Siberian Permafrost Melting

TeknoHog writes "New Scientist Reports on a remarkable runaway process of global warming that has been going on in Siberia for the past few years. 'Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3C in the last 40 years.' As a result, a million square kilometers (the area of France and Germany) of frozen peat bog have been found to be melting, according to Russian and international scientists. This releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, which contributes to further global warming."

The world actually needs more bogs

[ugmoe]

http://www.waverley.gov.uk/waste/peat.asp#What%20i s%20Peat? [waverley.gov.uk]

David Bellamy said, "We criticise people from the third world countries for not conserving their rainforests, but when it comes to our peat bogs which are actually a rarer habitat than the tropical rainforest, we are doing a much worse job". (The Times, Saturday November 25, 2000).

Exploitation by afforestation, conversion to agriculture and commercial peat extraction has destroyed much of our peat lands. In the last century we lost 75% of our blanket bogs and 94% of our raised bogs. Gardeners and horticulture used a staggering 2.55 million cubic metres of peat each year. In the UK there is less than 9,500 acres of near natural raised bog left.

Re:TF Text from TFA

[Atryn]

estimates that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane

Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

According to this [nef.org.uk] site, the approximate annual CO2 emissions worldwide is about 140M tonnes. If methane is 20 times as potent, that would be the equivalent of about 7M tonnes of methane. Using that number, the amount of methane contained in the peat bog is equivalent to 10,000 years of CO2 emissions at the current rate.

So I guess the remaining question is how fast this 70 billion tonnes of methane is actually entering the atmosphere (adjust properly for acceleration effects)...

Re:Yeah it sucks, but....

[darkonc]

Something similar is happening in Northern canada, and they are complaining. Polar bears are starving, the permafrost is turning into a bog, the hunting is getting messed up, and thawing ground is messing up buildings and other infrastructure designed with (no longer permanent) permafrost in mind.

And the polar ice cap is melting fast too... Most of us may live to see it all but disappear. Think of it as the mother of all ice cubes, and imagine what the melting is going to do --- dilute the 'drink' (which will change water density which will change ocean water flow, which will seriously mess with weather patterns) and once it finishes melting, it's function as a thermal buffer disappears and global warming will really start to hurt us.

I'm thinking that people are underestimating that last point.

Re:yeah but it'll stink won't it?

[eggstasy]

Pure methane is odorless, but when used commercially is usually mixed with small quantities of strongly-smelling sulfur compounds such as ethyl mercaptan to enable the detection of leaks.
(from wikipedia)

Re:Burning methane

[eggstasy]

If I read this wikipedia article, it's more like 23 to 1:

Global warming potential (GWP) is a measure of how much a given mass of greenhouse gas is estimated to contribute to global warming. It is a relative scale which compares the gas in question to that of the same mass of carbon dioxide whose GWP is one.
(...)
Examples:

        * carbon dioxide has a GWP of exactly 1 (since it is the baseline unit to which all other greenhouse gases are compared.)
        * methane has a GWP of 23.

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potent ial [wikipedia.org])

Re:What is Peat?

[ugmoe]

You said:

"The problem is that these phases normally last millions of years, and the transitions between them are often extremely slow"

Antarctic ice cores from the last 300,000 years show something different from what you claim.

http://www.koshland-science-museum.org/exhibitgcc/ historical02.jsp [koshland-s...museum.org] The data that I have seen shows that the ice-age cycles last 100,000 years, not millions, and that the transitions can be abrupt. (data from 300,000 years of ice cores from Vostok, Antarctica)

Climate can exhibit abrupt shifts over large regions of the world. As the last glacial period was giving way to the current warm interglacial period, average temperatures in Greenland returned to glacial levels for more than 1,000 years. This unusual period, which is called the Younger Dryas, ended abruptly about 12,000 years ago. Evidence from an ice core drilled in Greenland indicates that temperatures there rose approximately 15F (8C) in less than a decade.

http://www.weathernotebook.org/transcripts/1999/10 /20.html [weathernotebook.org] "Scientists used to think that climate took hundreds, even thousands of years to change. Now we know better. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook.

An example of an extremely quick climate change came during a period of time known as the Younger Dryas, which happened right after the last ice age ended, about 12,000 years ago. The Younger Dryas itself lasted about 1,000 years. What we didn't know until recently was just how quickly the Younger Dryas started and stopped. In a period of less than 50 years, the climate from the eastern US and Canada to much of Europe went from climate conditions much like today's, to frigid readings more like the Ice Age, at least a ten degree Farenheit change. That's how it stayed for a thousand years - and then the climate flipped back to normal in as little as 20 years."

