The Heat Death Of American Dreams - AlterNet On Siberian Methane Release

A number of news reports and commentary on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have linked the disasters to global warming. Almost nobody noticed a crucial scientific finding, two weeks earlier, that foreshadows disasters on a far greater scale in the decades to come.
According to August 11 articles in the magazine New Scientist and the British newspaper the Guardian, a pair of scientists, one Russian and one British, report that global warming is melting the permafrost in the West Siberian tundra. The news made a little blip in the international media and the blogosphere, and then it disappeared.

Why should anyone care? Because melting of the Siberian permafrost will, over the next few decades, release hundreds of millions of tons of methane from formerly frozen peat bogs into the atmosphere. Methane from those bogs is at least twenty times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide that currently drives global warming. Dumping such a huge quantity of methane on top of already soaring CO2 levels will drive global temperatures to the upper range of increases forecast for the remainder of this century.

According to the most recent forecast by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), compiled in 2001, human industrial emissions are on course to raise global temperatures between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. The IPCC models didn't account for methane releases from the Arctic, nor did they consider other natural sources of greenhouse gases that could be released by human activity. The agency judged Arctic methane releases to be a real but remote possibility, not likely to emerge for decades. Now we find that it could very well be happening today.

The news of melting Siberian permafrost means, in all likelihood, that global warming is accelerating much faster than climatologists had predicted. The finding from Siberia comes amidst evidence, presented at Tony Blair's special climate change conference last February, that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be in danger of disintegrating -- another warming-induced event once thought to be decades or centuries away. Meanwhile, according to a September 29, 2005 report in the Guardian, scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center have measured a drastic shrinking of ice floes in the Arctic Ocean. Arctic waters are now expected to be ice-free well before the end of this century.

EDIT

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/25351/

unless we can get rid of our current oil-based administration and start some real energy efforts pronto.

Xtian fundy fruitcakes square ruining God's 'creation' with their religion? Do they not think he might just be a little pissed of for their support of the criminals liars and murderous thieves who destroyed what he created (since that is what they believe).

I know I always get pissed off at anybody who breaks my stuff.

And everyone will be able to fly, and go to Disneyland every day (no lines, either!) and the stores will be open 24/7, and there'll always be enough money in the checking account . . . .

:puke:

They will be sucked up into Heaven on moonbeams, as the sinners and infidels fry below them. They will have a hearty laugh at our expense, then raise a glass of Miller when they get to the Pearly Gates.

They interpret that bible passage "and God gave man dominion over the flora, fauna, fungi, protista and monera" as biblical license to, well, do whatever the hell we want with earth, including exploit and mistreat it.

. . . so to speak. If the oceans warm up enough, Methane Hydrate (frozen methane) deposits could be rather suddenly released, making the methane being released in the peat bogs a small (but significant) blip in the progression of global warming.

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20011212methane.html for more information.

...is that the Greenland ice sheet melts as quickly as possible so that the 20 foot rise in the oceans crashes our technological civilization (and slows human-sourced greenhouse gas emissions) before the oceanic methane hydrate melts. This best case would result in maybe about 2-3 billion human deaths over the 5-10 years following. That's the best case.

The worst case scenario is that the methane hydrate melts too, causing such a runaway greenhouse effect that the biosphere is unable to support higher forms of life for a million years (or more). We'd be extinct (along with most other land mammals).

I don't think there is a 'non-catastrophic' option available anymore. Greenland is almost certainly going to melt no matter what we do at this point.

I don't like the humidity here anyway (dry heat is OK).

http://www.flcv.com/flenergy.html

also:
Energy savings from airtight buildings
U.S. commercial building owners could save substantially on annual heating and cooling energy costs by making buildings more airtight.
A study, by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, used simulation software to evaluate the energy impact of improved air barriers in three typical non-residential buildings in five cities, each in a different climate zone.
With baseline energy, climate and building data from each city, the researchers simulated conditions of a typical, two-story office building; a one-story retail building; and a four-story apartment building in Bismarck, N.D.; Minneapolis; St. Louis; Miami; and Phoenix. Each building was modeled with wood frame and masonry construction.
In Phoenix, the estimated annual cost-savings were 10 percent for two-story building, 16 percent for the retail building and 3 percent for the apartment building, but the savings were higher in colder climates such as Minneapolis, where the predicted energy savings were 37 percent for the office building, 26 percent for the retain building and 33 percent for the apartment building.

In hot climate zones, roof color, attic or roof heat barriers, shading, and window treatment can have significant effects on cooling energy costs

and the flooding that will happen. Some of the state may just be gone - unless they decide to build levees a la New Orleans.

The smart thing to do is start moving people now rather than spending
billions on concrete walls that only need to fail in one place ...

Also see the following topic in the Science forum:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=228x13380

methane hydrate melts. Some forms of mammals would be able to survive another ice age - here's hoping Gaia has a contingency plan to shake off her human viral infection.

we could do something else. I'm open to suggestions, but I veto in advance anything involving writing letters or moving to the sensible center.

but try to remember that all natural processes,
especially as speculative as this, probably create their
own feedback loops that make a linear
extrapolation a bit iffy.
example: collapse of gulf stream ushers in
mini ice age, changing the equation in northern
Europe/Siberia?