Return of the beavers, or terraforming in your back yard

A press release from the University of Saskatchewan: Over-trapping nearly wiped out the beaver 100 years ago but the ambitious rodents have bounced back and have created ponds on three continents that cover an area about the size of Switzerland, according to University of Saskatchewan research published in the Royal Swedish Academy of Science journal AMBIO.

The researchers also noted an associated increase in methane emissions from those ponds. At the end of the 20th century, beaver activities contributed up to 800 million kilograms of methane to the atmosphere each year, about 200 times greater than in 1900. And on balance, that is a good thing, explained Colin Whitfield, hydrologist with the Centre for Hydrology at the University of Saskatchewan.

“We found that valuable habitat area has been established by beavers over the last century,” Whitfield said. “While this habitat contributes to global methane emissions, the magnitude of this methane source is lower than many other natural sources and unlikely to be a dominant climate-change driver.”

Beavers are architects of geomorphic change; they drastically alter water flow through a landscape and their dams create ponds where there was once swift-moving water. Carbon-rich plant matter decomposing in the oxygen-poor pond bottoms releases methane into the atmosphere, Whitfield explained.

...“We found global beaver numbers have grown dramatically on the three continents they currently inhabit North America, Eurasia and South America, to a population of over 10 million,” he said. “We estimate this has led to the creation of more than 42,000 square kilometres of aquatic pond areas as well as over 200,000 kilometres of shoreline habitat.”

The result is habitat for birds, greater biodiversity and improved water quality. “Continued range expansion and population growth in combination with anticipated increases in surface water temperatures suggests that the contribution of beaver activity to global methane emissions may continue to grow,” said Whitfield....

A beaver down the street from me, pausing in his relentless campaign to inundate the landscape. Shot by Brian Thomas. Public domain, sez me.

Satellite data shows surprising methane hotspot in US southwest

The Guardian (UK) via AP: A surprising hotspot of the potent global warming gas methane hovers over part of the southwestern US, according to satellite data and is likely to be leakage from pumping methane out of coal mines. The result hints that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other agencies considerably underestimate leaks of methane, which is also called natural gas.

The higher level of methane is not a local safety or a health issue for residents, but is a factor in overall global warming. While methane isn’t the most plentiful heat-trapping gas, scientists worry about its increasing amounts and have had difficulties tracking emissions.

A satellite image shows the hotspot of atmospheric methane concentrations as a bright red blip over the Four Corners area of New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah in continental US. The image used data from 2003 to 2009.

Within that hotspot, a European satellite found atmospheric methane concentrations equivalent to emissions of about £1.3m a year. That’s about 80% more than the EPA figured. Other ground-based studies have calculated that EPA estimates were off by 50%. The methane concentration in the hotspot was more than triple the amount previously estimated by European scientists.

The amount of methane in the Four Corners, an area covering about 2,500 square miles would trap more heat in the atmosphere than all the carbon dioxide produced yearly in Sweden. That’s because methane is 86 times more potent for trapping heat in the sh
ort-term than carbon dioxide.

...“It’s the largest signal we can see from the satellite,” said study lead author Eric Kort, a University of Michigan atmospheric scientist. “It’s hard to hide from space.” There could be some areas elsewhere in the country where more methane is emitted if it is dispersed by wind, Kort said. Kort said the methane likely comes from leaks as workers extract natural gas from coal beds, and not from hydraulic fracturing, called fracking, because the data were collected before fracking really caught on....

Image of hotspot from NASA

'Widespread methane leakage' from ocean floor off US coast

Matt McGrath n BBC News: Researchers say they have found more than 500 bubbling methane vents on the seafloor off the US east coast. The unexpected discovery indicates there are large volumes of the gas contained in a type of sludgy ice called methane hydrate.

There are concerns that these new seeps could be making a hitherto unnoticed contribution to global warming. The scientists say there could be about 30,000 of these hidden methane vents worldwide. Previous surveys along the Atlantic seaboard have shown only three seep areas beyond the edge of the US continental shelf.

The team behind the new findings studied what is termed the continental margin, the region of the ocean floor that stands between the coast and the deep ocean. In an area between North Carolina and Massachusetts, they have now found at least 570 seeps at varying depths between 50m and 1,700m.

