Will Climate Wake Up Call Be Answered?

August 15, 2005 — By Center for Environmental Economic Development

Mounting evidence ranging from Siberia to Alaska and reports by geoscientists and nomadic herdsman confirm that land frozen for thousands of years has begun to thaw. Currently in western Siberia, frozen peat bogs cover an area the size of France and Germany combined and contain billions of tons of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The western Siberian sub-arctic region has begun to melt, according to researchers Sergei Kirpotin of Tomsk State University and Judtih Marquand of the University of Oxford, who recently returned from this little visited region (New Scientist 08/11/05). In 2001 scientists estimated that global mean temperatures could increase by 1.4 C to 5.8 C (2.5 F to 10 F) by the end of the century (http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/IPCC). This does not take into account the release of greenhouse gases from melting peat bogs.

Tero Mustonen, an arctic climate researcher and director of the organization Snow Change based in Finland, expressed "concern and alarm" when informed of reports of melting permafrost in Western Siberia. "This is consistent with Northeastern Siberia," Mustonen added, "where many reindeer herders in the communities of Nutendli and Andrejuskino have reported 'ground sinking' and lakes disappearing causing fishing and reindeer herding to suffer."

Interior Alaska's permafrost has warmed in some places to the highest level since the ice age ended 10,000 years ago and is very close to the point when it starts to thaw, according to Vladimir Romanovsky, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Anchorage Daily News 08/14/05).

Release of the greenhouse gases stored in places such as peat bogs is one of five potential mechanisms for abrupt climate change (www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/POSTpn245.PDF) which also include the disruption of the currents in the Atlantic Ocean dramatized in the film Day After Tomorrow.

Though climate change develops over decades — not days or weeks or a few years, as depicted by Hollywood — once set in motion (as it already has) climate change is difficult to control or offset, much less reverse.

Stanford Professor Stephen H. Schneider called these latest reports "the latest of a few hundred wake up calls that don't seem to stir the slumbering political establishment in the United States, though whether this is a tiny ring or a clarion call remains to be determined."

Schneider observed that "increased intensity of hurricanes, many more damaging heat waves, rapidly waning mountain glaciers, thinning Arctic sea ice and the warmest few decades in thousands of years should have been wake up calls enough! How many oil company executives and members of Congress has that awakened from their climate change policy slumbers?"

Delegations from across the Circumpolar North will gather in Anchorage, Alaska, September 28-30, for a large international gathering devoted to local and indigenous observations of climate change. They will seek to find answers to the urgent threat of human induced climate change caused by the industrial societies (for more information see www.snowchange.org).

This July, the United States, China and four other countries signed the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development. For this agreement to be a step in the right direction, meaningful and binding emission reduction targets need to replace the agreement's voluntary guidelines, notes Center for Environmental Economic Development Executive Director Daniel Ihara (www.ceedweb.org).

Between November 28 and December 9, international climate treaty meetings will be held in Montreal (http://unfccc.int/meetings/cop_11/items/3394.php). "The United States and China in particular," Ihara added, "should join with the rest of the world and shoulder their major global responsibilities. Will our leaders slumber on while the hope for an environmentally sustainable future slips away from us?"

Contact
Daniel Ihara, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Center for Environmental Economic Development (CEED)
(707) 822-8347
ceed@humboldt1.com
www.ceedweb.org