As a result of CO2 emmitted by human beings there is a very real possibility that climate change will happen and fast. This is a quote from an extremely well-researched book called The End of Ice written by Dahr Jamail. Very few people understand the danger of what warming oceans are doing in this region of the world.
“Natalia Shakhova studies the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf because methane emissions there differ significantly from what is happening elsewhere around the world. The ESAS is the largest undersea shelf in the world encompassing more than 2 million square kilometres, or 8 percent of the world’s total continental shelf. Shakhova believes the ESAS holds at least 10 to 15 percent of the world’s methane hydrates (methane compressed into ice), and the releases, when they happen, may well be abrupt, like the unsealing of an overpressurized pipeline. Shakhova says this could result in unfathomable emission rates that could change in order of magnitude in a matter of minutes, and that there would be nothing smooth, gradual or controlled about it.
The release could be triggered at any moment by an earthquake or by the thawing of the permafrost. The ESAS is particularly prone to these immediate shifts because it is three times shallower than the mean depth of the continental shelf of most of the world’s oceans. This means the probability of dissolved methane reaching the surface and escaping into the atmosphere is three to ten times greater than anywhere in the world’s oceans-and could happen in a matter of minutes.
Shakhova originally co-authored a study in 2008 that showed what she has been warning us about for years: that a fifty gigaton release of methane from thawing Artic permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea is highly possible at any time. That would be the equivalent of at least one thousand gigatons of carbon dioxide (for perspective, humans have released approximately 1474 gigatons of carbon dioxide since 1850) and may cause an approximately 12-times increase of modern atmospheric methane burden with consequent catastrophic green-house warming.
Troublingly, there is precedent for Shakova’s findings, as this has happened before. In 2017, scientists found evidence of an ancient methane explosion in the Arctic. More than 100 million years ago, there was a sudden period of global warmig, likely brought on from multiple volcanic eruptions, which released a giant upwelling of formerly frozen methane from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
According to a 2010 paper by Shakhova highlighting how the ESAS is a key reservoir of methane, methane concentrations in the Arctic then were about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years and on par with previous estimates of methane venting from the entire World Ocean. ….Shakhova was the lead author of a study that showed subsea permafrost on the ESAS to be in a decline at rates faster than believed.
Between the summers of 2010 and 2011 scientists found that in the course of a year methane vents of only thirty centimeters had grown to a kilometer. Some of the methane and carbon dioxide concentrations we’ve measured have been large, and we’re seeing very different patterns from what models suggest, Charles Miller from the aforementioned CARVE NASA study said. WE saw large regional-scale episodic bursts of higher than normal carbon dioxide and methane in interior Alaska and across the North Slope during the spring thaw, and they lasted until after the fall refreeze. To cite another example, in July 2012 we saw methane levels over swamps in the Innoko Wilderness that were 650 parts per billion higher than normal background levels. That’s similar to what you might find in a large city.
But that’s just the terrestrial methane. The methane hydrates on the Arctic seabed contain the equivalent of one thousand to five thousand gigatons of carbon. The lower estimate of a thousand gigatons is still roughly one hundred times the total carbon equivalent that humans release into the atmosphere annually by burning fossil fuel.
Leifer doesn’t see anything that can be done to put this genie back into its bottle. If all humans stop producing carbon dioxide from all activities, no one is suggesting the currents of the ocean are going to care for quite a while, and the atmosphere is still going to have everything that is already in it for hundreds of years, he says. This warmer ocean water that is heading to the Barents and East Siberian Sea is going to keep on going. He thinks that when these warmer currents begin to have their full impact in the East Siberian Sea, underneath which the brunt of known methane deposits are stored, it will have a positive forcing on global climate. This coupled with ongoing human forcing from CO2 emission, will push the global system past tipping points that haven’t even been identified yet.
There is a general idea we’ll hit a tipping point, it’ll get worse, then stop, he says, But that in’t to say there aren’t further tipping points? Right now there is no reason the global climate couldn’t push past tipping points that mean only 1 billion people can live on the planet. Knowing that sounds extreme, Leifer says that we are already past a point where large swaths of the Middle East will become uninhabitable because temperatures are going to be beyond what humans can tolerate. This he believes can also happen to large parts of Europe and India. If you aren’t extracting food that can support humans, people can’t live in these places and you’ve got problems and that’s without even bringing geopolitics into the mix and it all comes back to these tiny bubbles.
All of this is overwhelming to take in. Some might label these scientists as extremists and choose to ignore their warnings despite their peer-reviewed studies, but even the relatively staid Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned of such a scenario. The IPCC Fourth Assessment stated. The possibility of abrupt climate change and/or abrupt changes in the earth system triggered by climate change, with potentially catastrophic consequences, cannot be ruled out….Positive feedback from warming may cause the release of carbon or methane from the terrestrial biosphere and oceans.
….for most of us who don’t live in the Artic, all of this can be easy to ignore, given our physical distance from the region. Nevertheless our fate is tied to what happens there.”
If the climate tips into a hothouse Earth scenario, some scientists warn of food and water shortages, hundreds of millions of people being displaced by rising sea levels, unhealthy and unlivable conditions, and coastal storms having larger impacts.Runaway climate change of 4–5 °C can make swathes of the planet around the equator uninhabitable, with sea levels up to 60 metres (197 ft) higher than they are today. Humans cannot survive if the air is too moist and hot, which would happen for the majority of human populations if global temperatures rise by 11–12 °C, as land masses warm faster than the global average.Effects like these have been popularized in books like The Uninhabitable Earth and The End of Nature.