Their findings came as a bit of a surprise. "It is the first time we have seen this level of seepage outside the Arctic that is not associated with features like oil or gas reservoirs or active tectonic margins," said Prof Adam Skarke from Mississippi State University, who led the study....

From 1992: mapping conducted by the USGS off North Carolina and South Carolina shows large accumulations of methane hydrates.Dr. William Dillon, U.S. Geological Survey, public domain

Are Siberia’s methane blow-holes the first warning sign of unstoppable climate change?

News.com.au: What do three enormous craters in the Siberian wastelands have to do with a terrified American climate scientist? Methane. And that’s something to scare us all. The end of the world could be starting right now — in a frozen Siberian wasteland known as Yamal. It translates as “The End of the Land”.

The first mysterious crater was spotted by oil workers earlier this month. It was an 80m wide cavern that reached deep into the earth. Since then, the Siberian Times reports goatherds have found a further two enormous vents in the ground.

Russian researchers have returned from their investigation of the first find and taken water and soil samples to help resolve how the hole was formed. ...[S]cientists already have a pretty good idea. Explosive vents of vast quantities of methane gas.

Now a new, ominous, name could be attached to them: Dragon’s mouths. Here’s where a blog posted by American professor in glaciology Dr Jason Box at the weekend comes in: “The dragon breath hypothesis has me losing sleep.” Dr Box highlights signs of alarmingly huge spikes of methane being released into the atmosphere above Siberia.

It’s what that means which has him alarmed. He’s not mincing his words. He’s issued a no-holds barred call to action. “This is an all hands on deck moment,” he writes. “We’re in the age of consequences.”...

Going ashore on the Yamal Peninsula, photo by Fridtjof Nansen

Thousands of fracking wells in Pennsylvania 'may be leaking methane'

Bobby Magill in the Guardian (UK) via Climate Central: A study of abandoned oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania finds that the hundreds of thousands of such wells in the state may be leaking methane, suggesting that abandoned wells across the country could be a bigger source of climate changing greenhouse gases than previously thought.

The study by Mary Kang, a Princeton University scientist, looked at 19 wells and found that these oft-forgotten wells are leaking various amounts of methane. There are hundreds of thousands of such oil and gas wells, long abandoned and plugged, in Pennsylvania alone, and countless more in oil and gas fields across the country. These wells go mostly unmonitored, and rarely, if ever, checked for such leaks.

A growing list of studies conducted over the past three years has suggested that crude oil and natural gas development, particularly in shale formations, are significant sources of methane leaks — emissions not fully included in US Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse gas inventories because they are rarely monitored. Scientists say there is inadequate data available for them to know where all the leaks are and how much methane is leaking.

...So when abandoned oil and gas wells — possibly hundreds of thousands of them in Pennsylvania alone — that are not currently included in any federa
l estimate for total US greenhouse gas emissions are found to be leaking methane, the implications could be significant.

Kang directly measured leaks from the abandoned wells and found that all 19 wells in the study tested positive for methane leaks, some more than others. She found that overall, the wells leak so much methane that if leaks from all the abandoned wells in Pennsylvania are added up, the leaks could account for between 4 percent and 13 percent of human-caused methane emissions in the state.

But because of significant uncertainty about the total number of abandoned and plugged wells that exist in Pennsylvania, more study is needed to fully understand how common leaking abandoned wells are in the state and how much methane they may emit....

A fracking site in Warren Center, Pennsylvania, shot by Ostroff Law - Fracking Lawyer, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

Tropical and northern wetlands likely to blame for greenhouse gas increases

A press release from the University of Guelph: A surprising recent rise in atmospheric methane likely stems from wetland emissions, suggesting that much more of the potent greenhouse gas will be pumped into the atmosphere as northern wetlands continue to thaw and tropical ones to warm, according to a new international study led by a University of Guelph researcher.

The study supports calls for improved monitoring of wetlands and human changes to those ecosystems – a timely topic as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prepares to examine land use impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, says Prof. Merritt Turetsky, Department of Integrative Biology.

Turetsky is the lead author
of a paper published today in Global Change Biology based on one of the largest-ever analyses of global methane emissions. The team looked at almost 20,000 field data measurements collected from 70 sites across arctic, temperate and tropical regions. Agnieszka Kotowska, a former master’s student, and David Olefeldt, a post-doc at Guelph, also were among 19 study co-authors from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Finland, Germany and Sweden.

