Permafrost Thaw Potentially Dwarfs Manmade GHG Emissions

"nobody?s even talking about yet". Where has that writer been living the last years?

Just two examples:

2011:

Maybe you missed the part about:

"The concept is actually relatively new," says Kevin Schaefer of the Natio nal Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "It was first proposed in 2005. And the first estimates came out in 2011." Inde ed, the problem is so new that it has not yet made its way into major clima te projections, Schaefer says.

"None of the climate projections in the last IPCC report account for permaf rost," says Schaefer. "So all of them underestimate, or are biased low."

Seems like every few months, the climate models are found to have some major omission. All the new discoveries are in the even-worser-dire-disaster direction, of course. That's what sells.

There seems to be some sort of Climate Disaster Olympics going on. I'll see your Greenland Melting, and raise you a Permafrost.

Of course, the actual temperature trend continues to defy the ever-scarier models. Sensible people have already lost interest.

he

tional Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. " It was first proposed in 2005. And the first estimates came out in 2011." I ndeed, the problem is so new that it has not yet made its way into major cl imate projections, Schaefer says.

mafrost," says Schaefer. "So all of them underestimate, or are biased low."

John Barnes 1994 end-of-the-world sci-fi novel "Mother of Storms"

used Arctic sub-sea methane clathrates to give anthropogenic global warming a flying start. The IPCC doesn't figure it into their projections because nobody knows enough about the volume of methane tied up in permafrost and s ub-sea clathrates - and where it's tied up - to allow quantitative predicti ons.

The IPCC does tend to gloss over real risks where the numbers are hard to w ork out - sea level rise is another area where they've been less alarmist t han they should be.

These are all predictions of things that are going to happen over the next few centuries, if we don't mend out ways. It's a rather long game, but ther e's rather more at stake than few gold medals.

Defy? The Atlantic Multidecadal oscillation has been working against anthro pogenic global warming for the last decade or so, as if did from about 1940 to about 1960 - the warming trend is stronger now, so this time it hasn't managed to reverse the trend, just slow it down for a bit.

Insensible people - like John Larkin - haven't got a clue what's going on a nd feel free to produce idiotic pontifications. Sensible people are decided ly anxious.

No, 'the climate models' don't have major omissions, they're far and away the most inclusive models we can trust. When, from time to time, new features are introduced, it's only after the phenomenological relations to OLD features are understood. Multivariate modeling requires understanding covariances (not just effects). Mathematically, there's no reason to believe a climate model won't react to small noise in its input data with an explosive growth in tropical wind and crash in trade wind, while (hypothetically) the sum of those variables is constant and the difference is extremely noise-sensitive (i.e. poorly related to available information sources).

It's very much like making a high gain amplifier, that suddenly oscillates. The output has some connection to the input; there's a stray covariance.

The entertainment press can sell stories with advertising; that entertainment press does NOT, however, drive science. You ought not take their "exciting news here" pronouncements so seriously. "What sells" doesn't have much clout in science.

You've lived a very sheltered life. All those buzzwords that you see in university press releases have a very practical purpose, namely separating funding agencies from their money.

Nobody ever got tenure by saying that his predecessor got it right.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

And you trust them?

When, from time to

There's a lot of money sloshing around here. Algore has made over $200e6 off climate change. The IPCC and all those researchers need salaries and grants... and get them. AGW is big, big business.

All mathematical models are over-simplifications of reality. They become intractably complex remarkably quickly. The art is in making useful simplifications, concentrating the attention (and the computational effort) on the more interesting areas.

You aren't trusting the models - you are trusting the people who set them up and interpreted the results.

Of course, digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel is a very much larger business, where there's a very much larger pool of money sloshing around.

Spending a few tens of millions of dollars on low grade denialist propaganda - only good enough to fool the John Larkins of this world - makes sense. You can fool enough of the people for long enough to buy a few more decades of irresponsible exploitation.

The case in point relates to belching of methane from formerly-permafrost regions; that's a variation on volcanic activity (active volcanoes belch gasses, we would lose out atmosphere entirely if they stopped). It's unreasonable to expect weather/climate models to include a timetable for eruptions of this sort (though there is some provision for vulcanism, it isn't predictive modeling, just responsive to events as they occur).

The climate modelers that found our weather was going out of historical bounds DID warn us of unknown instabiities in the 'new' regime.

Warm weather releasing greenhouse gasses by melting permafrost, isn't an element of past weather/climate observations, so, it was unknown.

It makess a positive feedback loop, so it's pretty definitely an instability.

The scientists warned us. That warning still stands, and this datum is a confirmation.

Interesting spin. If the omission is in the direction you prefer it shows how poorly the climatologists have done their job and how the models are biased. If the omission is in the direction you don't like then of course it is all just part of the bunkum anyway, right?

Fortunately this man's opinion is of little consequence in the events that will unfold.

I would love if people like Larkin could stake the well being of their descendants to the outcome of global warming. But that wouldn't be fair to the unborn generations, would it? I'd just like to see the name Larkin associated with the idea that AGW is just a fad. In 100 years, rather than "Your name is Mudd" the term will be, "Your name is Larkin".