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 years in the permanently frozen ground of the northern hemisphere are thawing out, with potentially catastrophic implications for climate change, the researchers said.

A study into the speed at which the permafrost is melting suggests that the tipping point will occur between 2020 and 2030 and will mark the point at which the Arctic turns from being a net “sink” for carbon dioxide into an overall source that will accelerate global warming, they said.

The study is the first global investigation of what will happen in a warmer world to the huge amounts of frozen plant matter that has remained undegraded in the soil since it was incorporated into the permafrost about 30,000 years ago.

It also found that by 2200 about two-thirds of the Earth’s permafrost will have melted, releasing an estimated 190 billion tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the air – about half of all the fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases since the start of the industrial revolution.

“Our results indicate that, as the Arctic warms up, this frozen carbon will thaw out, allowing microbial decay to resume and releasing carbon into the atmosphere,” said Kevin Schaefer of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado.

“Our research shows that the release of carbon from permafrost will result in an irreversible climate tipping point in only 20 years… Once the frozen carbon thaws out and decays, there is no way to put it back into the permafrost,” Dr Schaefer said.

The Arctic has experienced some of the greatest climatic changes in the world over recent decades. Summer sea ice has melted back to record minimums, average temperatures have increased dramatically, and scientists have documented significant melting of the underground permafrost, from Alaska to eastern Siberia.

The rising temperatures have lengthened the growing season of the Arctic summer, which has increased plant growth and the consequent uptake of carbon dioxide. However, by around 2025 this will go into reverse and the thawing permafrost will release more carbon than is being taken up by the tundra growing above it, Dr Schaefer said.

“There are two important messages from this study. The first is that the melting permafrost can release huge amounts of carbon and, secondly, the process is irreversible on a human timescale and will affect our targets for reducing fossil fuel emissions,” he said.

“All our emission reduction strategies are designed to hit a target atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration corresponding to a target climate. If we do not account for carbon released from thawing permafrost, we will overshoot this target concentration and end up with a warmer climate than we want,” Dr Schaefer said.

Permanently frozen ground covers about a quarter of the northern hemisphere and starts about a metre below the surface, extending up to 500 metres. The top three metres contain most of the frozen plant matter, primarily grass roots caught up in the last ice age.

Source Independent UK

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 the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

“Methane release from the East Siberian Shelf is underway and it looks stronger than it was supposed [to be],” he said.

Professor Semiletov has been studying methane seepage in the region for the last few decades, and leads the International Siberian Shelf Study (ISSS), which has launched multiple expeditions to the Arctic Ocean.

The preliminary findings of ISSS 2009 are now being prepared for publication, he told BBC News.

Methane seepage recorded last summer was already the highest ever measured in the Arctic Ocean.

High seepage

Acting as a giant frozen depository of carbon such as CO2 and methane (often stored as compacted solid gas hydrates), Siberia’s shallow shelf areas are increasingly subjected to warming and are now giving up greater amounts of methane to the sea and to the atmosphere than recorded in the past.

This undersea permafrost was until recently considered to be stable.

But now scientists think the release of such a powerful greenhouse gas may accelerate global warming.

Higher concentrations of atmospheric methane are contributing to global temperature rise; this in turn is projected to cause further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane in a feedback loop.

A worst-case scenario is one where the feedback passes a tipping point and billions of tonnes of methane are released suddenly, as has occurred at least once in the Earth’s past.

Such sudden releases have been linked to rapid increases in global temperatures and could have been a factor in the mass extinction of species.

According to a report by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the springtime air temperature across the region in the period 2000-2007 was an average of 4C higher than during 1970-1999.

That is the fastest temperature rise on the planet, claims the university.

The recent thaw over the last decade means that some of the large reserve of carbon from organic material such as dead animals and plants in sediments is now being released into the sea and into our atmosphere.

Trapped below that is the methane hydrate now warming and leaking through holes in the defrosting sediments.

Previously it was thought much of this gas was absorbed into the sea.

But according to a recent report that Professor Semiletov and his team compiled for the environmental group WWF, the shallow depth of arctic shelves means that methane is reaching the atmosphere without reacting to become CO2 dissolved in the ocean.

Professor Semiletov’s fellow researcher aboard the Russian icebreaker that carries the ISSS team each year is Professor Orjan Gustafsson from Stockholm University in Sweden.

He said that methane measured in the atmosphere around the region is 100 times higher than normal background levels, and in some cases 1,000 times higher.

‘No alarm’

Despite the high readings, Professor Gustafsson said that so far there was no cause for alarm, and stressed that further studies were still necessary to determine the exact cause of the methane seepage.

“It is important now to understand how fast it is being released and how much is being released,” he said.

