Climate alarmists are resuscitating an old scare, claiming melting permafrost caused by modest global warming will accelerate warming, thus creating rapid and runaway global warming.
Objective historical data, however, conclusively debunk the scare.
An article in the April 30 edition of Nature claims, “Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release. The sudden collapse of thawing soils in the Arctic might double the warming from greenhouse gases released from the tundra.”
As a result, alarmists claim, global warming will continue to accelerate and may be irreversible absent dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Alarmists are piling on in response to the article.
“Carbon released into the atmosphere by the increasing loss of Arctic permafrost, combined with higher solar absorption by the Earth’s surface due to the melting of sea ice and land snow, will accelerate climate change,” states a EurekaAlert press release from Lancaster University
“A ‘sleeping giant’ hidden in permafrost soils in Canada and other northern regions worldwide will have important consequences for global warming,” claims the PhysOrg website.
The notion that modest warming will release frozen methane and carbon dioxide that will destabilize the climate is an old and tired scare that is thoroughly debunked by past climate history.
As even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has documented (see page 202, here), many warming periods have occurred throughout the planet’s history, including several substantial warming events that raised temperatures higher than present levels.
Several of these substantial warming events have occurred since the last ice age glaciation ended approximately 10,000 years ago.
Yet each warming period eventually ended and was followed by a subsequent cooling period. If runaway ‘positive temperature feedbacks’ occur due to thawing permafrost, none of the subsequent cooling periods would have happened.
Ultimately, the Earth’s climate is not inherently unstable and subject to self-reinforcing temperature trends.
While scientists theorize about how and why the Earth’s climate self-regulates in response to initial warming and cooling episodes (with subsequent changes in cloud cover being a likely factor), the objective data show quite clearly that the Earth’s climate tends to self-regulate.
Thawing permafrost occurred during each of the past warming events, and yet the impacts from none of the resulting methane and carbon dioxide releases were sufficient to cause runaway, self-perpetuating global warming.
Consider the ‘runaway permafrost thawing’ scare just that – a self-serving and historically debunked climate scare.
Read more at CFACT
Back in ’99, I pitched a tent north of Anchorage, in July. Let me tell you, there ain’t nothing nice about permafrost.
I doubt that carbon dioxide has anything but a trivial warming impact. Even if it did cause as much warming as the alarmist claim, it is not enough to support their political agendas. To do this they need to add amplification. The most common is positive feed back via water vapor. Another is the “trigger point” from Permafrost release of green house gasses. I do remember the time when this was being loudly proclaimed. However, with time even the environmental left decided this theory didn’t have merit. As the article pointed out, it didn’t happen when it was much warmer in the past. What is different today is there a stronger push politically than there has ever been before to take Draculan actions advocated by the climate change movement. This means they need to pull up every possible excuse, including the Permafrost trigger point.
David… I think that you may like this article….
https://principia-scientific.org/hydro-flask-challenge-anthropogenic-climate-change/
Thanks for the link, Al. Good reading.
Back in the days when they were still carrying out above ground nucular testing the increase in Thunderstorm activity was blamed on the tests which of course was not true its like when they blamed bad weather and crop Failuer’s on witches and burning them at the stake the Eco-Wackos want to blame everything from High Tide to Burnt Toast on Global Warming/Climate Change