Some Bad News on Climate Change

In spite of what you continue to hear from the Climate Liars and Obtuse Deniers (CLODStm for short) evidence continues to mount that we are at serious risk and not just in some far flung future. Something we have been warned about is the possibility of reaching irreversible thresholds where positive feedback from global warning triggers events that will hasten the global rise in temperature. One of the most significant positive feedback thresholds exists within the vast expanse of permafrost in the Northern parts of the globe. Permafrost locks up huge amounts of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas. As long as the permafrost remains frozen this methane is safely sequestered but if we warm the globe enough we will reach a threshold where the permafrost begins to melt and release its methane. This will not be a good thing and it appears from a recent report  that hard evidence is showing that permafrost is, in fact, melting.
From Mother Jones comes the news of a new research report:

Arctic seabed stores of methane are now destabilizing and venting vast stores of frozen methane — a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The paper, in the prestigious journal Science, reports the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf — long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane — is instead perforated and leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Melting of even a fraction of the clathrates stored in that shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

A report from Climate Progress gives a little more detail and links to some of the other research but on paragraph says pretty much all you need to know.

Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane.  Methane is  is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!