Are you just making up your claims?

Do you have data to back them up?

Re:Air is getting warmer inside heads too...

[Coryoth]

but has anyone taken into consideration that the earth has been warming up steadily for the past several thousand years?...the Earth fluctuates quite frequently (geologic time) in temperature... We very well may be causing this, which would be bad, but what if we are not?

Yes, the earth has been warming. The issue that is being raised here, however, is not the general warming trend, but the rate of warming. The claim (and there is an slowly increasing amount of data to back it up) is that the rate of warming has undergone a very dramatic increase in the last 100 years that is unprecendented in recent history (last 1000 years or so). The sudden rise correlates well with dramatic increases in atmospheric CO2 from the industrial revolution onward, and there are studies on the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere that lend creedence to a causal rather than just correlated relationship.

Yes the planet goes through natural cycles of cooling and warming, and over time it can indeed fluctuate over huge temperatures. The risk is that we are disturbing the natural fluctuation and pushing the system out of its rough equilibrium. Systems often have tipping (bifurcation) points that can radically alter the behaviour of the system. A pendulum naturally swings back and forth steadily, but give it a hard enough push and it just starts spinning round and round. In essence we are giving the pendulum of warming and cooling a very strong push. Whether the pendulum will simply swing a little higher then settle back, or go over the top and start spinning in just one direction is certainly up for debate. Possibilities for feedback systems and induced dampening given the manner of warming are almost innumerable, and we are still working to understand the most obvious candidates well. There isn't reason to panic yet, but there is most certainly reason for concern.

Jedidiah.

Re:BBC...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because it even says "NEW SCIENTIST REPORTS"

But let's not get stupid little things like that get in our way, dumbass.

Re:"Global" "Warming"?

[uncadonna]

even though he obviously bends the truth to make his fiction more interesting

More than a little. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74 [realclimate.org] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=76 [realclimate.org]

Re:TF Text from TFA

[uncadonna]

The 140 M tons is Britain alone, per year. The global total is 6GT, neatly working out to about a ton per person per year. It's unevenly divided, with a few countries having per capita emissions 5 times higher than the average.

High latitude methane may nevertheless work out to be a big deal. Softening the blow a bit is the fact that methane is shorter-lived in the atmosphere than CO2.

Some researchers believe that tundral methane releases play a big role in the termination of the recent glaciations.

Everybody signed Kyoto

[violet16]

the Russians didn't sign the Kyoto Agreement

What!? Dude. Every single country in the UN signed the Kyoto protocol [wikipedia.org], including Russia. Two, the US and Australia, have since changed their minds and won't ratify it. There are only four other countries that haven't yet ratified it: Croatia, Kazakhstan, Monaco, and Zambia.

The Kyoto Protocol isn't some little thing. It's a pact between 141 countries to tackle global warming, even though the planet's #1 greenhouse gas polluter refuses to help.

Re: Third Post

[WiFiBro]

" What on Earth makes you think we can change it? " An American relative gave me a "Say you can and you will" poster (never seen anything comparable in any other country). World community except 1 is trying to prevent too drastic change.

"What on Earth makes you think we should change it?!?!"
Um.. disappearing glaciers? Insurance companies panicking ?

"Are you so arrogant as to think we have a say in it?"
Dutch researchers calculated China and India can reduce emissions even when the use of electricity will double. Key word: efficiency. Absent word: nuclear power.

Re:Third Post

[Conanymous Award]

Am I the only one who is excited about this?? Think of the possibilities! We've already exhumed one mammoth from the ice in Siberia... think about how many more things we're going to find out about our ancestors, how many exciting possibilities there are. I'm really not worried.

I'm a paleontologist, and actually I'm not excited about this at all. Melting permafrost means melting carcasses of mammoth, woolly rhino and other fauna of the last glaciation. If nobody's there to pick them up at the exact time when they melt, it's buh-bye frozen fossils and welcome microbes.

Re:The world actually needs more bogs

[marvin]

Are you sure you know what you are talking about? Bog conserves a lot of carbon in peat. Thus breaking down CO2, a pesky greenhouse gas. Peat is too seen as "fossil fuel". Only the fossils are some thousands of years old at most. But then again, i'm posting to slashdot, what do i expect.

