Dec. 20, 2005 - 17:21 MST

MAKES ONE WONDER

Things might be worse than we laymen suspected according to an article by Jim Erickson of the Rocky Mountain News in an article in today's paper. In full:

WARMING COULD THAW PERMAFROST

Boulder researchers see damaging trend in climate simulation

"Up to 90 percent of the topmost layer of the Northern Hemisphere's permafrost could thaw by 2100 according to a new climate simulation from Boulder researchers."

"The meltdown will exacerbate problems already occuring in Alaska, Canada, Russia and elsewhere, where soil collapse has damaged buildings and buckled highways.

In addition, the thawing soils could release large amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas, adding to climate warming blamed largely on the burning of fossil fuels."

"There's a lot of carbon stored in the soil," said David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and lead author of the report in Geophysical Research Letters."

"If the permafrost does thaw, as our model predicts, it could have a major influence on climate."

"Andrew Slater, of the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center, was co-author of the study, which used advanced computer-based climate simulations."

"About one-quarter of the Northern Hemisphere's land surface contains permanently frozen soil called permafrost."

"On top of the perennially frozen soil is an "active layer" that thaws in the summer and refreezes in the winter."

"The NCAR simulation suggests the active layer will deepen significantly if fossil fuel emissions continue to rise sharply."

"Currently, the depth of the active layer varies considerably from palce to place. It is 10 to 18 inches deep in northernmost Alaska and up to 10 feet deep in Fairbanks, a few hundred miles to the south, said U.S. Geological Survey expert Gary Clow."

"Under a high-emissions scenario, the NCAR study indicates that up to 90- percent of the top 10 feet of frozen soil could thaw over vast portions of the far north by 2100, Lawrence said."

"The region that contains permanently frozen soil within 10 feet of the surface could shrink 3.6 million square miles, an aea the size of the United States."

"That would be a phenomenal amount of thawing up there, and it would radically change the landscape," Clow said."

"Those of us who work in the permafrost community are already seeing it happen, and I don't think any of us have any trouble with model projections that say that trend is going to continue."

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Seems as it is true, from various sources comes information pointing to the fact. Shrinking ice in Antarctica, hole in the ozone layer expanding, most everything seems to be pointing in the same direction. These guys aren't economists, they are scientists. (somewhat of a joke here, "Any two economists who meet and talk will have several different conflicting opinions on any given subject"), sure ticks my son-in-law off when I come up with that comment, especially when he has to agree. I choose to feel the scientists have valid reasons for their decisions.

Of course by 2100 Bush will have been out of office for a number of years. As well he is waging a preemptive war based on heh, "faulty intellgence" about WMD and all that stuff. But he chooses not to believe what science is trying to tell him. Or perhaps he fears that his industrialist friends might lose money if we bought into Kyoto.

All this pandemonium going on now keeps us off balance and tends to MAKE ONE WONDER . . . . . . . . . . .

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