One of the strongest greenhouse gases, methane comes from agriculture and fossil fuel use, as well as natural sources such as microbes in saturated wetland soils. The amount of atmospheric methane has remained relatively stable for about a decade, but concentrations began to rise again in 2007. Scientists believe this increase stems partly from more methane being released from thawing northern wetlands.

Scientists have assumed that wetland methane release is largest in the tropics, said Turetsky. “But our analyses show that northern fens, such as those created when permafrost thaws, can have emissions comparable to warm sites in the tropics, despite their cold temperatures. That’s very important when it comes to scaling methane release at a global scale.”....

US Fish and Wildlife Service photo of tundra in the Arctic

Permafrost thawing could accelerate global warming

Kathleen Haughney in Florida State 24/7: A team of researchers lead by Florida State University have found new evidence that permafrost thawing is releasing large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere via plants, which could accelerate warming trends. The research is featured in the newest edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We’ve known for a while now that permafrost is thawing,” said Suzanne Hodgkins, the lead author on the paper and a doctoral student in chemical oceanography at Florida State. “
But what we’ve found is that the associated changes in plant community composition in the polar regions could lead to way more carbon being released into the atmosphere as methane.”

Permafrost is soil that is frozen year round and is typically located in polar regions.  As the world has gotten slightly warmer, that permafrost is thawing and decomposing, which is producing increased amounts of methane.

Relative to carbon dioxide, methane has a disproportionately large global warming potential. Methane is 33 times more effective at warming the Earth on a mass basis and a century time scale relative to carbon dioxide.

As the plants break down, they are releasing carbon into the atmosphere. And if the permafrost melts entirely, there would be five times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere than there is now, said Jeff Chanton, the John Widmer Winchester Professor of Oceanography at Florida State. “The world is getting warmer, and the additional release of gas would only add to our problems,” he said.

Chanton and Hodgkins’ work, “Changes in peat chemistry associated with permafrost thaw increase greenhouse gas production,” was funded by a three-year, $400,000 Department of Energy grant. They traveled to Sweden multiple times to collect soil samples for the study....

Koyukuk River, Kanuti National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska

Global warming may increase methane emissions from freshwater ecosystems

A press release from the University of Exeter: New research led by the University of Exeter suggests that rising global temperatures will increase the quantity of the key greenhouse gas methane emitted from freshwater ecosystems to the Earth’s atmosphere – which could in turn lead to further warming.

The collaborative study, led by Dr Gabriel Yvon-Durocher from the University of Exeter, collated data from hundreds of laboratory experiments and field surveys to demonstrate that the speed at which methane fluxes increase with temperature was the same whether single species populations of methanogens, microbial communities or whole ecosystems were analyzed.

Dr Yvon-Durocher said: “This is important because biological methane fluxes are a major component of global methane emissions, but there is uncertainty about their magnitude and the factors that regulate them. This hinders our ability to predict the response of this key component of the carbon cycle to global warming. Our research provides scientists with an important clue about the mechanisms that may control the response of methane emissions from ecosystems to global warming.”

Methane is an important greenhouse gas because it has 25 times the global warming effect of carbon dioxide. The production of methane in freshwater ecosystems is brought about by an ancient group of microorganisms called Archaea that exist in waterlogged sediments where there is no oxygen. They play an important role in the decomposition of biomass, but rather than producing carbon dioxide, they produce methane as a by-product of their metabolism.

The report, published today in the leading scientific journal Nature, also showed that the temperature response of methane production is much higher than respiration (production of carbon dioxide) or photosynthesis (consumption of carbon dioxide), indicating that global warming may increase the amount of methanerelative to carbon dioxide emitted globally from aquatic ecosystems, terrestrial wetlands and rice paddies...

Archaeobacteria in a hot springs in Yellowstone National Park, shot by Wing-Chi Poon, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Climate change study suggests cutting herds

Eric Mortenson in the Capital Press (Oregon): New report from an OSU scientist says reducing cattle and other ruminant herds is the most effective way to reduce methane gas emissions and ease climate change. A new climate change study issued by an Oregon State University professor and others concludes the best way to reduce methane gas emissions is to reduce cattle, sheep and other ruminant herds worldwide.