And the Alps are melting, too

[nysus]

There was a recent article in the New York Times about this and now there is this article: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1730079, 00.html [timesonline.co.uk]

Re:Third Post

[Rei]

climate change is a natural part of the planet's life cycle

*Slow* climate change is. As far as we can tell, the world has never seen anywhere close to this fast of global climate change. Perhaps you remember this famous graph [lakepowell.net]. Note two key details:

  * The biggest difference, as far as resolution will allow, is about 10C. It took about *20,000* years for this to happen. Just at our rate over the last century, that would take only 2000 years. At current rates? About 500 years.
  * CO2 levels have an incredible correlation with temperature

dramatic warming following the last ice age

That was nothing - three degrees average in several thousand years? That's a walk in the park compared to what we have ongoing currently.

How peat bogs grow

[xilmaril]

it's simple. the ice melts in summer, exposing the previous years layer of dead moss. on top of that, a new layer grows. in the winter, that moss dies, and becomes the dead layer the next years layer grows on, and so on. this has been happening for thousands of years straight. sometimes much much longer.

the bottom layers of moss (pete, decomposed moss) haven't defrosted in millenia, and they now are. and staying that way. I think that's the news.

I haven't read the article, mind you, and this explanation is from memory of biology 10. so I may be waaaaay off. someone, feel free to confirm or deny this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat [wikipedia.org]
hey, guess what. I didn't read the wikipedia article either, but I glanced at it, and I think it agrees. w00t!

Re:Third Post

[Rei]

Completely false. Here's the primary datafile [umich.edu] used to generate that graph. Graphed CO2 levels are from measured, direct trapped CO2 in the ice. Graphed temperature is determined by the proportion of heavy water ice (oceans are richer in heavy water and glaciers poorer in it because of selective evaporation (the heavier the water, the harder it is to evaporate); the colder the climate, the more pronounced the effect).

Next time, don't just make stuff up when you want reply to a post, ok?

Re:Word from Chicken Little

[1u3hr]

humans sans any real technology have managed to survive several much more radical climate changes - and without their numbers being endangered in any real way.

Hunters and gatherers move on to more fertile land, and kill or are killed by those who already lived there. Unfortunately, when the killing uses modern weapons, it actually could be threatening the race and not just unlucky tribes this time.

Many civilisations were wiped out by climate shifts; history is written by the victors, and not just in war. For instance, several years of drought is thought to have put paid to the Mayans, a cold change wiped out the Vikings in Greenland.

But yes, humans and civilisation will survive, but many individuals may not; and the cost to non-human life will be much more severe.

Re:Explain yourself time traveler!

[1u3hr]

How can you determine what the atmospheric temperature was thousands of years before writen records were kept?

Radiochemistry. For example,

Ice Core Science and Fluctuating Temperatures [ucsd.edu]:
... The isotopes of interest are hydrogen (H) and its heavy sibling deuterium (D), as well as oxygen-16 and oxygen-18, which have been described previously in connection with the deep-sea record in foraminifers. Water vapor turns to precipitation over the polar ice sheet more readily when it has the composition HOD and H18OH than if it is normal water, H16OH. As air cools upon climbing up an ice shield, water changes phase from vapor to liquid, thus losing D and 18O preferentially. This means that the coldest snow has the least D and 18O in it.

With this basic information (and some statistics and isotope chemistry) we can extract a temperature record from the ice on Greenland for the last 100,000 years. For Antarctica, a record going back 400,000 years has been reconstructed.

Re:thawing frozen peat bog

[Anonymous Coward]

Well no, not unprecedented. Its a complicated issue, but the famous Mann hockey stick curves which show it to be are not in fact valid. There was a medieval warm period which was just as extreme as our current warming, and there was also a cold period ending in about 1800 which was as extreme in the other direction.

Re:I almost wish someone would invent...

[leifbk]

Anyone have photos of this? any aerial ones I can overlay on google earth?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gall ery/05/sci_nat_how_the_world_is_changing/html/1.st m [bbc.co.uk]

Re:TF Text from TFA

[Cyberax]

Methane moleculas are excited by UV-radiation, and excited molecula of methane can react with two O2 moleculas producing CO2 and H20.

Re:Word from Chicken Little

[Ironsides]

one additional point of note. The sun's output has been increasing [space.com]. So our "constant out from the sun" has been increasing, helping to contribute.

