Not so perma
Nova has an interesting (and alarming) episode on melting permafrost in Siberia and Alaska that’s releasing methane–>more warming–>more melting and on it goes.
As the Arctic warms, methane that has been locked in permafrost for thousands of years escapes and can explode. Released methane that finds its way to the surface contributes to the greenhouse effect of climate change with even more heat retention capacity than carbon dioxide. Even igniting it doesn’t solve the problem, since that produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct.
It’s a tipping point, and it’s already tipped.
In Alaska they find a large lake bubbling with methane. On Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula, residents have reported large holes in the frozen tundra, including one more than 80 feet wide and 150 feet deep.
And it’s only going to get worse. There is no fix.
Somehow when I talk to my students about this, they miss the importance. I explain that it is a tipping point, but they nod, write it down, and can’t explain later why it’s important. I sometimes think the bad news skips out of their brain, They’re so used to being told we have a decade that the idea we’ve already passed a tipping point is some sort of cognitive dissonance.
I was reading several years ago that the methane was escaping. It is going to be grim.
Igniting it is, however, one hell of a lot better than letting it go into the atmosphere as CH4.
It’s been clear for many years now that humans had passed the psychological tipping point, even if we were uncertain about the scientific one. That is to say: we’ve recognized for a long time that we had to reduce emissions below a certain level in order to avoid catastrophic future temperature change, but in all that long time there have been no significant behavioral changes. Climate scientists have kept repeating the same message over and over: “people, we need to change. Hello, we need to change. HELLO!” and the only response has been buy more cars, consume more goods, keep on with the status quo. So really, at this point, it’s just going to have to be a matter of trying to adapt to the enormous changes await us, which we could have (possibly) avoided.
Naif, correct.
James Garnett, agreed, but we don’t seem to have passed the political tipping point yet, and that was the one that mattered. even if we passed it tomorrow, the reality is, as you’ve said, adaptation and mitigation. Prevention is in the rear view mirror.
We have chosen not to look up. Michael Mann was the advisor to the movie “Don’t Look Up” and it’s an obvious metaphor for our response to climage change, which is to look away. Droughts lead to war, not only in the struggle for arable land, but also in the tendency for rural farmers to move to cities for better opportunity causing conflict with those who already live in the cities. The Oceans retain heat and turn CO2 into carbolic acid, leaching the corals, etc etc
Not only are pockets in the permafrost melting to release methane where we can see the pockets, but there is permafrost at the floor of the Arctic Ocean, and there are huge bubbles of methane popping up through the water as the permafrost thaws from warmer water.
Just don’t look up, the scientists will fix it in time.
Yes the Nova episode began with researchers at a lake in the far north of Alaska that was sending up methane bubbles. As the episode goes on it becomes clearer and clearer that this is happening all over the Arctic, and that nobody has any idea how to stop it. Houses are sinking as the tundra melts, and the tundra is…everywhere.