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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.
Yes, and its part of a natural cycle. The polar caps on Mars are also melting, but we seem to be peaking and cycling back into the cold half again for another 11 or 22 or 28 or 88 years. There are several cycles that sometimes harmonize to cause the extremes.
Solar cycle extremes as a seasonal predictor of Atlantic-Basin tropical cyclones
FTA:
Minimum sunspot years and the AMO index can combine to explain more than 54 percent of the variations in total tropical cyclones and nearly 46 percent of the variation in tropical cyclone days. Solar cycle extremes should be considered for more accurate seasonal tropical cyclone predictions.
So what does that have to do with the permafrost melting, or even global warming more generally?
Did you just find a peer reviewed article talking about sunspots and figured no one would realize it didn't support your argument?
I stole this Sig
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.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Good try, but Trump hasn't even nominated anyone for the posts I listed.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, we're not talking about nominations that aren't getting through. We're talking about nominations that haven't been MADE. Democrats can neither approve nor deny a nomination that hasn't been made. Democrats fought against some of Trump's nominees - and lost every battle. But the vast majority of posts he has never nominated anybody for at all. Because Don the Con has zero interest in doing the president's actual job. He occupies the job for one purpose only: to take a lot of taxpayer money for himself.
Already the secret service is bankrupt from bills they have to pay to properties owned by Trump on his constant vacations. The man they are protecting is actually billing them for the privilege of protecting him - to the extent that they are now broke.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
"why hasn't there been runaway carbon dioxide warming in the past?"
End Permian, 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost
Known as “the great dying”, this was by far the worst extinction event ever seen; it nearly ended life on Earth. The tabulate corals were lost in this period – today’s corals are an entirely different group. What caused it? A perfect storm of natural catastrophes. A cataclysmic eruption near Siberia blasted CO2 into the atmosphere. Methanogenic bacteria responded by belching out methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Global temperatures surged while oceans acidified and stagnated, belching poisonous hydrogen sulfide. It set life back 300 million years.
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?
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?
Why doesn't any positive feedback react that way? If I have a single beer that triggers a positive feedback loop where I want another beer, but it doesn't end up with me dead of alcohol poisoning, it ends up with me drunk and deciding I've had enough. An avalanche is another positive feedback, a single snowball might not do anything, but once there's enough sliding snow it starts to trigger more snow to slide.
But the result isn't snow sliding to the centre of the earth, the positive feedback of sliding snow gives out as the snow reaches the bottom of the mountain.
Global warming feedbacks aren't fundamentally different, positive feedbacks diminish in effectiveness as the system moves in their direction. The positive feedbacks of global warming are like two meta-stable states of the snow, top of the mountain and bottom of the mountain. Just like we went from an ice age to a modern climate, we're on our way from a modern climate to global warming. And that climate won't be stable either, eventually something else will happen, another set of positive feedback will kick in, and the earth will move to yet another equilibrium.
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?
I don't know how typical it is for the sun to cause a crazy hot year, but one really hot year doesn't do much. The permafrost doesn't melt in one hot year, it takes a lot of hot years in a row.
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.
I read a lot of MSM and Trump's administration has gone more or less how I expected, as has the climate over the past couple decades.
Somehow I suspect you end up being either surprised the state of reality a lot more often than I do.
I stole this Sig
Here is what is happening: Democrats are requiring that Republicans check all the procedural boxes on most nominees....
“The level of obstruction exhibited by Senate Democrats on these nominees is just breathtaking,” Mr. McConnell said...
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.
So, you vindictive partisan fuck..... go to a library and beg them to get you into a class to teach you how to read. Then cut your nuts off, you ignorant dipshits are fucking up the gene pool.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
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