Re:It Sucks, But Not For You

[jackbird]

Even if the seas were to raise, the US and Europe would just build higher and hold it back.

Just build higher?!

Do you have any concept of the time and money it takes to rebuild a commercial building more complex than a Wal-Mart? Or an interstate highway? Or a tunnel? Or a port? Or a railroad? Or an airport? Or a high-voltage power transmission line? Or a nuclear power plant? Do you have ANY idea how much human effort and raw material is tied up in the infrastructure of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Boston, Providence, Washington, Miami, New Orleans, Baltimore, Savannah, Norfolk, and Tampa? That's tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of stuff to rebuild on the east coast of the US alone.

And what 'piles of cash' exactly, do we have to do it with, considering much of our vast national debt is held by China, who will be busy rebuilding what they lost in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and finding something to do with the Japanese and Taiwanese refugees?

And when Tel Aviv AND Gaza AND Qatar and Dubai flood out, those land pressures won't start a catastrophic war, no sir. And when India loses Mumbai and Chennai and Pakistan loses Karachi, there won't be any incentive for them to start lobbing nukes.

Re:And the Alps are melting, too

[kisak]

I visited Grenoble in the French Alps where they had the winter olympics in 1968. They still have some of the facilities there that they used in 1968, like the ski jump etc, but they don't have snow that low in the winter anymore to use any of them! The climate change has made what was a sure place to run the olympics 37 years ago into a place where you don't get any snow in the winter...

What about "tipping point" don't we understand?

[skids]

First off, yes, there were denials of warming by some neocons. At least until now:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8917093/ [msn.com]

Then there's the argument that, oh, the environment will just adjust and absorb the carbon. Nope:

http://www.sundayherald.com/51146 [sundayherald.com]
http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/umw elt_naturschutz/bericht-47597.html [innovations-report.de]

Oh, and why worry, it's just heat, right?

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/20 02377292_ocean13m.html [nwsource.com]
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L29498448 .htm [alertnet.org]
http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2005/08/05/ne ws/community/friloc07.txt [gazettetimes.com]
http://www.bgsu.edu/offices/pr/news/2005/news8474. html [bgsu.edu]

Re:TF Text from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

So, 6GT per year carbon, there's 70GT methane at 20 times effect, makes 1400GT equivalent carbon or 233 years worth of carbon emissions at current rate. Gee, that's ok then.

I am sick of entitlements

[falconwolf]

If you're sick of entitlements then why did you vote for someone who supports entitlements instead of voting for someone like Michael Badnarik [badnarik.org] who really would work to end entitlements?

Falcon

Re:Air is getting warmer inside heads too...

[RayBender]

Even the experts don't really know what the hell is going on, and why should we expect them to? [...] I have a huge problem with passing seat-of-the-pants legislation which will have real, measurable, enormous effects on our standard of living.

You overestimate the uncertainties. If you read things like the IPCC report you will see that there is actually a fairly strong consensus on the amount of warming (they give confidence limits); and fairly good models for the impact. Scientists always admit uncertainty - but uncertainty isn't synonymous with having no clue...

You then state that the economic impact will be devastating. That statment is probably fraught with more uncertainty than any of the climate change predictions. How do you know that the effect of limit greenhouse emissions won't actually improve our economy by stimulating greater efficiency and innovation?

Re: American jobs!

[jc42]

And speaking of "bullshit", did you know that bovine flatulence is a major soure of atmoshperic methane?

Actually, we've known for some time that it's mostly burps rather than farts, though they do produce both. Those complex 4-chambered stomaches in cattle are fairly good at reducing leafy input to simpler molecules, which includes a fair amount of methane. Most of that methane escapes through the esophagus.

What's even funnier though is that it took a long time to verify the other major source of atmospheric methane. It turns out to be termites. You probably wouldn't believe the total world-wide termite biomass. Their digestive systems have a lot of chemical similarities to those of cattle, for much the same reasons, and they produce a lot of waste methane. This had been a conjecture for some time, but has been verified only in the past couple of decades.

Current estimates are that ungulates and termites each contribute roughly 1/3 of the annual methane output. All other single sources are much smaller.

I haven't read whether the termite methane comes primarily from burps or farts. I'd guess burps, but maybe some day we'll read a report from someone who has studied the little critters, and then we'll know.