However, there is a real fear that global warming may cause Siberia’s subsea permafrost to thaw.

Some estimates put the amount of carbon trapped in shelf permafrost at 1,600 billion tonnes – roughly twice as much carbon as in the atmosphere now.

The release of this once captive carbon from destabilised ocean sediments and permafrost would have catastrophic effect on our climate and life on Earth, warn the scientists.

Source BBC News

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 global recordkeeping began in 1880 have come since 1998.

The effects of rising temperature are pervasive. Higher temperatures diminish crop yields, melt the mountain glaciers that feed rivers, generate more-destructive storms, increase the severity of flooding, intensify drought, cause more-frequent and destructive wildfires, and alter ecosystems everywhere. We are altering the earth’s climate, setting in motion trends we do not always understand with consequences we cannot anticipate.

Crop-withering heat waves have lowered grain harvests in key food-producing regions in recent years. One with a profoundly direct human impact was the searing heat wave that broke temperature records across Europe in 2003. The intense heat, which contributed to the world grain harvest falling short of consumption by 90 million tons, also claimed more than 52,000 lives.

There has also been a dramatic increase in the land area affected by drought in recent decades. A team of scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that the area of the globe experiencing very dry conditions expanded from less than 15 percent in the 1970s to roughly 30 percent by 2002. The scientists attribute part of the change to a rise in temperature and part to reduced precipitation, with high temperatures becoming progressively more important during the latter part of the period. A 2009 report published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reinforces these findings. It concludes that if atmospheric CO2 climbs to 450–600 ppm, the world will face irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions of the world. The study likened the conditions to those of the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.

The warming is caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping “greenhouse” gases and other pollutants in the atmosphere. Of the greenhouse gases, CO2 accounts for 63 percent of the recent warming trend, methane 18 percent, and nitrous oxide 6 percent, with several lesser gases accounting for the remaining 13 percent. Carbon dioxide comes mostly from electricity generation, heating, transportation, and industry. In contrast, human-caused methane and nitrous oxide emissions come largely from agriculture—methane from rice paddies and cattle and nitrous oxide from the use of nitrogenous fertilizer.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the principal driver of climate change, have climbed from nearly 280 parts per million (ppm) when the Industrial Revolution began around 1760 to 387 ppm in 2009. The annual rise in atmospheric CO2 level, now one of the world’s most predictable environmental trends, results from emissions on a scale that is overwhelming nature’s capacity to absorb carbon. In 2008, some 7.9 billion tons of carbon were emitted from the burning of fossil fuels and 1.5 billion tons were emitted from deforestation, for a total of 9.4 billion tons. But since nature has been absorbing only about 5 billion tons per year in oceans, soils, and vegetation, nearly half of those emissions stay in the atmosphere, pushing up CO2 levels.

Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is produced when organic matter is broken down under anaerobic conditions, including the decomposition of plant material in bogs, organic materials in landfills, or forage in a cow’s stomach. Methane can also be released with the thawing of permafrost, the frozen ground underlying the tundra that covers nearly 9 million square miles in the northern latitudes. All together, Arctic soils contain more carbon than currently resides in the atmosphere, which is a worry considering that permafrost is now melting in Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia, creating lakes and releasing methane. Once they get under way, permafrost melting, the release of methane and CO2, and rising temperature create a self-reinforcing trend, what scientists call a “ positive feedback loop.” The risk is that the release of a massive amount of methane into the atmosphere from melting permafrost could simply overwhelm efforts to stabilize climate.

Another unsettling development is the effect of atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs) consisting of soot particles from burning coal, diesel fuel, or wood. These particles affect climate in three ways. First, by intercepting sunlight, they heat the upper atmosphere. Second, because they also reflect sunlight, they have a dimming effect, lowering the earth’s surface temperature. And third, if particles from these brown clouds are deposited on snow and ice, they darken the surface and accelerate melting. These effects are of particular concern in India and China, where a large ABC over the Tibetan Plateau is contributing to the melting of glaciers that supply the major rivers of Asia. Soot deposition causes earlier seasonal melting of mountain snow in ranges as different as the Himalayas of Asia and the Sierra Nevada of California, and it is also believed to be accelerating the melting of Arctic sea ice.

In contrast to CO2, which may remain in the atmosphere for a century or more, soot particles in ABCs are typically airborne for only a matter of weeks. Thus, once coal-fired power plants are closed or wood cooking stoves are replaced with solar cookers, atmospheric soot disappears rapidly.

