Climate warning as Siberia melts

[Dover]

Climate warning as Siberia melts
11 August 2005
NewScientist.com news service

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".

What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre across. Kirpotin suspects that some unknown critical threshold has been crossed, triggering the melting...cont'd

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

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Climate Cycle Matched to Biblical Prophecy
By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News


Aug. 10, 2005— Consequences of a seven-year climactic cycle foretold by Joseph in the Old Testament Book of Genesis may have materialized, and the climactic cycle still exists today, according to a scientific analysis of hundreds of years of data compiled on Egypt's Nile River.

In addition to the seven-year cycle, the findings reveal climate patterns that exist in 2.2, 4.2, 12, 19, 64 and even 256-year cycles, all of which could affect Egyptian rainfall levels.

In Biblical times, desired rains or dreaded drought meant the difference between crop success or failure, as Joseph suggested in his interpretation of a dream that a pharaoh had concerning seven healthy and unhealthy cows.

In Genesis Chapter 41, verses 29-31, Joseph said to the pharaoh, "Seven years of great abundance are now coming throughout the land of Egypt; but these will be followed by seven years of famine, when all the abundance in the land of Egypt will be forgotten. When the famine has ravaged the land, no trace of the abundance will be found in the land because of the famine that follows it — so utterly severe will that famine be." ..cont'd

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050808/bibleclimate.html

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Alaskan people tell of climate change
By Kate Bissell
BBC Radio 4



For the past 20 years climatologists and ice and atmosphere scientists have been working in Alaska studying climate change.
Now they have discovered a rich new source of records extending their knowledge back by decades through the oral history of native Alaskans.

Barrow is the most northerly town in the United States, lying 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle.
And 92-year-old Bertha Leavitt is its oldest inhabitant.

"When I was a child", she says, "it was so much colder and the winds in winter used to be fierce." She remembers her elders telling in their stories that the weather was going to change. And since her childhood she believes this has come true.

Frozen land

In a land where not just the rivers but also the sea freezes over, it is impossible not to be aware of the seasons.


The ice in the arctic is getting much thinner, locals say
Barrow whaling captain Percy Nusunginya has particular reason to be alert to change. Each autumn and spring his crew ventures out on the ice to fish at air holes. He says that working out on the Arctic Sea has become very dangerous.

"Nowadays ice conditions are thinner than in the 1970s and 80s. The ice used to be 20 to 30 feet thick but now it is more like 10 feet thick. But what can we do? Sometimes I feel sad but we just have to go with what we have got.

"Up here in the Arctic we are definitely warming up, the polar pack ice has all but gone."

Percy says Western nations need to have scientific proof that the climate is warming rather than believing the word of the native people but he adds: "The white man, the climatologists are just learning what we knew was going on."..cont'd

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4748287.stm

[BrklynLiberal]

1. We are certainly doomed....

:(

[wli]

2. lights out, the party's over

6C did the Permian-Triassic extinction, 10C is the end of it all

[Desertrose]

3. Gotta face that what I always thought was in the years ahead is...

actually happening now...

damn.....

[Dover]

4. Data Error May Have Hidden Some Warming

WASHINGTON - The puzzling difference between warming temperatures on the ground and not-so-warm readings in the sky above may have been resolved.

Atmospheric researchers studying global warming have sought for years to determine why readings taken from weather balloons didn't show the same increases as readings on the ground. The difference has fueled skeptics of global warming.

Now, researchers at Yale University say exposed instruments on the balloons may be the problem.

Weather balloons are sent up around the world twice a day — at local times equivalent to noon and midnight Greenwich mean time — and older versions of the balloons used temperature probes that were exposed. The result was higher-than-normal readings on probes sent up in daytime because of the sunlight exposure.

In more recent years, however, new probes were developed that were shielded from the light.

The result, while readings were rising on the ground they were not doing so up in the air, since the extra solar heating was no longer warming the probes....>

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050812/ap_on_sc/warming_sky_1

[Ptah]

5. I've noticed this also.

I was born and reared near Glacier National Park.

One of my grandmothers spent some time painting.

I have an oil painting of hers circa 1962.

Her vantage point was at the east end of St. Mary's Lake in
said park.

The difference from her painting (eyewitness) to present day
is unmistakable.

The glaciers she rendered are now almost gone.

:cry:

:cry: :cry:

[On the Road]

6. My Girlfriend's Family

is from the part of China just south of Siberia (Heilong-Jiang province). Her mother has noticed very noticeable warming over her lifetime. Twenty-below days in winter are much less frequent now, and summers are hotter.

[phantom power]

7. Methane is 20x more potent than CO2, as a greenhouse gas.

The warming we've been experiencing is going to accelerate.