Melting Siberian permafrost is the slow motion Time bomb of climate change.
This is a Greenpeace film, which raisese hackles for some – but no matter how you feel about Greenpeace, the message in this video is an important one, and the pictures from a remote part of the planet deserve to be seen and absorbed.
Well, it’s melting, and it’s going to get warmer even if we halted all CO2 emissions now… so it will continue to melt.
We appear to have passed a tipping point.
I know scientists are trying to collect data to get their arms around this. But it seems a little late, yes?
We’re still near the stage where the kitchen curtains are on fire, and it’s trying to spread… is that the time when we say, “well, the house is done for, it’s too late, don’t change anything?” I suppose some would say yes, but many of us would rather get a chance to try to stop the spread of the fire, rather than burn alive. Because, unfortunately, we don’t have a way out of this house.
Yes, there is already some more warming cooked in, via our current emissions and those for the past 30 years or so. 1C-1.6C The warming to this point is from emissions about 30 years ago, delayed by the thermal inertia of the oceans. But that shouldn’t be taken to mean we should do nothing in terms of mitigation. Doing nothing will ensure much more warming later.
I have the wrong numbers in my last comment. 1C-1.6C more warming is more like the low end of estimates for a doubling of CO2 concentration from pre industrial. I believe 0.6C is closer to what we have already commited to with present emissions. I’m trying to find it in my notes.