EGAD

Climate Climax

A couple of weeks ago I pointed out a troubling story about changing current and temperature patterns in the Pacific, which have the potential to seriously disrupt marine life there. And I've brought up the spectre of thermohaline collapse on a couple of occasions. But here's a new potential tipping-point phenomenon that has the potential to get really terrifying in a real hurry.

Reported here by the BBC and elsewhere, Siberia is melting. Sometime in the last five years, an expanse of frozen peat the size of western Europe has abruptly turned into a very much thawed bog. Now that biology can get back to what it was doing there before the last Ice Age put it on hold, said ex-tundra is fixing to exhale millions of cubic kilometers of methane into the atmosphere.

Methane is an even more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So by itself, that's enough to force a bump up in the severity of climate change predictions. However, models now have to be adjusted; the global Arctic contains a whole lot of frozen tundra. If the Siberian thaw is caused by greenhouse warming (as is probable), then we could be looking at a positive feedback loop that's just been triggered. Now that we've raised the temperature to some critical level, the air will thaw more and more tundra, which will release huge amounts of trapped carbon and lead in turn to even more warming. And if that cycle has already started, there's absolutely nothing we Homo Sapiens can do about it.

So maybe moving to Minnesota wasn't such a bad move for me, after all.