If we continue with business as usual, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) projected rise in the earth’s average temperature of 1.1–6.4 degrees Celsius (2–11 degrees Fahrenheit) during this century seems all too possible. Unfortunately, during the several years since the IPCC study was released, both global CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentrations have exceeded those in its worst-case scenario. With each passing year the chorus of urgency from the scientific community intensifies. Each new report indicates that we are running out of time. For instance, a landmark 2009 study by a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that the effects of climate change will be twice as severe as those they projected as recently as six years prior. Instead of a likely global temperature rise of 2.4 degrees Celsius, they now see a rise exceeding 5 degrees.

Another report, this one prepared independently as a background document for the December 2009 international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, indicated that every effort should be made to hold the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Beyond this, dangerous climate change is considered inevitable. To hold the temperature rise to 2 degrees, the scientists note that CO2 emissions should be reduced by 60–80 percent immediately, but since this is not possible, they note that, “To limit the extent of the overshoot, emissions should peak in the near future.”

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change sponsored an analysis of some 40 scientific studies that link rising temperature with changes in ecosystems. Among the many changes reported are spring arriving nearly two weeks earlier in the United States, tree swallows nesting nine days earlier than they did 40 years ago, and a northward shift of red fox habitat that has it encroaching on the Arctic fox’s range. Inuits have been surprised by the appearance of robins, a bird they have never seen before. Indeed, there is no word in Inuit for “robin.”

Douglas Inkley, National Wildlife Federation senior science advisor, notes, “We face the prospect that the world of wildlife that we now know—and many of the places we have invested decades of work in conserving as refuges and habitats for wildlife—will cease to exist as we know them, unless we change this forecast.” Unfortunately, this observation holds true for humans as well. If we cannot quickly reduce carbon emissions, it is civilization itself that is at risk.

Adapted from Chapter 3, “Climate Change and the Energy Transition,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available online at www.earth-policy.org/books/pb4.

Additional data and information sources at http://www.earth-policy.org/.

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 greenhouse emission.

We don’t see it as affecting us directly today. We know the world is warming at a rate that will cause a radical shift in the way we live in the coming decades, still we don’t act. The question to be asked and for you to answer is when will you? Does it need to hit you personally, to devastate your life and that of those you love?

From the frozen north, now warming at an alarming rate comes this observation by Par Moukmouk le jeudi of the village of Pohenegamouk, not far from Montréal – I pay all credit to his observations.  

I am not alone in giving news about North. The newspapers are full. But why the focus on what happens elsewhere?

In France, Betancourt’s case occupies journalists; here is a change in the law on the census. Yes, there are many fires in Russia and floods in Pakistan, but that’s not going to pay the mortgage, or find the love of my life.

Caribou by tens of thousands are moving slowly in the treeless plain bordering the Arctic Ocean. There were mountains here, but the glaciers have crashed, it remains as soft undulations as small breasts of young women. There is not a single tree as far as the eye. Here, the permafrost layer under a few inches when pushing the moss and grass particularly abundant this year, there are tens of meters of ice mixed with soil of moraine rock crushed as finely as flour by the friction of glaciers.

A caribou walks a bit away to a clump of grass that seems appetizing. Suddenly, he sinks into the ground; he struggles to swim and wants what does widens the pool of mud around him. You hear shouting, call and then nothing, his head sank, he disappeared. The other caribou have pretended not to hear, have had nervous tremors like to hunt mosquitoes too abundant. I think they know that danger is now standing still on the ground may open under their feet and they disappear with no hope of relief. The caribou are pretending not to know.

Our small planet saw the warmest year since we are able to measure temperatures. The boreal forest burns, permafrost melts at high speed releasing billions of tons of methane much more active than the CO2 in the development of the greenhouse effect. The earth opens up beneath our feet.

Because of the current La Nina, next winter will probably be a little colder than average. This will be a good opportunity to burn more oil. The loudmouths on the radio to enjoy laughing doomsayers who talk about global warming. And we’ll pretend not to know.

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 previously thawed permafrost could increase nitrous oxide production by 20-fold.

Introduction

Arctic soils store tremendous amounts of organic matter. Over millennia, cold, wet conditions have slowed the breakdown of plant material in the Arctic, and large quantities of carbon and nitrogen have built up in permanently frozen ground — termed permafrost. Global warming threatens to thaw these frozen soils and release large quantities of methane and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere1. Nitrous oxide — another potent greenhouse gas — can also be emitted from permafrost soils, but the relationship to thawing is uncertain2. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Elberling and colleagues3 show that the addition of the original nitrogen- and carbon-rich meltwater to thawed permafrost cores, sampled from Greenland, stimulates nitrous oxide production.

Microbial breakdown of soil organic matter can produce three greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. The magnitude of emissions is not only dependent on temperature, but also on water and oxygen levels. The quality and abundance of soil organic matter — which is heterogeneously distributed in most soils — will also influence gas flux from the soil to the atmosphere.

