NASA: Another brutally hot year for the Siberian tundra 3

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1. 

   randino Posted 9:54 pm
   17 Dec 2008

   Brings to mind a saying from Antonio Gramsci that has governed my activism, "Pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will."
   Read stuff like this and you figure what's the use? But that is bull shit, and you get up the next morning and get back to work. And damn the odds!
   Randy Cunningham
   
   Cleveland, OH
   
   Randy Cunningham

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2. 

   Hmpf Posted 4:47 am
   18 Dec 2008

   Regarding the oddsThis is how I figure it:
   There may be a 99% chance that we're already screwed.
   But if we don't even try to do anything about it, then that becomes a certainty.
   A 1% chance of being saved is still infintely better than guaranteed catastrophe.

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3. 

   dobermanmacleod Posted 7:50 pm
   18 Dec 2008

   Methane emissions will soon overwhelm any cuts!Current climate models don't take into consideration melting methane hydrate emissions, which will soon overwhelm any cuts we make:
   For instance, there is an area six times the size of Germany containing about 540 billion tons of carbon off the Siberian coast. That submarine permafrost is perilously close to thawing. Three to 12 kilometers from the coast the sea sediment is just below freezing.  The permafrost has grown porous, there is a loss of rigor in the frozen sea floor, and the surrounding seawater is highly oversaturated with solute methane.
   "If the Siberian (submarine) permafrost-seal thaws completely and all the stored gas escapes, the methane content of the planet's atmosphere would increase twelve fold. The result would be catastrophic global warming."  --"A Storehouse of Greenhouse Gases Is Opening in Siberia," Spiegel, 17 April '08
   Thirty percent of the Earth's surface is land.  Twenty percent of the land is permafrost. There is over a trillion tons of carbon frozen and buried in the land permafrost.  More than half the land covered by the topmost layer of permafrost will probably thaw by 2050.
   NASA's top climate scientist, James Hansen, says that the release of methane clathrates from permafrost regions and beneath the seabed will unleash powerful feedback forces that could produce runaway climate change that cannot be controlled - the so-called methane time bomb - a prediction of radical environmental transformation far worse than the worst-case scenarios theorised by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
   "The alternative (to geoengineering) is the acceptance of a massive natural cull of humanity and a return to an Earth that freely regulates itself but in the hot state." --Dr James Lovelock, August 2008
   "Recently some have begun to advocate engineered climate selection as a fallback or insurance policy, in case their preferred regulatory decarbonization approach does not solve the problem or an unforeseen event occurs that requires a rapid response. A more prudent and efficient strategy would appear to be to implement engineered climate selection first and then see what further needs to be done." --Alan Carlin, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, June 2007

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