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