As the Arctic climate warms, the upper, active layer of permafrost soils, which melts each summer, could thicken, facilitating the breakdown of previously frozen organic matter by soil microbes. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that newly thawed permafrost releases large volumes of methane and carbon dioxide1, 4. Furthermore, freeze–thaw cycles can promote nitrous oxide emissions5: in the Arctic, permafrost melting creates a mosaic of wet and dry soil conditions — due to small differences in topography and drainage — that favour nitrous oxide production6.

Elberling and colleagues show that the production of nitrous oxide just beneath the active layer can be extraordinarily high when permafrost soils undergo melting and subsequent re-wetting in a laboratory environment3. They examined the effect of thawing on nitrous oxide production in permafrost cores up to three metres in length, collected from a wetland site in northeastern Greenland. To mimic freeze–thaw conditions, cores were thawed, drained and subsequently re-wetted with the original meltwater, which contained high concentrations of ammonium and dissolved organic matter. Rates of nitrous oxide production were low in the frozen and thawed cores. However, there was a 20-fold increase in nitrous oxide production throughout the entire depth of the permafrost soils on re-wetting with the original meltwater; production rose to 18 μg nitrogen per hour per kg of soil. The fact that the addition of carbon- and nitrogen-rich water triggered nitrous oxide production suggests that the carbon and nitrogen cycles in these soils are tightly connected. Measurements of nitrous oxide production in permafrost soils collected from an additional five wetland sites suggest that the high rates of nitrous oxide production observed in the Greenland soils are not unique.

However, not all of the nitrous oxide produced following re-wetting will escape to the atmosphere. Some will be consumed within anoxic micro-zones in the active layer. To gauge the amount of nitrous oxide actually emitted, Elberling et al. measured nitrous oxide emissions from one of the thawed and re-wetted cores from northeast Greenland: only 31% of the nitrous oxide produced was emitted to the atmosphere, although this is still equivalent to 34 mg of nitrous oxide per square metre per day. In fact, emissions of this magnitude exceed those from bare peat patches, match most of those from highly fertilized agricultural sites, and are only beaten by emissions from highly fertilized and compacted potato fields7 (Fig. 1).

Elberling et al. examined the impact of thawing on nitrous oxide production in permafrost soils3. They found that thawing alone had little impact on nitrous oxide levels, but re-wetting with the original meltwater significantly stimulated production. Experiments on one core suggest that only a third of the nitrous oxide produced following re-wetting is released to the atmosphere. Error bars represent the standard deviation.

Of course, their findings need to be verified in the field. A key uncertainty is how plants — which compete with soil microbes for ammonium and nitrate — will influence the production and emission of nitrous oxide. Given that strong nitrous oxide emissions are found in vegetation-free patches of sub-Arctic tundra2, and that plant cover will probably increase in the Arctic region owing to rising temperatures, the impact of vegetation on nitrous oxide emissions deserves examination.

Elberling and colleagues show that nitrous oxide emissions from thawed permafrost can equal those from highly fertilized agricultural soils3. But science is not an Olympic sport, where faster, higher and longer are the only results that count. It is important, too, to understand the more subtle feedbacks, such as those between the Arctic carbon and nitrogen cycles.

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 ocean water is thawing permafrost, allowing methane trapped underneath to escape. The amount of methane emitted by that one patch of seabed roughly equals the amount scientists believed was released by all of the world’s oceans.

But just how the discovery will affect projections of future warming is hard to say, according to a team of scientists from the United States, Russia and Sweden who published their findings yesterday in the journal Science.

“Seabed deposits [of methane] were considered until recently to be reliably sealed by subsea permafrost,” said the study’s lead author, Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “But what we are having now is up to 10 million tons annually escaping from this seabed. This means permafrost does not serve as an impermeable cap or seal to prevent this leakage any longer.”

Shakhova said there is not enough information now to know whether the methane seeping up from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf — which covers more than 810,000 square miles — signals the emergence of a significant new source of the potent greenhouse gas. Methane is regarded as 20 to 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Uncertainty over whether the release will grow

Information she and her colleagues gathered during multiple research expeditions between 2003 and 2008 suggest that the area, home to 100 methane “hot spots,” emits 8 million metric tons of the gas into the atmosphere.

That’s a relatively small slice of the 440 million metric tons of methane emitted worldwide each year from a combination of human activities and natural sources like rotting plants in wetlands, termites and wildfires.

But Shakhova pointed out that scientists had not thought subsea permafrost would begin to thaw and release the gas. She said more research is needed to figure out whether the methane leaking from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is an ongoing, steady phenomenon, or whether it suggests a new source of the gas is emerging as seafloor permafrost thaws.

