Thawing Earth Sends Climate Wake-up Call

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For Immediate Release

Thawing Earth Sends Climate Wake-up Call

ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Aug. 18 -/E-Wire/-- Geoscientists and nomadic herdsman from Siberia to Alaska confirm that land frozen for thousands of years is thawing.

Western Siberia's frozen peat bogs, covering an area the size of France and Germany combined, contain billions of tons of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. This sub-arctic region has begun to melt according to Sergei Kirpotin (Tomsk State University) and Judtih Marquand (Oxford University). In 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global mean temperatures could increase 1.4 - 5.8 C (2.5 â 10 F) by the end of the century. That estimate did not factor in melting peat bogs releasing additional greenhouse gases.

Tero Mustonen, director of Finland's Snow Change organization, expressed "concern and alarm" over reports of melting permafrost in Western Siberia. In Northeastern Siberia, Mustonen added, reindeer herders in the Nutendli and Andrejuskino communities report "ground sinking" and lakes disappearing.

Interior Alaska's permafrost has warmed in some places to the highest level since the ice age and is very close to when it starts to thaw, Vladimir Romanovsky, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks reported in the Anchorage Daily News Sunday.

Release of the greenhouse gases stored in places such as peat bogs, along with disruption of the currents in the Atlantic Ocean dramatized in the film Day After Tomorrow, are two potential mechanisms for abrupt climate change. Though climate change develops over decades - not days or weeks - scientists recognize that, once set in motion, climate change is difficult to control or offset.

Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider called the reports "the latest of a few hundred wake-up calls that don't seem to stir the slumbering political establishment in the United States. Increased intensity of hurricanes, many more damaging heat waves, rapidly waning mountain glaciers, thinning Arctic sea ice and the warmest few decades in thousands of years should have been wake up calls enough!"

Delegations from the Circumpolar North gather in Anchorage, Alaska September 28-30 to find answers to the urgent threat of human-induced climate change caused by industrial societies

November 28 - December 9 international climate treaty meetings will be held in Montreal. Daniel Ihara, Director of the Center for Enviromental Economic Development, called on the United States and China to join with the rest of the world and shoulder their major global climate responsibilities. "Will," he asked, "our leaders slumber on while the hope for an environmentally sustainable future slips away from us?"

Center for Environmental Economic Development (CEED)

Daniel Ihara, Ph.D., Executive Director Center for Environmental Economic Development (CEED), (707) 822-8347, ([REDACTED-PHONE] (cell) [REDACTED-EMAIL]

http://www. ceedweb.org

http://www.snowchange.org

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu

http://www. ceedweb.org

http://www.snowchange.org

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