An irreversible climate “tipping point” could occur within the next 20 years as a result of the release of huge quantities of organic carbon locked away as frozen plant matter in the vast permafrost region of the Arctic, scientists have found.Billions of tons of frozen leaves and roots that have lain undisturbed for thousands of [...]

Scientists have uncovered what appears to be a further dramatic increase in the leakage of methane gas that is seeping from the Arctic seabed. Methane is about 20 times more potent than CO2 in trapping solar heat. The findings come from measurements of carbon fluxes around the north of Russia, led by Igor Semiletov from [...]

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute and Author of Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization We are entering a new era, one of rapid and often unpredictable climate change. In fact, the new climate norm is change. The 25 warmest years on record have come since 1980. And the 10 warmest years since [...]

Sometimes the most important news is what is not happening. That comment in a recent article along with the following adaptation (from the French) of a story sent to me by a colleague in Quebec Canada made me reflect on why the global community is not focused and active on pushing for immediate reductions in [...]

Nature Geoscience Subject Category: Biogeochemistry Soil science: Arctic thaw Hermann F. Jungkunst is at the Institute of Geography, Landscape Ecology, University of Gottingen, Goldschmidtstrasse 5, D-37077 Gottingen, Germany. e-mail: hjungku@gwdg.de Abstract The organic matter stored in frozen Arctic soils could release significant quantities of carbon dioxide and methane on thawing. Now, laboratory experiments show that re-wetting of [...]

Warmer oceans are thawing methane deposits, adding more of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere A large amount of methane is bubbling up from the ocean floor east of Siberia at a surprising rate and could accelerate climate change, researchers said yesterday. The gas is bubbling up from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf because warming [...]

Recently a team from Russia, the US, and Sweden found that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) is releasing around 8 teragrams of methane from subsea sediments each year. Now team member Natalia Shakhova and colleague Dmitry Nicolsky have come up with a new model for the Dmitry Laptev Strait region of the shelf to explain exactly how [...]

Deniers are dancing on the graves of their reputations, to say nothing of reality itself. But Earth will still get the last laugh on all of them, and us for that matter. March 21, 2010  |  Scott Thill – Alternet And if the ground’s not cold/Everything is gonna burn/We’ll all take turns/I’ll get mine too. — [...]

BALTIMORE — Microbes living under ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland could be churning out large quantities of the greenhouse gas methane, a new study suggests. In recent years scientists have learned that liquid water lurks under much of Antarctica’s massive ice sheet, and so, they say, the potential microbial habitat in this watery world [...]

For those who have read my book ZERO Greenhouse Emissions – The Day the Lights Went Out – Our Future World, the reports this week by the science community of the discovery of methane release from thawing methane clathrates from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf will come as little surprise. In chapter 9 Mother Natures [...]