Water over the Siberian site averages minus 1.8 to 1 degree Celsius, 12 to 17 degrees warmer than the air that helps permafrost on land stay frozen.

Martin Heimann, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, said the amount of methane now escaping there is “negligible,” though that could change.

“Will this persist into the future under sustained warming trends?” he said in a commentary published in Science. “We do not know.”

Warming rivers melt the permafrost

News of methane escaping at the Siberian site follows a similar report last year, when British researchers said they found 250 plumes of methane rising from the seafloor in the Barents Sea north of Norway.

Speaking with reporters yesterday, Shakhova said it appears that river runoff flowing into the area she studied is getting warmer and raising the temperature of water near the ocean floor, where the permafrost lies.

She also noted that water over the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is unusually shallow, with an average depth of just 148 feet. That means the methane that escapes from the ocean floor has little chance of dissolving or oxidizing as it rises to the sea surface.

“It just escapes,” she said.

Source Scientific America

“Our results suggest that degradation of subsea permafrost in the ESAS currently very likely occurs on a wider scale than was previously thought,” Natalia Shakhova toldenvironmentalresearchweb. “Specifically, it was [previously] considered that in the areas of the ESAS shallower than 60–70 metres subsea permafrost is stable, continuous and impermeable for gases. We have shown that areas of the ESAS affected by thermokarst [permafrost melting], submerged taliks and some other processes could serve as migration pathways for methane to escape to the water column and further to the atmosphere.”

The permafrost beneath the Laptev Sea in the Dmitry Laptev Strait has experienced many changes in sea level, becoming terrestrial for some periods of its lifetime; it was last inundated about 7000–8000 years ago to a maximum depth of around 15 metres. This resulted in an increase in average temperature of the permafrost from around –17 °C to just below freezing. The team believes that global climate change has caused additional warming to the subsea permafrost by raising the temperature of river run-off entering the ocean. The permafrost is also experiencing geothermal heating from the rift zone below.

Shakhova and Nicolsky believe that the development of open taliks – unfrozen regions – in the permafrost at sites where thaw lakes and river palaeo valleys were submerged is enabling methane to escape.

“Generally speaking, destabilization of subsea permafrost means that it fails to further prevent methane leakage from seabed deposits of methane stored in the ESAS,” said Shakhova. “This provides the global carbon budget with a previously unconsidered and very specific type of methane source.”

Unlike other terrestrial and marine sources, which gradually release methane as it forms, the shelf is emitting methane that has accumulated in seabed deposits for hundreds of thousands of years and until now was restricted by permafrost, says Shakhova.

“As methane has been permanently originating in the seabed since it was formed, these deposits are huge and emissions of this ready-to-go methane to the water column only depend on occurence of migration pathways (provided or not provided by permafrost),” she said. “These emissions could be non-gradual, sudden, more or less massive, they could even be abrupt.”

The methane released from ESAS does not become oxidized by microbes as it passes through the water column, unlike methane released from the oceanic hydrate deposits found at depths of more than 700 m. “In the ESAS this bio-filter does not work because the water is very shallow – mean depth is less than 50 m – and there is just not enough time for oxidation,” said Shakhova.

“Moreover, Arctic shallow hydrate deposits are three times more sensitive to warming than oceanic deposits,” said Shakhova. “This means that three times less energy (provided by warming) is required to destabilize them compared to deep oceanic hydrates.”

Now the researchers, who reported their work inEnvironmental Research Letters, plan to model further the current state of subsea permafrost over the entire area of the ESAS using their original multi-year data on sea bottom temperatures and some additional data.

Source Environmental Research

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. — Pixies, “Monkey Gone to Heaven.” 

Bad news. Thanks to perfectly timed, premeditated reality assassinations like so-called ClimateGate, nearly half of Americans may now believe that the various threats of climate change are exaggerated. That’s the highest quotient ever since polling on the issue commenced. But there is good news: They’re on the wrong side of history and science, and Earth will still get the last laugh on all of them, and us for that matter.

Welcome to our existential nightmare. From rising seas and runaway droughts and storms to the outer limits of dystopian catastrophes like the fart apocalypse — I’ll explain later — our planet has no shortage of ways to bitch-slap us back into our dangerous reality, whether we want it to or not.

Of course, we could stave off some of the more egregious probabilities of extinction, if we acted now to limit global warming’s inexorable rise to 2 degrees. But that means a determined destruction of the status quo, and that’s always messy for those who like things just the way they are, thank you very much. But they’ll still get theirs. How? Let us count the ways.

