UN Report: Melting Permafrost Seen as New Peril in Global Warming

November 28, 2012Email ThisPrintNewslettersTweetArticle1 CommentsPermafrost lands across Siberia and Alaska that contain vast stores of carbon are beginning to thaw, bringing with it the threat of a big increase in global warming by 2100, a U.N. report said on Tuesday.

A thaw of the vast areas of permanently frozen ground in Russia, Canada, China and the United States also threatens local homes, roads, railways and oil pipelines, the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) said in the report which was released at the U.N. climate talks being held this week and next in Qatar.

“Permafrost has begun to thaw,” Kevin Schaefer, lead author at the University of Colorado told a news conference in Doha.

An accelerating melt would free vast amounts of carbon dioxide and methane which has been trapped in organic matter in the subsoil, often for thousands of years, the report said.

Warming permafrost could release the equivalent of between 43 and 135 billion tons of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, by 2100. That would be up to 39 percent of annual emissions from human sources.

Permafrost now contains 1,700 billion tons of carbon, or twice the amount now in the atmosphere, it said.

HIGHER TEMPERATURES
And a melt of the permafrost meant that U.N. projections for rising temperatures this century “might be too low”, Schaefer said.

UNEP issued a report last week saying that rising world greenhouse gas emissions were on track to push up temperatures by between 3 and 5 degrees Celsius (5.4

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New Antarctic Ice Shelf Threatened by Global Warming

May 10, 2012Email ThisPrintNewslettersTweetArticle3 CommentsScientists are predicting the disappearance of another vast ice shelf in Antarctica by the end of the century that will accelerate rising sea levels.

The Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf fringing the Weddell Sea on the eastern side of Antarctica has so far not seen ice loss from global warming and much of the observation of melting has focused on the western side of the continent around the Amundsen Sea. But new research from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany says the 450,000-sq-km

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