The conclusion isn’t likely to be favored by industry groups, but OSU forestry Professor William Ripple and co-authors said herd reduction should be considered an antidote to climate change along with cutting back on fossil fuel use. “Because the Earth’s climate may be near a tipping point to major climate change, multiple approaches are needed for mitigation,” Ripple said in an OSU news release.

The Oregon Cattlemen’s Association dismissed the recommendation to reduce herds. Methane produced from “enteric fermentation” by livestock amounts to only about 2 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, association communications officer Lauren Montgomery said in an email. She said other sources, including wildfires, produce much more.

She said such studies have not taken into account what “substitute” greenhouse gases might be produced if livestock are reduced or even eliminated.

The association believes assessments of greenhouse gas impacts should include an accounting of energy used per gas unit produced...

A 1943 shot of livestock in Colorado, Clelland, Joe, War Relocation Authority photographer, Photographer (NARA record: 8464457)

Cost of Arctic methane release could be ‘size of global economy’ warn experts

University of Cambridge Research News: Economic modelling shows that the possible methane emissions caused by shrinking sea ice from just one area of the Arctic could come with a global price tag of 60 trillion dollars - the size of the world economy in 2012.

As the Arctic warms and sea ice melts at an unprecedented rate, hitting a record low last summer, the thawing of offshore ‘permafrost’ - frozen soil - in the region is releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Scientists have previously warned that there are vast reservoirs of methane in the Arctic, hundreds of billions of tonnes of a gas many times worse than carbon dioxide for global warming - of which only a fraction needs releasing into the atmosphere to trigger possibly catastrophic climate change.

Now, researchers from Cambridge and Rotterdam have for the first time calculated the potential economic impact of a scenario some scientists consider increasingly likely: that the methane below the East Siberian Sea will be emitted, either steadily over the next 30 years or in one giant “burp”.

Writing in the journal Nature, the academics say that just this area’s methane alone - some 50 billion tonnes, or 50 gigatonnes - would have a mean global impact of 60 trillion dollars, an amount very similar to the size of the entire global economy last year. Current US national debt stands at a mere 16 trillion dollars in comparison.

The economic impact modelled was only for the methane existing on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, and “the total price of Arctic change will be much higher,” they warn...

“Arctic science is a strategic asset for human economies because the region drives critical effects in our biophysical, political and economic systems,” write the academics, who say that world leaders will “miss the bigger picture” without factoring in Arctic methane projections - as neither the World Economic Forum or the International Monetary Fund currently recognise the economic danger of Arctic change...

Lama Lake on the Putorana Plateau in Siberia, shot by Vitaly Repin, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Methane emissions higher than thought across much of US

University of California-Santa Barbara news release: After taking a rented camper outfitted with special equipment to measure methane on a cross-continent drive, a UC Santa Barbara scientist has found that methane emissions across large parts of the U.S. are higher than currently known, confirming what other more local studies have found. Their research is published in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, stronger than carbon dioxide on a 20-year timescale, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, though on a century timescale, carbon dioxide is far stronger. "This research suggests significant benefits to slowing climate change could result from reducing industrial methane emissions in parallel with efforts on carbon dioxide," said Ira Leifer, a researcher with UCSB's Marine Science Institute.

Leifer was joined by two UCSB undergraduate students on the road trip from Los Angeles to Florida, taking a primarily southern route through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and along the Gulf of Mexico. They used specialized instrumentation, a gas chromatograph, to measure methane. The device was mounted in the RV, with an air ram on the roof that collected air samples from in front of the vehicle.

"We tried to pass through urban areas during nighttime hours, to avoid being stuck in traffic and sampling mostly exhaust fumes," Leifer said. "Someone was always monitoring the chromatograph, and when we would see a strong signal, we would look to see what potential sources were in the area, and modify the survey to investigate and, if possible, circumnavigate potential sources."

...Previous methane studies have focused primarily on large-scale airborne data, which were challenging to separate from local sources, according to Leifer. In fact, clear identification of individual sources often could not be conducted, requiring computer models and other surface measurements....