1. Envirogees: If you’re one of those righteously indignant climate change deniers who also hates immigration, you’re in for a world of hurt. According to scientists and scholars, climate refugees could hit 50 million this year and explode to 150 million over the next 50. Hordes of these envirogees, as I call them, will be turned out of their environmentally sensitive homes in China, India, the United States and elsewhere.

They will doubtless end up in the backyards of disgruntled citizens who like to mumble or scream about things they won’t settle for in their backyards. If you think immigration is a problem now, just wait until Mother Earth starts cleaning house.

2. Dead Zones: Deniers might like to point out that hypoxic oceans and lakes, known as dead zones in ecological parlance, could be just as attributable to overpopulation as to global warming. Whatever. Their increased frequency is making climate change worse, no matter the prime cause, as if there could ever be such a thing. From shrinking the sex organs of our planet’s fish to fucking up its food chain and escalating the ocean’s nitrous oxide emissions, dead zones are deep threats.

More nitrous oxide, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, means more ozone depletion, which means more cancer, crop depletion and much worse.

3. Rising Tides: Of course, most deniers, especially those who live near oceans, probably won’t be worrying about their chemical content once catastrophic climate change’s more severe symptoms arrive. They’ll be too busy fleeing the rising tide.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report prophesied that global warming would increase sea levels by 190-580 millimeters by 2100. More recent research has doubled the bar to an upper limit of two meters. Which probably means that in another few years, the already catastrophic limit will be raised again, perhaps by another 100 percent, at which point there won’t be much point in measuring anything at all. Coastal metropoles like Los Angeles, Miami, London, Sydney and others will literally be drowning in data.

It’s an object lesson in ironic reversal: ClimateGate deniers were partially right about the IPCC’s projections, although they were wrong in thinking they were too severe. In fact, they were too conservative.

4. Fart Apocalypse! The hits just keep on coming, when it comes to global warming and the oceans. Take methane, for example, which like nitrous oxide is a killer greenhouse gas. Plus, it smells terrible, like someone took a crap right in your head.

Now imagine being choked by it, as it is belched from the oceans in a toxic feedback loop and dominates the atmosphere. It’s probably happened before in one or more of a variety of extinction events like the Permian-Triassic, more scarily known as the Great Dying. But it could be happening again, as the permafrost melts and farts methane into the ocean and thereby the sky.

According to recent science, atmospheric methane has steadily risen each year since 2007, and whether it’s factory farming of beef or melting permafrost, the threat remains the same. Earth has serious gas, and it’s not afraid to use it. Hey, at least it’s not hydrogen sulfide, an extinction executioner you’ll never smell coming. Methane has the decency to stink up your nose and future.

5. Droughts and Desertfication: Sure, flooded cities and fart Armageddons are flashier than drying croplands, but the latter is a clear and present danger while the former are still future catastrophes waiting to strike.

Drought and desertification are surely the least glamorous ravages of global warming, but they are immediate. Parched rivers and declining precipitation, especially in once-fertile regions in America, India, China, Africa and elsewhere, are fueling everything from crop failure to gender inequality and “famine marriages.” Drought news has eased somewhat, thanks to recent record-breaking storms and freezes that have balanced water accounts for some regions, especially in the United States. But if you think climate change is going to bring more water your way instead of less, I’ve got a subprime condo in Australia I’d like to sell you. It’s hot!

6. Ice Age Cometh? Deniers love the aforementioned record-breaking storms, because it’s hard for their tiny brains to comprehend that catastrophic climate change could simultaneously feature both deep freezes and ferocious firestorms. (They just can’t figure out why snow won’t make the words “global warming” go away.) The first decade of this still-new century was the hottest on record, yet our recent winter was wetter and colder than average. That dynamic flux is central to global warming, at least for now, as changing atmospheric flows remake the environmental map of the world. What we end up with once the new normal settles down, no one really knows.

In fact, it could be another ice age, at least for some parts of the world endangered by disruptions in thermohaline circulation and other possibilities. It happened after the Medieval Warm Period, and it can happen again. Which means that deniers pointing to deep freezes as evidence against global warming might be frozen before they realize how wrong they are. Oh well.

7. Deforest Dystopia: What’s as bad as global carbon dioxide emissions from planes, trains and automobiles? Deforestation, which accounts for around 20 percent of the CO2, currently at an all-time high, belched into the air every year. Cutting down forests, which are carbon sinks, in order to build wood and paper crap like the Wall Street Journal that we’re just going to throw away and burn into the atmosphere later is an unclassifiable kind of dumb.

Yet we do it every year, to our own detriment. Our rampant hyperconsumption and half-hearted conservation efforts have endangered the billion or so of us that perennially live off of forests. At best, we could kill off our great forests, as well as our way of life. At worst, climate change turns trees from carbon sinks to emitters, without looking back. And then deniers truly won’t be able to see the forests for the trees, because there won’t be any left.

