permafrost

arctic sea ice/shutterstock

Right now, we’re on a trend of losing roughly 300 billion tons of ice per year from the Arctic ice cap. Once we reach the point of regular Blue Arctic events, we won’t be able to lose that much ice, net, in a given year.[read more]

Thawing permafrost

Recent research from a team of Russian scientists reports that a 1.5°C rise in global temperature is enough to melt permafrost in Siberia and throughout the Arctic.[read more]

I’ve long been a proponent of the carbon budget way of viewing our climate change predicament. By focusing on the total amount of CO2 (or CO2 equivalent other greenhouse gases) we can emit from this point forward, I think it greatly simplifies the “feeds and speeds” without introducing any inaccuracies or openings for misunderstanding...[read more]

Jamais Cascio has made it official… “there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.” Scientists who...[read more]

Most of you have probably seen the news already that a recent study can’t explain all the warming that we know happened in the geologic past purely from atmospheric CO2 emissions. What’s that–there’s Something Else that could be causing warming besides CO2??? Is it time to raid the palatial headquarters of the IPCC and Al Gore’s home...[read more]

There’s an interesting study in Nature regarding the climate impact of defrosting and then greening the (still, for now) Arctic permafrost. Arctic thaw could prompt huge release of carbon dioxide: Scientists have long debated how the global climate might be affected by thawing of the Arctic’s permanently frozen soils, known as...[read more]

Three items that I highly recommend to all the TCOE faithful: First is Mark Lynas’ article, Climate chaos is inevitable. We can only avert oblivion (emphasis added): Sometimes we need to think the unthinkable, particularly when dealing with a problem as dangerous as climate change - there is no room for dogma when considering the...[read more]

Probably the biggest, nastiest monster under my bed for some time has been the possibility of a massive methane release from the Arctic region kicking global warming into warp speed. To people who don’t follow this stuff as obsessively as I do, this probably sounds like I’ve suddenly enlisted in the tinfoil hat brigade. Let me explain...[read more]

What is the point of no return for the climate — the level of CO2 concentrations beyond which catastrophic outcomes are virtually unstoppable? No one knows for sure, but my vote goes for the point at which we start to lose a substantial fraction of the tundra’s carbon to the atmosphere — substantial being 0.1% per year! As we saw in...[read more]

[This three parter will review the tundra-climate connection, then look at some preliminary modeling of the tundra in a warmed world, and end with some new research.] The tundra is probably the single most important amplifying carbon-cycle feedback. None of the IPCC’s climate models, however, include carbon emissions from a defrosting...[read more]

The new monthly data from NOAA’s National Climactic Data Center agrees with the NASA data I blogged on a few days ago: The globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was the fifteenth warmest on record for February, the sixteenth warmest for boreal winter (December-February), and the January-February year-to-date...[read more]