Cross-country data superimposed over satellite data from SCIAMACHY and from GOSAT. Satellite data shows positive methane anomalies for the southern U.S. are centered on eastern Texas. From the UC-Santa Barbara website

Tropical trees are largest emitter of methane in their ecosystem

The Open University News: Researchers at The Open University have found that trees in Bornean rainforests emit more methane than any other element of the ecosystem, which provides a new understanding about sources of this powerful greenhouse gas from tropical ecosystems.

In a paper titled Trees are major conduits for methane egress from tropical forested wetlands by Dr Vincent Gauci and Sunitha Pangala, published in New Phytologist on 18 December, the researchers announced new findings which show that trees in tropical peat forests of Southeast Asia release more methane through their stems than is emitted from the soil surface.

Sunitha Pangala, final year PhD student at The Open University’s Centre for Earth, Planetary Space and Astronomical Research, and lead author on the paper said: "This is the first study to measure methane release from tree stems in tropical peat swamps and evaluate its importance at an ecosystem level. Our research establishes that trees in tropical peat swamps are the largest emission pathway of methane in that ecosystem."

Previously it was thought that methane was only emitted via diffusion and bubbles at the wetland surface. The team measured methane emissions from healthy tree stems in a tropical forested peatland in the upper Sebangau River catchment in Borneo. They found significant quantities of methane being released from the stems of seven of the eight tree species studied. They estimated up to 87% of the methane are released from tree stems, highlighting that the previous methane emission inventories of this ecosystem may have been severely underestimated.

"This work challenges our previous understanding of how these ecosystems exchange methane with the atmosphere and adds another piece to the tropical methane emission puzzle,” said Dr Vincent Gauci, Senior Lecturer, Earth Systems, and the project’s leader. "It further shows that for wet tropical forested ecosystems, the like of which span south America, Africa and southeast Asia, researchers may have been missing most of the methane emitted from these ecosystems if they neglected to measure tree stem emissions.”...

A 1859 rendering of Borneo

Nitrous oxide and methane: the forgotten gases in the forests and climate change debate

Catriona Moss in Responding to Climate Change: Policy makers seeking to reduce greenhouse gases from deforestation cannot ignore the levels of nitrous oxide and methane released into the atmosphere as part of land conversion for palm oil, soya bean and other crops, scientists say.

While these forgotten gases account for only a small fraction of total greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation, nitrous oxide is up to 300 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere when compared to carbon dioxide over a 100-year time period. Methane is 25 times more effective, says Kristell Hergoualc’h, a scientist with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). As such, they need to start being a bigger part of the climate change debate.

Forest degradation and conversion are responsible for around 12 percent of overall greenhouse gas emissions – the majority of which is carbon dioxide released from forest fires and deforestation.

...Peatlands and mangroves are well known for their huge carbon-storing potential – mangrove soils alone store up to 4 times more carbon than trees – however, less is known about methane and nitrous oxide emissions, which may be important for their global warming potential, warns Hergoualc’h....

Humber Peatlands National Reserve, shot by Simon Huguet, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

A new global warming culprit: Dam drawdowns

EurekAlert: Washington State University researchers have documented an underappreciated suite of players in global warming: dams, the water reservoirs behind them, and surges of greenhouse gases as water levels go up and down.

Bridget Deemer, a doctoral student at Washington State University-Vancouver, measured dissolved gases in the water column of Lacamas Lake in Clark County and found methane emissions jumped 20-fold when the water level was drawn down. A fellow WSU-Vancouver student, Maria Glavin, sampled bubbles rising from the lake mud and measured a 36-fold increase in methane during a drawdown.

Methane is 25 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. And while dams and the water behind them cover only a small portion of the earth's surface, they harbor biological activity that can produce large amounts of greenhouse gases. There are also some 80,000 dams in the United States alone, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams. "Reservoirs have typically been looked at as a green energy source," says Deemer. "But their role in greenhouse gas emissions has been overlooked."

Deemer and Glavin's findings will be on display this week in a poster session at the national meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Portland. Their efforts are part of a larger attempt to appreciate the role of lakes, reservoirs and streams in releasing greenhouse gases. A study published last year in the journal Science conservatively estimated that the ability of terrestrial ecosystems to act as carbon sinks, storing greenhouse gases, could be one-fourth less than estimated once emissions from reservoirs are considered.

