[LINK] o/t Post-Copenhagen

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Ivan writes,

> Siberia - which is to become the new wheat bowl of the world once
> the permafrost melts ..


But drying out Siberia, apparently, would be *catastrophic* for the world?

For eg, "Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide"


 http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/node/8299

Stealthily-rising temperature is taking its toll, now, on Siberia's 
wetlands. They lay frozen for millennia, until now. 

(And) what's happening in Siberia has serious ecological consequences. 

For, buried beneath the permanently frozen subsoil of the western 
Siberian lowland are billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse 
gas. 

Scientists, for long, have considered the vast frozen peat bogs (wet 
spongy ground of decomposing vegetation) in Siberia a good carbon sink. 

It is estimated that about 70 billion tonnes of methane gas — a quarter 
of the world's entire methane reserves — is locked up beneath the western 
Siberian soil. 

But carbon sink it no longer is. 

A team of Russian scientists on an expedition have recently discovered 
that this vast expanse of frozen land is slowly turning wet and soggy. 

They spotted a mass of shallow lakes — many of them a kilometre across. 

They fear the methane will bubble out of the peat land, if the ice were 
to melt. Such release will drastically add to the already-burgeoning 
atmospheric methane load, hastening the global warming process. 

They dub the phenomenon they studied as an "ecological landslide'. 

It seems to have commenced three to four years ago. 

The western Siberian lowlands cover more than one million square 
kilometres — the size of France and Germany combined. There are more than 
10,000 peat bogs filled with decaying plant material, including sphagnum 
moss, lichen and tree trunks. Their depth ranges from less than 1 metre 
to 10 metres. For almost 11,000 years, a chilly climate ensured the 
decaying material never fully decomposed. 

Now, rising temperature is dramatically changing things. 

If only one-fourth of methane sequestered in this soil were to belch out, 
it would be catastrophic. 

Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

Typically, there are attempts to portray what is happening in Western 
Siberia as ‘natural'. This is far from true. There is evidence Siberia 
has warmed faster than any place in the world; average temperature here 
has gone up by about 3 degrees Celsius in the last 40 years due to 
climate change associated with anthropogenic activities. 

Cheers, IT

Stephen



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