Global Warming

If you haven't yet been scared shitless about global warming, pick up a copy of Time magazine tomorrow. Time has a lengthy article on global warming and the prospects of passing tipping points that create feed back loops in the very near future. To consider the dangers of passing these tipping points, you have to look at two facts contained in the article. From Time:

As a tiny component of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide helped warm Earth to comfort levels we are all used to. But too much of it does an awful lot of damage. The gas represents just a few hundred parts per million (p.p.m.) in the overall air blanket, but they're powerful parts because they allow sunlight to stream in but prevent much of the heat from radiating back out. During the last ice age, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was just 180 p.p.m., putting Earth into a deep freeze. After the glaciers retreated but before the dawn of the modern era, the total had risen to a comfortable 280 p.p.m. In just the past century and a half, we have pushed the level to 381 p.p.m., and we're feeling the effects. Of the 20 hottest years on record, 19 occurred in the 1980s or later. According to NASA scientists, 2005 was one of the hottest years in more than a century.

Now, as we start to thaw the Arctic and the permafrost the carbon release doesn't go up a little it goes up a lot. Also from Time:

A similar feedback loop is melting permafrost, usually defined as land that has been continuously frozen for two years or more. There's a lot of earthly real estate that qualifies, and much of it has been frozen much longer than two years—since the end of the last ice age, or at least 8,000 years ago. Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of partially decayed organic matter, rich in carbon. In high-altitude regions of Alaska, Canada and Siberia, the soil is warming and decomposing, releasing gases that will turn into methane and CO2. That, in turn, could lead to more warming and permafrost thaw, says research scientist David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (ncar) in Boulder, Colo. And how much carbon is socked away in Arctic soils? Lawrence puts the figure at 200 gigatons to 800 gigatons. The total human carbon output is only 7 gigatons a year.

That's 30 to 100 times what we are releasing every year and once that starts, there isn't a damned thing we can do about it. Go read the entire article, and remember, the only way to get anything accomplished in this country which emits 25% of the worlds carbon emissions, is to vote republicans out of office. They currently hold all three branches of government in this country and they haven't done a damn thing about this problem other than pay it some lip service.