Roughly as I'm not a specialist in this field, Methane concentrations should increase over the next several years leading to more heat retained in the atmosphere than is dispersed. The median temperature should shift upwards. Is that bad? For us it means more volatile weather patterns as water absorbes som of that energy and and rises from lower states such as solid ice and liquid water to its gaseous state.
If you observe average temperatures estimated over the course of the last 300 to 500 million years you will see that we are still in and exiting the last Ice Age.
This process is gradual and takes many millennia but the ramped up usage and expulsion of waste energy has accelerated the process ahead of the normal cycle. If the earth goes through these cycles that last tens of thousands of years, what happens when we accelerate the cycle. When the gradual rise in median temperatures occurs over centuries instead of millennia. Instant injections of the A.K.A greenhouse gases would create a temperature spike that would have to be compensated.
The funny thing about energy is that it is never used up. It is transferred into various states or dispersed. Median temperatures increased until atmospheres became thick enough to block additional solar radiation. Less solar energy mean that the environmental model that once sustained itself on that measure of energy could not maintain its state and over millions of years there was deflationary process. Ancient plants and creatures absorbed the ambient energies of a time long ago to fuel their breeding which increased their energy absorption. While most if it is expelled through their lifetimes back into the environment little by little over time some of that energy becomes stored during the fossilization process. The whole process of energy becoming stored during fossilization, the reflection of solar energy, and the normal process of the earth just naturally radiating its existing energy into space resulted in an Ice Age.
The Ice Age is a reaction to excessive atmospheric thickness. And as temperatures decrease and through the process of precipitation the greenhouse gases are carried back to the surface which in time allows for solar radiation to increase.
Is there global warming? You can be sure if it. Are we the cause? No but we are an accelerant. Will we cause it to go out of control? That is the $64,000 question and is up for debate. To deny global warming is to be an absolute moron. But to debate ononesyour opinion on the merit that they have at least researched the subject and accepted the natural cycle before garnering media attention.
Climate warning as Siberia melts 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.
Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3 °C in the last 40 years. The warming is believed to be a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical change in atmospheric circulation known as the Arctic oscillation, plus feedbacks caused by melting ice, which exposes bare ground and ocean. These absorb more solar heat than white ice and snow.
Similar warming has also been taking place in Alaska: earlier this summer Jon Pelletier of the University of Arizona in Tucson reported a major expansion of lakes on the North Slope fringing the Arctic Ocean.
The findings from western Siberia follow a report two months ago that thousands of lakes in eastern Siberia have disappeared in the last 30 years, also because of climate change (New Scientist, 11 June, p 16). This apparent contradiction arises because the two events represent opposite end of the same process, known as thermokarsk.
In this process, rising air temperatures first create "frost-heave", which turns the flat permafrost into a series of hollows and hummocks known as salsas. Then as the permafrost begins to melt, water collects on the surface, forming ponds that are prevented from draining away by the frozen bog beneath. The ponds coalesce into ever larger lakes until, finally, the last permafrost melts and the lakes drain away underground.
Siberia's peat bogs formed around 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Since then they have been generating methane, most of which has been trapped within the permafrost, and sometimes deeper in ice-like structures known as clathrates. Larry Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface worldwide.
His colleague Karen Frey says if the bogs dry out as they warm, the methane will oxidise and escape into the air as carbon dioxide. But if the bogs remain wet, as is the case in western Siberia today, then the methane will be released straight into the atmosphere. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.
In May this year, Katey Walter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks told a meeting in Washington of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that she had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia, where the gas was bubbling from thawing permafrost so fast it was preventing the surface from freezing, even in the midst of winter.
An international research partnership known as the Global Carbon Project earlier this year identified melting permafrost as a major source of feedbacks that could accelerate climate change by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. "Several hundred billion tonnes of carbon could be released," said the project's chief scientist, Pep Canadell of the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra, Australia. Related Articles
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