Dangerous Melting Of The Permafrost Detected
This is a big “uh oh” event – Dangerous melting of the permafrost layers detected.
The permafrost layer extends around the world, trapping carbon-rich organic matter in frozen soils. When the permafrost melts, this carbon is released directly into the atmosphere, including enormous quantities of an even more dangerous greenhouse gas, methane.
As readers may have come to expect, past estimates on how fast the permafrost layer is melting are clearly wrong – this is now happening much faster then expected. However, I’m not at all surprised given the latest news on just how warm the Arctic has become.
More than twice the carbon found in the atmosphere lies frozen in the permafrost. If released, this would raise global temperatures significantly. It’s a disturbing trend. In one test site, the ground temperatures had risen by 10 degrees in just five years. Thousands of miles away, two other test sites didn’t even freeze at all. Right now, they’re making the assumption that freeze-up didn’t happen in large sections of Alaska’s interior.
And that’s bad news. It’s been ignored on many fronts, especially within the political landscape of the United States, but not everyone has been silent on this issue. A catastrophic methane release has been predicted as both “possible” and “likely” and even a “certainty” by some scientists, but this does not have wide-spread support. With this new data, there will need to be a fast reassessment of whether or not the world will experience this disaster again – because it happened at least one time before in the historical record.
With the world warming up at a break-neck pace, I believe that this is not only possible, but actually likely to happen – and far sooner then most estimates have provided. I do not agree with the constant date setting of what to expect in the year 2100 for example, it’s pretty clear already that these future dates are all going to be woefully incorrect with regards to all sorts of climate related events, temperatures and effects. Many of these are actually happening right now, causing science to reassess their estimates and timelines. The permafrost is one such example, this type of melt was not “expected” until around the year 2100. But it’s 2019… nearly 80 years sooner.
We are in a VERY dangerous time that is still going broadly unrecognized, due in part to the Trump Administration and Trump’s personal “agenda” to undue every possible climate mitigation effort he possibly can. Donald Trump’s new pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency told lawmakers on Wednesday he does not believe climate change is a major crisis, and would continue to undo Obama-era emission limits if confirmed.
It’s dead obvious that the United States has lost its mind – and its leadership on … well, everything, and certainly on fighting the good fight on climate change.
Malcom Light has issued a warning of global extinction in just 18 – 34 months, in part because of the looming methane threat. This too is being widely ignored despite coming from an actual scientist. My feeling is that we should better start paying attention to the more strident doomer voices that have studied this issue, because it’s already clear that many scientific bodies are pretty far behind the reality curve when it comes to how fast, how bad and how much the planet is warming up.
