New Scientist: Climate warning as Siberia melts

[muriel_volestrangler]

THE world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.

The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world's least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.

Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725124.500

[rodeodance]

1. whow---this is happening in last 3-4 years.

[wli]

2. here comes runaway global warming

Looks like a positive feedback loop to me. Probably set to trigger a huge mass extinction event or worse.

[whistle]

3. "....billions of tonnes of methane" now there is where we need energy

....monies spent, how best to capture and use this energy resource rather then just let it escape into the atmosphere where it can only do greater harm. How about a giant cover over the entire area? How does "billions of tonnes" of methane gas compare to say 50 million barrels of crude oil? Can anyone shed some factual light on this?

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. It's a slow release

which will have an effect on the climate, but probably too slow to be practically captured, happening over a million square kilometres. From The Guardian story on this:

The permafrost is likely to take many decades at least to thaw, so the methane locked within it will not be released into the atmosphere in one burst, said Stephen Sitch, a climate scientist at the Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter.

But calculations by Dr Sitch and his colleagues show that even if methane seeped from the permafrost over the next 100 years, it would add around 700m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year, roughly the same amount that is released annually from the world's wetlands and agriculture.

It would effectively double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming, he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1546824,00.html

That would be 700 tonnes/sq. km/year. From here, 1 tonne of LNG is the energy equivalent of 1.22 tonnes of crude, or 1.22*7.3 barrels =8.9 barrels, so this would be the equivalent of about 6000 barrels of oil per sq. km. each year, or 17 barrels a day. That's if you could capture it all, without having any bad effect on the ground you're getting it from.

[cprise]

7. The heat trapping potential of methane that matters here

... not its energy content. You seem to assume that the greenhouse potential of the CO2-from-oil is the same as methane. But ounce-for-ounce, methane has about 24x the potential.

You would need to get the CO2 output of a barrel of oil and its lifecycle to make such a comparison.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. I was replying to whistle's question

"how best to capture and use this energy resource" - they are wondering about the energy content, not the greenhouse potential.

[Boomer]

9. delete

[cprise]

6. It's too soon to say much.

However The Guardian article states a possible added forcing of 25% over the amount of global warming that was previously anticipated.

The ClimatePrediction.net computing project (a screensaver - like SETI@Home for climate science) has so far estimated the mean warming as high as 20dF before 2100.

The project is running new experiements to refine its climate models and hopes to publish new results early next year (it would really benefit from any unused computing capacity in your systems ;) ).

The uncertainties are all in the degree of damage: bad or very bad, plus where so the worst effect occur? But I think this new development in Siberia makes it considerably worse for everybody (higher mean temperatures more quickly).

[Boomer]

10. Join the DU ClimatePrediction team!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=228x11021

[slor]

4. Really bad time to have an idiot for president...

at a time of Peak Oil and Global Warming. It is always bad to have a idiot in "charge", but it is particularly not good right now.

[gulfcoastliberal]

11. All this shit reminds me of the star trek:TNG episode

The one where Picard is immobilized by this alien probe that beams a lifetime of experiences of a long-dead human civilization into his head in the space of 15 minutes. He married, raised a family, etc and knew the planet was dying but could do nothing. Maybe we ought to start building a similar probe.