...The research could lead to different ways of managing drawdowns, he says, as emissions may be higher in summer months, when warmer temperatures and low oxygen conditions in bottom waters stimulate the microbial activity that produces greenhouse gases...

A 1905 photo of the Yakima Project - General View - Bumping Lake Dam - Washington

Danger from the deep: New climate threat as methane rises from cracks in Arctic ice

Steve Connor in the Independent (UK): A new source of methane – a greenhouse gas many times more powerful than carbon dioxide – has been identified by scientists flying over areas in the Arctic where the sea ice has melted.

The researchers found significant amounts of methane being released from the ocean into the atmosphere through cracks in the melting sea ice. They said the quantities could be large enough to affect the global climate. Previous observations have pointed to large methane plumes being released from the seabed in the relatively shallow sea off the northern coast of Siberia but the latest findings were made far away from land in the deep, open ocean where the surface is usually capped by ice.

Eric Kort of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that he and his colleagues were surprised to see methane levels rise so dramatically each time their research aircraft flew over cracks in the sea ice.

"When we flew over completely solid sea ice, we didn't see anything in terms of methane. But when we flew over areas were the sea ice had melted, or where there were cracks in the ice, we saw the methane levels increase," Dr Kort said. "We were surprised to see these enhanced methane levels at these high latitudes. Our observations really point to the ocean surface as the source, which was not what we had expected," he said.

"Other scientists had seen high concentrations of methane in the sea surface but nobody had expected to see it being released into the atmosphere in this way," he added....

Sea ice off the coast of Helsinki, shot by Pöllö, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

New perils seen to even modest warming

Douglas Fischer in the Daily Climate: Amounts of warming previously thought to be safe may instead trigger widespread melting of the world's ice sheets and other catastrophic impacts, scientists said Tuesday. Accelerating melting on the world's ice sheets and other new observations have scientists concluding that even a two-degree Celsius rise in temperatures – a benchmark long seen as safe in global climate talks and other emissions reductions scenarios – could lead to an 80-foot rise in sea levels.

"The dangerous level of global warming is less than what we thought a few years ago," said James Hansen, director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "It was natural to think that a few degrees wasn't so bad.... (But) a target of two degrees is actually a prescription for long-term disaster." Antarctica and Greenland are losing ice at a surprising clip, Hansen said, and methane hydrates – a potent source of greenhouse gas frozen beneath the seas – are starting to bubble up.

The key question for climatologists: How sensitive is the climate to increasing amounts of fossil fuel emissions. Last year humanity pumped almost 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, a half-billion tons more than 2009 and the largest jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, according to the Global Carbon Project.

"There's evidence that climate sensitivity may be quite a bit higher than what the models are suggesting," said Ken Caldiera, a senior scientist at Stanford University's Carnegie Institution for Science. Caldiera and Hansen spoke at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, one of the world's largest gatherings of geophysical researchers.

The problem, those researchers said, is the "hang time" for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Even if greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow, "climatically important" amounts of carbon dioxide and other compounds emitted today would continue to influence the atmosphere for thousands of years, Caldiera said. That kind of pressure, or "forcing," on the atmosphere could be devastating, he cautioned....

Iceland's Skaftafellsjökull glacier is melting, shot by Someone35, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Russia may lose 30% of permafrost by 2050

From Terra Daily via AFP, a story about loss of permafrost in Russia. No mention of the terrifying surge in methane released into the atmosphere, but that would also be involved. This is a good example of a negative effect that's almost unthinkable. According to the EPA in the United States, methane (CH₄) remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years and it's over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period and is emitted from a variety of natural and human-influenced sources. Human-influenced sources include landfills, natural gas and petroleum systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, stationary and mobile combustion, wastewater treatment, and certain industrial process. Now we add vanishing permafrost to the mix: Russia's vast permafrost areas may shrink by a third by the middle of the century due to global warming, endangering infrastructure in the Arctic zone, an emergencies ministry official said Friday.

"In the next 25 to 30 years, the area of permafrost in Russia may shrink by 10-18 percent," the head of the ministry's disaster monitoring department Andrei Bolov told the RIA Novosti news agency. "By the middle of the century, it can shrink by 15-30 percent, and the boundary of the permafrost may shift to the north-east by 150-200 kilometres," he said....

