The mindless fearmongers of the global warming cult are telling us that methane from melting permafrost due to global warming is going to kill us all.
Ivan collected these newspaper accounts of melting permafrost going back more than 130 years.
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1880:
“The Tundras or wastes along the border of the Arctic Ocean are of the dreariest description, covered with ice and snow in winter, and in summer metamorphosed into mosquito-haunted marshes.”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/95042351 -
1891:
“Partly in this region are the vast tundra, or great shaking, quivering bogs, which cover an immense area of the north of Siberia. They are estimated by some authorities as covering 1,000,000 square miles, but that is merely an estimate. The north of this tundra can never be anything else but a bog ; regarding the southern tundra the Russians differ. Some are of opinion that they are like the northern, and can never be anything else but desolate bogs; others think they can be drained, reclaimed, and turned into first class pasture land, or even used for crops.”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/65531499 -
1896:
“On the maps the tundra has a bad name. It is called the ” region of treeless swamp.” It is uninhabited ; and for eight months out of the twelve it is covered with snow.”
“The tundra was, in fact, a moor, with here and there a large flat bog and abundant lakes.”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/20444537 -
1899:
“In winter the Tundra is, of course, one vast frozen sheet. In the brief summer it is swampy, steamier and swarming with mosquitoes”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/52560339 -
1901:
“To the north, the Tundra, stretching inland from the Arctic Sea, swampy and treeless, ranging from 150 to 400 miles in width.”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/55672719 -
1902:
“The “tundras” are vast areas of swamp and marsh lands hardened by frost and covered with snow in winter, but in the short summer teeming with vegetation and swarming with wild birds,”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/68874793 -
1906:
“Then comes the hot sun, and the low, wide tundras along the coast are turned into great fresh water lakes”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/82681836 -
1907:
“There is in the north the half-frozen Tundra.”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/5052392 -
“arriving just after the ice melts on the largest swamp in the world called the Tundra, extending over 2,000 miles east and west.”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/12678897 -
1910:
“Another danger that threatens them is that they may be delayed over-long on the way, so that summer overtakes them, in which case they will run grave risk of being engufed, together with their machines, in the thawing tundra.”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/66386801
So the UN at Doha COP18 is stirring up alarm about thawing of Siberian permafrost. But there are scientists in Siberia monitoring the situation. What do they say?
“Indeed above at the surface it has gotten warmer, but that’s just part of a normal cycle. The permafrost is rock hard, And that is how it is going to stay. There’s no talk of thawing.” Michali Grigoryev
http://notrickszone.com/2012/11/19/russian-arctic-scientist-permafrost-changes-due-to-natural-factors-its-going-to-be-colder/
“It seems that the permafrost should be melting if the temperature is rising. However, many areas are witnessing the opposite. The average annual temperature is getting higher, but the permafrost remains and has even started to spread. Why? An important factor is the snow cover. Global warming reduces it, therefore making the heat insulator for the permafrost thinner. Then even weak frosts are enough to freeze the ground deeper below the surface.”
Nikolai Osokin is a glaciologist at the Institute of Geography, the Russian Academy of Sciences.
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20070323/62485608.html
“The Russian Academy of Sciences has found that the annual temperature of soils (with seasonable variations) has been remaining stable despite the increased average annual air temperature caused by climate change. If anything, the depth of seasonal melting has decreased slightly.”
“This is just another scare story . . . This ecological structure is balanced and is not about to harm people with gas discharges.”
Vladimir Melnikov is the director of the world’s only Institute of the Earth’s Cryosphere. The Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute is located in the Siberian city of Tyumen and investigates the ways in which ground water becomes ice and permafrost.
“The boundaries of the Russian permafrost zone remain virtually unchanged. At the same time, the permafrost is several hundred meters deep. For methane, other gases and hydrates to escape to the surface, it would have to melt at tremendous depths, which is impossible.”
Yuri Izrael, director of the Institute of Climatology and Ecology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20050822/41201605-print.html
And the Russians are the most vocal about this nonsense. Pretty awesome, I’d say.
Methane isn’t a ghg. Or if it is, then the green house gas theory doesn’t work the way the alarmists have been selling it to work.
Because the Saturn moon Titan has a thick blanket of methane in it’s atmosphere, but the same surface temperature as it’s nearest neighbor, Hyperion.
Hyperion has no atmosphere, greenhouse gas or otherwise.
If methane is a ghg, then there’s no problem anyway. Apparently, CH4 is roughly 23x more potent than CO2 (according to several literatures) and, there being just 1700 parts per BILLION in the atmosphere and levelling off:
2006: http://www.imk-ifu.kit.edu/img/VT_CapePoint_CH4_Trends_PIC_klein.jpg
Doing the math proves it. Atmospheric CH4 represents only 42ppm CO2, if such a thing can be equated.
The Russians, more than most, recognize a grab for power and wealth, which is exactly what the whole CAGW is about.