Thawing permafrost may speed global warming: study
WASHINGTON — Global warming could cause up to 60 percent of the world’s permafrost to thaw by 2200 and release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere that would further speed up climate change, a study released Wednesday warned.
Using a series of projections based on UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado estimated that if global warming continues even at a moderate pace, a third of the earth’s permafrost will be gone by 2200.
If the planet warms at a faster pace, the world could see 59 percent of the permanently frozen underground layer of earth thaw out, and as that happens, organic matter that has been trapped in the permafrost for tens of millennia will begin to decay, releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
The NSIDC scientists then used a model to predict how much carbon the thawing permafrost would release and came up with the staggering figure of 190 gigatons by 2200
“That’s the equivalent of half the amount of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age. That’s a lot of carbon,” NSIDC scientist Kevin Schaefer, the lead author of the study, told AFP.
A gigaton is one billion tons, so 190 gigatons is the equivalent of around a billion tons of carbon entering the atmosphere each year between now and 2200.?
and what’s really scary….
…there are people reading that and wetting their pants
Well, models of crap the modelers don’t understand can be really, really scary!! A gigaton is one billion tons!!!!! See! Very scary!
2200? These incompetent guys can’t even get snow predictions right for 5 years ahead. They want me to listen to their 189 year prediction?
Somebody please light a match and throw it on the ground. If the Earth doesn’t go up in a ball of fire I think we’ll be safe for the next 199 years or so.
CRAP! theres NO greenhouse effect anyway (it is totaly unphysical in the thermodynamics of the atmosphere) so it wont have ANY affect if it happens.
Before we jump to conclusions about permafrost CO2-climate interactions, we need to answer a simple question: Is there empirical evidence (not based on model virtual realities!) that CO2 can affect climate. I’m a physical scientists and I have looked deeply into the actual measured data of CO2 and global temperatures over the past 65 million years. There is literally no experimental evidence to support the theory that CO2 has been controlling climate thought any period of the Earth’s history. The data show either a very poor correlation between CO2 and temperature (i.e. over the past 65M years) or if the correlation is decent (with high-resolution data) as in the case of the Antarctica ice-core series, the CO2 follows the temperature with a lag of 500 to 4,000 years throughout the entire record indicating that, in fact, temperature changes have been driving CO2 variations over the past 800K years, not the other way around! Even over the past 110 years, the CO2-temperature correlation is inconsistent – going from a negative to positive to neutral. There has been zero warming over the past 10 years and no statistically significant warming over the past 15 years despite the continued increase of so-called ‘greenhouse gases’ over this period.
I challenge any scientist to provide me with unambiguous empirical evidence that CO2 has bee a driver of global climate during any period of Earth’s history. I’m prepared to pay $10,000 to such a scientists if the data withstand a rigorous scrutiny.
A paper will be published later this year that proves using standard physical theory that the ‘greenhouse effect’ (never mind the wrong term) is not a radiative phenomenon, but is caused by an entirely different mechanism! That’s right – there has been a 180-year long misconception in science about the physical nature of the so-called ‘greenhouse effect’ … Stay tuned … 🙂