8. Magnetic Mourning: Genius cosmologist Stephen Hawking once publicly worried that runaway greenhouse gases could eventually turn our verdant Earth into the celestial hellhole known as Venus. But what probably helped turn a once-oceanic Venus into that hellhole is a relative lack of a magnetic field, like the one we have on Earth that shields us from the sun’s interstellar ferocity. But for how long?

As recently discovered, Earth’s protective magnetic field is 250 million years olderthan previously thought. Now a ripe age of 3.5 billion years, our magnetic field could be weakening, and that weakening could turn us into Mars, not Venus, or even lead to the type of geomagnetic reversal that terrorized audiences in Roland Emmerich’s disaster porn movie, 2012.

What’s this got to do with global warming? Well, that depends on who you talk to. Some scientists believe that an already weakening magnetic field is causing global warming, but it’s probably only a matter of time before that arrangement is flipped. Fucking with a planet’s stable temperature and atmospheric flows tends to encourage these things. Who knows what that’s doing to the Earth’s core? Who wants to find out?

9. Give Us Demographics or Give Us Death! Tired of the bring-downs? Cheer up, pal! Demographics, not just facts, could be against the deniers as well. The median age of network and cable viewers grows older by the year, as those outlets decide to either avoid covering global warming or, like Fox News, glorify the deniers.

Even U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu admits the denier campaigns are led by global warming’s future losers, who will eventually have to bow to reality. Last year, ad revenue for newspapers and networks continued to decline, while it increased online, where the diversity of opinion and information on matters of great importance like global warming is much greater.

Only Fox News managed to stave off the old media bloodbath, but its viewers are continually dumber than everyone else. The trend is obvious: The more global warming wears on, the more evidence for its ascendancy piles up, and the more skeptics, graying and irrelevant, fall by the wayside. Now that climate-change believers in the White House are teaming up with Hollywood to spread the word, you can practically hear the skeptics aging by the minute.

10. Cosmological Constant: The list above is compelling enough to convince you that deniers are dancing on the graves of their reputations, to say nothing of reality itself. But we science-minded world citizens share one major commonality with them: The planet will probably outlive us both, no matter what happens.

In a billion years, the sun’s luminosity will likely increase, stripping Earth of its oceans and vegetation. By then, one can hope we have evolved enough to realize that no intelligent design can save us, that we’re lucky to be spinning on a green and blue rock through the void of space. If we do, it’s likely we’ll have worked out a way to migrate to a more suitable planet and save our sorry hides. But that would mean getting through less existentially obvious hoops like global warming, which isn’t currently going so great.

It’s just a question of time, which is ridiculous if you think about it: We wouldn’t even understand time were it not for the gravitational ballet of our solar system. But here we are, at the dawn of the 21st century, trying to avoid the revelation that we are not God’s lucky children, but Earth’s lucky children, and we should be taking much better care of our sandbox. Or else.

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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 is huge. If the methane produced by the bacteria gets trapped beneath the ice and builds up over long periods of time — a possibility that is far from certain — it could mean that as ice sheets melt under warmer temperatures, they would release large amounts of heat-trapping methane gas.

Jemma Wadham, a geochemist at the University of Bristol in England, described the little-known role of methane-making microbes, called methanogens, below ice sheets on March 15 at an American Geophysical Union conference on Antarctic lakes.

Her team took samples from one site in Antarctica, the Lower Wright glacier, and one in Greenland, the Russell glacier. Trapped within the ice were high concentrations of methane, Wadham said, as well as methanogens themselves — up to 10 million cells per gram in the Antarctic sample and 100,000 cells per gram in Greenland. That’s comparable to the concentration of methanogens found in deep-ocean sediments, she said. The species of microbes were also similar to those found in other polar environments, such as Arctic peat or tundra.

The team then put scrapings from both sites into bottles and incubated them with water to see which microbes might grow. For the Antarctic samples, Wadham said, “nothing happens for 250 days and then bam! You get tons of methane.” The Greenland samples haven’t been growing for as long and so far don’t show much signs of giving off methane — but perhaps they just need more time, she reported at the meeting.

Other researchers have also recently found methanogens in icy settings. Mark Skidmore, a microbiologist at Montana State University in Bozeman, reported at the conference that his team has found methanogens in the Robertson glacier in the Canadian Rockies. “It underscores the importance of subglacial methanogenesis,” Skidmore said.

The studies flesh out a picture of Antarctica as a much more dynamic and watery environment than the frozen, static one once envisaged. At least 386 lakes have been identified buried beneath the ice sheet, scientists from the University of Edinburgh reported at the meeting. Plans for major drilling projects are underway for several of them.

