position of Greenland shifted from an earlier position in which the Gulf Stream was directed all the way up into the Arctic Ocean, causing the pole to be a lot warmer. Slowly Greenland drifted to it's current position where the channel up past Hudson's Bay is too narrow to allow significant flow (and then it iced up which really stopped things). This caused the Arctic Ocean to freeze. The problem with this is there are some indications that at least in some areas the freeze happened quite rapidly, so some details are clearly missing or wrong.
---- separator ---- line ---- encountered ---- lameness ---- filter ----
The following part is a guess. Don't believe it, but take it seriously.
But note that in the current permafrost area the vegetation that ended up under the permafrost was annuals rather than perennials (like trees), so imagine that for a long time it was an area that was swampy during the summer and frozen during the winter, and chilly all the way to the bottom of the bog. In fact a good model would probably be the colder Irish peat bogs. Then it really froze, and the decomposition slowed to a crawl. But this allowed more oxygen to diffuse into the mess, because now life processes were too slow to use it up. So when it melts not ALL the decomposition will be anaerobic. This will be important because aerobic processes are more energetically efficient, but it will be limited, because not that much oxygen is around. This means a rapid bloom followed be a slow continuation.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Just apply the Sarah Palin caribou conservation method to carbon sequestering, but with republicans instead of wolves.
Hunt them down with high-powered rifles from helicopters.
You know? The Alaskan way.
The best part is there'd be no opposition from wildlife or animal protection groups.
Actually, they'd probably join the hunt and feel the joy of killing for the first time.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And there's nothing wrong with more fresh water.
Hey, if Al Gore's not concerned, we shouldn't be. He's buying up beachfront property and producing lots of CO2 emissions.
By the way: One of my concerns about the increased use of solar panels for power is that they absorb far more sunlight than the surfaces they shade - like nearly all of it, when much might have been reflected back to space. All of it goes to heat - about a fifth when the power is used (if the panels are very efficient), the rest right there at the panel as various losses.
But it turns out that this stuff re-radiates to space roughly as much energy as the panel absorbs. It also cools the panel, which makes it more efficient. And it's cheap enough that coating the panel adds more power-in-the-wires per buck than building the uncoated panel, so it will be a price-performance improvement that is likely to actually be deployed. Much better.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
im installing my coal fired air conditioning system this month.
First, I didn't link any article (I responded to someone who did), and second, I don't think it is at all unreasonable to demand a full work-up on every nominee when it has been amply demonstrated that Trump sometimes (often?) makes picks based on loyalty and nepotism rather than qualifications. This should surprise nobody, it's how he got where he is.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Subsidies are probably not only not necessary but perhaps even counter productive. What we need is more people to recognize that without question wind is the easiest and cheapest solution, particularly if the rotors are placed off shore. If there is more recognition then it will become obvious to all that investments in wind power will be very good investments going forward, particularly relative to fossil fuels. With more recognition comes more investment and with more investment comes every falling prices, with increasing profits coming from economies of scale. What people need to recognize are three things:
1) wind will ultimately displace fossil fuels because of the economics, even without subsidies and even with the present massive subsidies for fossil fuels
2) those who are first to invest in wind power will become the new energy barons and all those profits that are now flowing into the hands of fossil fuel investors will soon be flowing into the hands of wind power investors instead.
3) unless solar or tidal technologies overtake wind in the market based on price, or if we simply continue to impose fossil fuels based on political considerations as the Trump administration is trying to do to everyone's detriment, humans won't be able to live on planet Earth in a few hundred years as temperatures will simply become too high for human life.
It has been melting ever sense the end of the little ice age -- I'm so scared.
Really? This is modded down?
The earth warms, the earth cools...and we aren't "warming up" but are heading to a COOLING DOWN period. Just ask any ham radio operator how the bands have sucked the last year. Sunspots are void, CME's are low, if at all. We ended the modern maximum around 2008-09. It's called A CYCLE and has nothing to do with man. One good burp from a stupid volcano throws more so called greenhouse gas in the air than Algore or Leo deCRAPrio can flying all over the place warning us that we are all going to die unless we change OUR lifestyle (but not theirs of course).
If all these things died and got frozen over quickly enough not
to decompose...doesn't that mean the permafrost wasn't always there? And when it did come on, it came on fast?
It's called "Thaw Season" as in, it is something that occurs "annually". The fires in BC are not helping: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1530(199701)8:1%3C45::AID-PPP240%3E3.0.CO;2-K/abstract
"... I read Breitbart first..."
Well there's your problem! Unless you are a jokester looking for laughs, in which case I salute you.