ABC News: Climate Change No Longer a Theory, It's Happening

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Scientists have uncovered what appears to be a further dramatic increase in the leakage of methane gas that is seeping from the Arctic seabed.

Methane is about 20 times more potent than CO2 in trapping solar heat.

The findings come from measurements of carbon fluxes around the north of Russia, led by Igor Semiletov from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

"Methane release from the East Siberian Shelf is underway and it looks stronger than it was supposed [to be]," he said.

Professor Semiletov has been studying methane seepage in the region for the last few decades, and leads the International Siberian Shelf Study (ISSS), which has launched multiple expeditions to the Arctic Ocean.

The preliminary findings of ISSS 2009 are now being prepared for publication, he told BBC News.

Methane seepage recorded last summer was already the highest ever measured in the Arctic Ocean.

High seepage

Acting as a giant frozen depository of carbon such as CO2 and methane (often stored as compacted solid gas hydrates), Siberia's shallow shelf areas are increasingly subjected to warming and are now giving up greater amounts of methane to the sea and to the atmosphere than recorded in the past.

This undersea permafrost was until recently considered to be stable.

But now scientists think the release of such a powerful greenhouse gas may accelerate global warming.

Higher concentrations of atmospheric methane are contributing to global temperature rise; this in turn is projected to cause further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane in a feedback loop.

A worst-case scenario is one where the feedback passes a tipping point and billions of tonnes of methane are released suddenly, as has occurred at least once in the Earth's past.

Such sudden releases have been linked to rapid increases in global temperatures and could have been a factor in the mass extinction of species.

According to a report by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the springtime air temperature across the region in the period 2000-2007 was an average of 4C higher than during 1970-1999.

That is the fastest temperature rise on the planet, claims the university.

The recent thaw over the last decade means that some of the large reserve of carbon from organic material such as dead animals and plants in sediments is now being released into the sea and into our atmosphere.

Trapped below that is the methane hydrate now warming and leaking through holes in the defrosting sediments.

Previously it was thought much of this gas was absorbed into the sea.

But according to a recent report that Professor Semiletov and his team compiled for the environmental group WWF, the shallow depth of arctic shelves means that methane is reaching the atmosphere without reacting to become CO2 dissolved in the ocean.

Professor Semiletov's fellow researcher aboard the Russian icebreaker that carries the ISSS team each year is Professor Orjan Gustafsson from Stockholm University in Sweden.

He said that methane measured in the atmosphere around the region is 100 times higher than normal background levels, and in some cases 1,000 times higher.

'No alarm'

Despite the high readings, Professor Gustafsson said that so far there was no cause for alarm, and stressed that further studies were still necessary to determine the exact cause of the methane seepage.

"It is important now to understand how fast it is being released and how much is being released," he said.

However, there is a real fear that global warming may cause Siberia's subsea permafrost to thaw.

Some estimates put the amount of carbon trapped in shelf permafrost at 1,600 billion tonnes - roughly twice as much carbon as in the atmosphere now.

The release of this once captive carbon from destabilised ocean sediments and permafrost would have catastrophic effect on our climate and life on Earth, warn the scientists.

So far, global warming has been limited to a rise of around 0.75C since the end of the 19th century. This sounds like a small change, but the scientific evidence suggests it is already leading to a range of impacts around the world. As we'll explore in future questions, these impacts includes changes to sea level, rainfall patterns, ecosystems and some kinds of extreme weather.

It's worth noting that the temperature rise observed to date isn't spread evenly around the planet. As can be seen clearly in maps of temperature change (such as those created by Nasa), the increase has been particularly steep in the Arctic, where the climate system is more sensitive to warming than most of the rest of the world, partly due to feedback loops in the local climate that amplify the warming.

More importantly, however, is that the temperature rise observed so far is not the chief cause of concern. More worrying is the significantly larger temperature rise (and associated changes in rainfall, snowfall, sea level and other phenomena) that scientists expect the world to experience in the coming decades and centuries.

This is nothing but sensationalist reporting. The scientists behind the research are theorising that these things are caused by global warming.

Who a referring to? Me or the original post on the thread?

I have notice that it's been a mild winter this year. Today's the first day since winter started that the temperature in my area is actually below 15 degrees Farenheit. And on New Year's Eve the high was around 70. Strange for Indiana.

...And they were reporting record cold a month ago...

Maybe someday Science will one day prove that the Universe is a living thing, it's inhabitant's are little galaxies of which it can easily live with or without. The fact that each planet is a small part of this organism we call the universe, seems to baffle the ego of science. Fact is, the earth is only a very small part of this universe. There is "Scientific" data, as well as actual facts that exist to prove itself beyond question that the earth has changed many times in the past. To conclude it has ever stopped, or expect it to stop changing, is not very "scientific".

This is the Real Deal. Since Al Gore became the not so humble man he once was. This period of time is referring to pre-presidential-failure, and coincidental accompanying announcements of the second largest catastrophe in modern human history (the first being the Y2K dilemma).

Poor Al was no longer willing nor capable of Stopping the warming of the globe. A globe of which for 1000's of years had been Melting. For a very long time he kept this his little secret and hobby. Now however, he has given up all hope on the human race since they did not elect him as it's leader.

Enter, Global Warming, the typical childish reaction of most politicians (I'll Show You). So...In order to prevent the Global Warming that he once had under control in a variety of mysterious ways. Such as the glaciers stopped receding, we all had normal weather, volcano's were all dormant, shorelines didn't change and many other things of coincidence prior to global warming.

But Wait...That's Not ALL. The only thing the human race has to do is buy GE products. Then the human race will have the shared power that he once so humbly had taken on as a weekend job. This is the power to alter the natural coarse of quantum universe dynamics the human race has only begun to consider, much less understand. The fact that he has a Major interest in this particular company is just another coincidence.

The earth as we know it, was not always as it is. The earth as we know it, will not always be. The total life of planet earth, is not even a second in regards of universal time. Yes, the universe is changing, which is the only proof of life as we know it. Therefore, it is safe to say,(Scientifically) the universe has lived without, can and will live without humans again. It's all as cyclic as our own weather, in it's own time, it's futility in motion.

Accept history as a memory
Remember the present as a gift
Respect time, and it will accept you

None of this lofty rhetoric (though I agree with much of it) seems to be dealing with what appears to be the fundamental thrust of this thread.


That is....Is global warming occuring or isn't it?


Nobody, least of all myself, said anything about anthropogenic causes for GW. That topic is for another thread and probably one in PPR.

Okay, why does one put ice in a drink on a hot day...


Because as the ice melts it cools the drink, the same thing will happen as iceberg's melt climate change is natural. There have been warm periods followed by ice ages before humans existed.

As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.

Models predict that Earth will warm between 2 and 6 degrees Celsius in the next century. When global warming has happened at various times in the past two million years, it has taken the planet about 5,000 years to warm 5 degrees. The predicted rate of warming for the next century is at least 20 times faster. This rate of change is extremely unusual.

Source: Nasa Earth Observatory

There is more than one factor that affects temperature on Earth, it isn't completely reliant on CO^2. A more logical response to the situation (if you think CO^2 is the culprit) would be to work on planting trees to restore the rainforests.