Images: 1) NASA. 2) Zina Deretsky/NSF. 

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“In that 70 percent or so of the world’s surface—oceans that we have been tampering with by warming, Mother Nature’s effervescence, ‘Bubbles,’ has been working on a fermentation process. She got the idea from Schweppes. Her marketing department is working on a catch phrase. On the table for consideration at present are ‘Bubbles stored for your life,’ ‘Bubbles borrowed direct from Nature to you’ and ‘Bubbles brewed for Millennia.’ She, Mother Nature, has had a couple of product test runs with surprising results.”

“Around 251 million years ago at the end of what’s called the Permian period, product trials came close to wiping out all life on Earth. More than 94 percent of the marine species present in fossil records disappeared suddenly as oxygen levels plummeted and life teetered on the verge of extinction. Over the next 500,000 years, a few species struggled to regain a foothold. It took 20 to 30 million years for even the most rudimentary coral reefs to re-establish themselves and for forests to regrow. In some areas, it took more than 100 million years for ecosystems to reach their former healthy biodiversity. We weren’t around at the time or even during the next failed product launch about 55 million years ago in what geologists now call the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM for short. This managed massive die-offs and disrupted the climate for a little over 100,000 years. Now, the weather plays a big part in these product launches, just ask Fosters. They sell a lot more cold beer in the warmer months. So as we get back up there to the right level, she is ready for another try. This time though, she has a bigger target market, you and me. Unlike the closely guarded secret formula for Coke, some have taken a look at the ingredients and given it the name Clathrates. The formula is made up of naturally occurring greenhouse gases trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern mud and at the bottom of the seas. Mother Nature’s special herbs and spices contain the all important ingredient, methane. Unlike those in her under-story in the Siberian and Alaskan permafrost, these are secured by either intense cold (pause for a moment—Arctic water now warming at 3 times the global average) or in the deep oceans under high pressure. Just a reminder—now warming to a depth of 3 kilometers. A few years back a palaeoceanographer called Gerald Dickens was (ironically) trying to assist our friends in the oil industry. While working for the University of Michigan, on a drilling expedition he had a drill pipe explode dramatically with the internal pressure build-up of methane, shooting mud 50 meters skyward. Quite simple for ‘Bubbles’ really, unlike an ice cube harmlessly melting (unless you’re the size of the Ross Ice Shelf), in the case of frozen methane it doesn’t change from ice to water, it changes from ice to gas. Indeed gas that is twenty to twenty-four times as potent as CO₂ as a greenhouse gas. Put another way, 1 cubic metre of ‘Bubbles’ clathrates brought to the surface releases 164 cubic meters of methane. Now when ‘Bubbles’ lets a few go, it can be a bit like an underwater flare that triggers more ‘Bubbles’ in the area. And before you know it the flame-like flare (like a gas flare on an offshore oil rig) under the right conditions can set off a chain reaction. The old ripple in the pond trick. This though, the theory goes, turned from a ripple in the pond to more like a deep sea nuclear holocaust in the case of the incident 251 million years ago and may have been more like a couple of dozen Hiroshimas in the incident 55 million years ago. To get the whole product launch going again might seem like a long-term project, unless she tries a couple of market tests in the now nearly ice-free Arctic. Estimates of Mother Nature’s store room in Davey Jones’s locker, are at best guess between 1 and 10 trillion tonnes—nobody is really sure at this stage, it’s a big ocean. There are a couple of other possibilities for the launch but at this time, it’s just a guess. On the basis of a very large and mostly uninhabited area of 71 percent of the planet, and with that 3 kilometers of warming going on, might it just be possible that one or two minor ‘bubbles’ would get the chance to be released? Might it even have, or be happening right now? Why do we ask this question? Throughout history, at least as ‘best available science’ suggests, when this sort of event takes place the oceans suddenly turn acidic as vast amounts of carbon dioxide dissolve into the surrounding waters, killing fish and other marine life. Have we not seen such occurrences of late, mass fish die-offs along coastlines and in open oceans from the Caribbean to the Baltic, from Scotland to New Zealand and Australia? Since first recorded in 1970 ocean dead zones have been on a dramatic increase, doubling in each decade from recorded areas in the 90’s to 150 in 2003, some stretching 70,000 square kilometers. The United Nations reports over the following two years 2003–2005 estimates were of 200. In 2008 the reported figure was 417 worldwide. And could this ripple effect be three-dimensional?”

End excerpt.

Many other tipping points both in the natural systems now being disrupted by climate change and by the perpetuation of our living and business as usual lives are also foreshadowed within the pages of the book. Maybe now would be a good time to get yourself a copy HERE.