Permafrost in the high Arctic, shot by Mila Zinkova, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Ignored tundra fires could have impact on global warming

International Business Times: The amount of soil-bound carbon released to atmosphere in the 2007 Anaktuvuk River fire was enough to impact the global climate, according to UF ecologist Michelle Mack and other scientists. "The 2007 fire was the canary in the coal mine," Mack said. "In this wilderness, hundreds of miles away from the nearest city or source of pollution, we're seeing the effects of a warming atmosphere. It's a wakeup call that the Arctic carbon cycle could change rapidly, and we need to know what the consequences will be."

The fire covered more than 400 square miles on the North Slope of Alaska's Brooks Range and 2.1 million metric tons of carbon was released in the fire. It was twice the size the amount of greenhouse gases generated by Miami in one year. The fire not only inserted greenhouse gases into the atmosphere but it also consumed 30 percent up of the insulating layer of the organic matter that protects moss covered landscape. Arctic tundra stores large amounts of carbon in cool, wet soils insulated by permafrost, a layer of permanently frozen ground.

"When the permafrost warms, microbes will begin to decompose that organic matter and could release even more carbon that's been stored in the permafrost for hundreds or thousands of years into the atmosphere," Mack said. "If that huge stock of carbon is released, it could increase atmospheric carbon dioxide drastically."

The study revealed how isolated fires can have massive impact, said University of Alaska biology professor Terry Chapin. "When you think about the massive carbon stocks and massive area of tundra throughout the world, and its increasing vulnerability to fire as climate warms, it suggests that fire may become the dominant factor that governs the future carbon balance of this biome," Chapin said....

The village of Anaktuvuk Pass in 1969

Climate change threat to tropical forests 'greater than suspected'

John Vidal in the Guardian (UK): The chances of northern Europe facing a new ice age, or of catastrophic sea-level rises of almost four metres that swamp the planet over the next century, have been ruled out by leading scientists. But the risk of tropical forests succumbing to drought brought on by climate change as well as the acceleration of methane emissions from melting permafrost, is greater, according to the Met Office Hadley Centre, in its latest climate change review.

The government-run climatology centre also suggests that, by the latter half of this century, the Arctic could become largely ice-free in summer, given new evidence of a slightly faster rate of decline. The study examined international peer-reviewed science over the past three years, and involved remodelling data on a more powerful computer. The research will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's assessment in 2013.

"The evidence of the dangerous impact of climate change is clearer than ever," said Vicky Pope, head of Hadley's climate predictions programme. "New understanding of the science suggests the overall impact will be about the same [but] in some cases, like the risk of methane release from wetlands and permafrost melting, [we] now conclude that the risks are greater."…

Spruce Nature Trail about 0.1 km from the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center, near the end of the loop, shot by Walter Siegmund (Wsiegmund), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Leaking Siberian ice raises a tricky climate issue

Associated Press: Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — at a perilous rate.

Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.

…Climate change moves back to center-stage on Nov. 29 when governments meet in Cancun, Mexico, to try again to thrash out a course of counteractions. But U.N. officials hold out no hope the two weeks of talks will lead to a legally binding accord governing carbon emissions, seen is the key to averting what is feared might be a dramatic change in climate this century.

…[G]lobal warming is amplified in the polar regions. What feels like a modest temperature rise is enough to induce Greenland glaciers to retreat, Arctic sea ice to thin and contract in summer, and permafrost to thaw faster, both on land and under the seabed.

Yet awareness of methane leaks from permafrost is so new that it was not even mentioned in the seminal 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned of rising sea levels inundating coastal cities, dramatic shifts in rainfall disrupting agriculture and drinking water, the spread of diseases and the extinction of species.

"In my view, methane is a serious sleeper out there that can pull us over the hump," said Robert Corell, an eminent U.S. climate change researcher and Arctic specialist. Corell, speaking by telephone from a conference in Miami, said he and other U.S. scientists are pushing Washington to deploy satellites to gather more information on methane leaks….

Sunset in Kuznetsk Alatau, South Siberia, shot by Dmitry A. Mottl, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license