Greenland's summer ice sheet 2014. Isn't ice supposed to be white?
photo credit: Jason Box
We're living in a time of extreme weather and crisis. And now, it seems that the dominos are falling faster and faster as dreaded 'feedback loops' begin to kick in. A new study published this week in Nature Climate Change shows that Greenland's permafrost may be thawing faster than we thought.
Think Progress/Climate
[T]he research shows that tiny microbes trapped in Greenland’s permafrost are becoming active as the climate warms and the permafrost begins to thaw. As those microbes become active, they are feeding on previously-frozen organic matter, producing heat, and threatening to thaw the permafrost even further.
[...]
The big worry climate scientists have about thawing permafrost is that the frozen soil is chock-full of carbon. That carbon is supposed to be strongly trapped inside the soil, precisely because it’s supposed to be permanently frozen — hence, “permafrost.”
However, as temperatures in the Arctic have risen due to human-caused climate change, permafrost is thawing, and therefore releasing some of that trapped carbon into the atmosphere. It’s yet another feedback loop manifesting itself in Arctic permafrost regions — as climate change causes it to thaw, the thawing causes more climate change, which causes more thawing, et cetera, et cetera.
The fastest safe solution to a rapid reduction in greenhouse gases is
reduction of the short living climate pollutants (SLCP's) including Methane, Black Carbon and ground level Ozone which are responsible for
30-40% of global warming to date. Because CO2 stays in atmosphere for hundreds of years, a fast reduction of the short lived gases mentioned above should give rapid cooling.
One of the greatest contributors of the SLCP's is
livestock production.
We don't have much time to slow this process.