Ticking Time Bomb by John Atcheson (Most Important)
http://www.GlobalWarming.net
Ticking Time Bomb
by John Atcheson
"We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse,
where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden."
Bill McKibben
The Arctic Council's recent report on the effects of global warming in the
far north paints a grim picture: global floods, extinction of polar bears and
other marine mammals, collapsed fisheries. But it ignored a ticking time bomb
buried in the Arctic tundra.
There are enormous quantities of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses
trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern muds and at the bottom of the
seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is
in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as
carbon dioxide.
Now here's the scary part. A temperature increase of merely a few degrees
would cause these gases to volatilize and "burp" into the atmosphere, which would
further raise temperatures, which would release yet more methane, heating the
Earth and seas further, and so on. There's 400 gigatons of methane locked in
the frozen arctic tundra - enough to start this chain reaction - and the kind
of warming the Arctic Council predicts is sufficient to melt the clathrates
and release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Once triggered, this cycle could result in runaway global warming the likes
of which even the most pessimistic doomsayers aren't talking about.
An apocalyptic fantasy concocted by hysterical environmentalists?
Unfortunately, no. Strong geologic evidence suggests something similar has happened at
least twice before.
The most recent of these catastrophes occurred about 55 million years ago in
what geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when methane
burps caused rapid warming and massive die-offs, disrupting the climate for
more than 100,000 years.
The granddaddy of these catastrophes occurred 251 million years ago, at the
end of the Permian period, when a series of methane burps came close to wiping
out all life on Earth.
More than 94 percent of the marine species present in the fossil record
disappeared suddenly as oxygen levels plummeted and life teetered on the verge of
extinction. Over the ensuing 500,000 years, a few species struggled to gain a
foothold in the hostile environment. It took 20 million to 30 million years for
even rudimentary coral reefs to re-establish themselves and for forests to
regrow. In some areas, it took more than 100 million years for ecosystems to
reach their former healthy diversity.
Geologist Michael J. Benton lays out the scientific evidence for this epochal
tragedy in a recent book, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction
of All Time. As with the PETM, greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide from
increased volcanic activity, warmed the earth and seas enough to release
massive amounts of methane from these sensitive clathrates, setting off a runaway
greenhouse effect.
The cause of all this havoc?
In both cases, a temperature increase of about 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit, about
the upper range for the average global increase today's models predict can be
expected from burning fossil fuels by 2100. But these models could be the
tail wagging the dog since they don't add in the effect of burps from warming gas
hydrates. Worse, as the Arctic Council found, the highest temperature
increases from human greenhouse gas emissions will occur in the arctic regions - an
area rich in these unstable clathrates.
If we trigger this runaway release of methane, there's no turning back. No
do-overs. Once it starts, it's likely to play out all the way.
Humans appear to be capable of emitting carbon dioxide in quantities
comparable to the volcanic activity that started these chain reactions. According to
the U.S. Geological Survey, burning fossil fuels releases more than 150 times
the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by volcanoes - the equivalent of nearly
17,000 additional volcanoes the size of Hawaii's Kilauea.
And that is the time bomb the Arctic Council ignored.
How likely is it that humans will cause methane burps by burning fossil
fuels? No one knows. But it is somewhere between possible and likely at this point,
and it becomes more likely with each passing year that we fail to act.
So forget rising sea levels, melting ice caps, more intense storms, more
floods, destruction of habitats and the extinction of polar bears. Forget warnings
that global warming might turn some of the world's major agricultural areas
into deserts and increase the range of tropical diseases, even though this is
the stuff we're pretty sure will happen.
Instead, let's just get with the Bush administration's policy of pre-emption.
We can't afford to have the first sign of a failed energy policy be the mass
extinction of life on Earth. We have to act now.
John Atcheson, a geologist, has held a variety of policy positions in several
federal government agencies.
Source: http://tinyurl.com/6pla3
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