Only, this 1,700 gigaton bomb has not been accounted for in prediction models. That a huge concentration of latent ice-age old carbon poses potential danger not just to humanity and to other species but to the roads, pipelines and buildings lying above it has been neglected, said UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. A suggested three-pronged course of action will hopefully change that.

A Thawing Bomb

“Permafrost is one of the keys to the planet’s future because it contains large stores of frozen organic matter that, if thawed and released into the atmosphere, would amplify current global warming and propel us to a warmer world,” said Steiner.

“Its potential impact on the climate, ecosystems and infrastructure has been neglected for too long,” he added.

The UNEP report, Policy Implications of Warming Permafrost was designed to spur dialogue among climate-treaty negotiators, policy makers and the general public as they prepare to create a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that expires this year. It also hacks a path to the way forward, instead of dropping concerned parties in an alarmist cloud.

Three proactive steps 

First, the report’s authors recommend that the IPCC – the official voice of climate change – commission a special report that reveals the potential impact that carbon released from 30-85% of the permafrost might have on the environment, which would in turn support emergent (and enormously important) policy decisions.

Then, northern countries, especially Russia, Canada, China and the United States, should assume responsibility for permafrost monitoring stations that share data across a network. “The International Permafrost Association should continue to coordinate development and the national networks should remain part of the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost,” UNEP urges.

And finally, it behooves these nations to prepare for the worst. Structural damages, habitat destruction, migration, longer growing seasons, and increased risk of fire are just a few potential consequences.

Infrastructure collapse

But the biggest fear for those of us shy of oil spills, we already have an idea of what will happen if pipelines laid over this territory are destabilized as a result of the shifting ground.

“Infrastructure failure can have dramatic environmental consequences, as seen in the 1994 breakdown of the pipeline to the Vozei oilfield in Northern Russia, which resulted in a spill of 160,000 tonnes of oil, the world’s largest terrestrial oil spill,” UNEP reports.

These events are always financially crippling, politically disastrous, and environmentally criminal, which is powerful ammunition for the likes of Bill McKibben and the 350.org (global) crowd, as well as other activists, moviemakers and indigenous people who are determined to fell the Keystone XL Pipeline project.

For a much more detailed and scientific analysis of the permafrost bomb, we beg you to visit the UNEP website.

Image of old Russian bomb in snow, Shutterstock

The post A 1,700 Gigaton Carbon Bomb is Thawing in the Permafrost appeared first on Green Prophet.

Scientists gathered at the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London warn that failure to drastically slash greenhouse gas emissions this decade could push the planet past certain thresholds that would keep climate change manageable, according to a Reuters report. If carbon emissions continue to rise, the overall global temperature could increase by a full six degrees celsius by the end of the century. That might seem negligible, but such changes would render certain parts of earth uninhabitable.

The Critical Decade

Executive Director of the Australian National University Climate Change Institute, Will Steffen says that this is the “critical decade.”

“We are on the cusp of some big changes,” said Steffen, according to Reuters. “We can … cap temperature rise at two degrees, or cross the threshold beyond which the system shifts to a much hotter state.”

While reducing greenhouse gas emissions now could stem the worst temperature rise, Steffen is convinced that melting ice sheets, which act as giant refrigerators for the planet, have already passed the tipping point.

“The West Antarctic ice sheet has shrunk over the last decade and the Greenland ice sheet has lost around 200 cubic km (48 cubic miles) a year since the 1990s.” Reuters writes.

Our Carbon Sink is Shrinking

And just as our refrigerators are melting away, our carbon sink – the Amazon Forest – is quickly growing dryer and smaller, and ten years of carbon emissions absorption has already been lost. The combined loss of these two crucial phenomenon and the release of carbon locked in the Siberian permafrost, will completely alter life as we know it.

The northern latitudes have experienced some of the most drastic changes in climate, Steffen notes. As this happens, billions of tonnes of carbon locked in the permafrost could gush into the atmosphere. Already giant plumes of gurgling methane have been observed, and it could get worse.

At present the fossil fuel industry releases circa 10 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. Depending on how quickly the permafrost melts, we could see 30-63 billion tonnes of carbon released every year, and that number could increase to as much as 380 billion tonnes by 2100.

No Turning Back

The main message seems to be that once we hit a certain point in climate change, there will be no turning back.

Meanwhile, a binding agreement that forces countries the biggest polluters (such as China and the United States) to curb their national emissions won’t go into force until 2020. By then, it will be too late.

:: Reuters

Image credit: Planet on Fire from Shutterstock

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The post It’s Game Over for Global Warming Unless We Act This Decade appeared first on Green Prophet.

Recent discoveries have confirmed scientists’ longstanding fears that global warming would catalyze the release of millions of tons of potential greenhouse gas emissions locked up in ice and permafrost in the great white north.

Layer after layer of plant debris that has not yet decomposed lies trapped in arctic and subarctic permafrost. As global temperatures rise and this perennial ice begins to melt, previously frozen organic matter will thaw out and decompose, releasing huge quantities of greenhouse gases into our already saturated atmosphere.

This may not seem like such an earth-shattering phenomenon, but scientists are deeply troubled since there’s a strong chance that methane (CH4) will be released – as it does in anaerobic wetland conditions – which does not bode well for planetary warming since it is 21 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide (CO2).

Nearly 1/4 of the northern hemisphere is underlain by permafrost that contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere, wrote The New York Times. This amounts to nearly 2 trillion tons of carbon in soils of the northern regions, 88 percent of which is “locked in permafrost,” according to Canadian scientist Charles Tarnocai and colleagues.

The New York Times reports:

For now, scientists have many more questions than answers. Preliminary computer analyses, made only recently, suggest that the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions could eventually become an annual source of carbon equal to 15 percent or so of today’s yearly emissions from human activities.

But those calculations were deliberately cautious. A recent survey drew on the expertise of 41 permafrost scientists to offer more informal projections. They estimated that if human fossil-fuel burning remained high and the planet warmed sharply, the gases from permafrost could eventually equal 35 percent of today’s annual human emissions.

Meanwhile, Yahoo news reports that Russian scientists have discovered “hundreds of plumes of methane gas, some 1,000 meters in diameter, bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean.” Igor Semiletov of the Russian Academy of Sciences told the UK Independent that thousands more of these giant gurgling methane pots could be lurking in the ice between the Russian mainland and the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

Having more heat-trapping greenhouse gases in our atmosphere will exacerbate many of the climate change problems we are already beginning to face, include rising temperatures, biodiversity loss, drought and famine, water scarcity, and an upsurge in the expense and intensity of certain natural disasters.

But here’s the good news: if we can scale back human-caused carbon emissions and therefore reduce the rate at which the planet is heating up, most researchers believe we can slow down the rate at which this methane will be released into the atmosphere.

:: New York Times, Yahoo News

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