Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air
washingtonpost.com
Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air
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Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air
#2Worth pointing out that this article is over 3 months old.
Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air
#3I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life.
"Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.
Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air
#4I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life. "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.
AFAIK the IPCC ignored most of the feedbacks in their last assessment.
https://thinkprogress.org/ipccs-planned-obsolescence-fifth-a...
Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air
#5[deleted]
Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air
#6"The study, based on aircraft measurements of carbon dioxide and methane and tower measurements from Barrow, Alaska, found that from 2012 through 2014, the state emitted the equivalent of 220 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere from biological sources (the figure excludes fossil fuel burning and wildfires).
That’s an amount comparable to all the emissions from the U.S. commercial sector in a single year."
Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air
#7I don't think this is specific to Alaska - there's something similar going on in Siberia and other places where melting permafrost has the potential to do serious damage.
There are even books (and soon at least one movie) on how restoring wooly mammoth populations can save us.
- http://www.npr.org/2017/07/05/534768716/woolly-breathes-new-...
- https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050308/woolly-ben-mezri...
Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air
#8I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life. "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.
It's probably safer to assume that we're pretty much screwed at keeping the status quo and we need to start researching ways for humanity to survive the resulting changes. Of course, we should still keep ongoing efforts to curb and eventually eliminate the emission of greenhouse gases in effect, but we're past the point of pretending the worst case isn't possible.
Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air
#9I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life. "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.
It was never true that human industry was the main cause of co2 release into the atmosphere.
Which is one of the reasons to doubt that all those climate accords will have any influence on global warming at all.
> "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.
If you increase the input into self-reinforcing feedback loop that is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Not that at that point it makes a large difference, but it certainly makes some difference.
Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate.
Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air
#10I don't think this is specific to Alaska - there's something similar going on in Siberia and other places where melting permafrost has the potential to do serious damage. There are even books (and soon at least one movie) on how restoring wooly mammoth populations can save us. - http://www.npr.org/2017/07/05/534768716/woolly-breathes-new-... - https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050308/woolly-ben-mezri...
Correct, and included in the article:
Alaska is only one area of the Arctic where permafrost
soils could be emitting carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. Permafrost regions in Canada and Siberia are
even vaster. But the new study’s lessons could also apply
to those areas, researchers say.