Reply #57: Yes, very wise and perceptive. Spreading emails would have no effect. [View All]

[DLnyc]

But the reference is to melting permafrost, which is not a 'doomsday scenario' but an actual, ongoing reality.

A sampling of easily available information:

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As the permafrost thaws as a result of global warming caused by increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, large quantities of methane are released. When methane gets out it causes more warming in a vicious cycle, and the release of even more methane, and so it goes on. Scientists refer to this as a positive feedback loop.
Siberia is one of the fastest warming regions on Earth - average temperatures have increased 3°C in the last 40 years.

Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, says "that's the thing that is scary about this whole thing. There are lots of mechanisms that tend to be self-perpetuating and relatively few that tend to shut it off."

Sergei Kirpotin of Tomsk State University describes permafrost melting as an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible". He says the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt in the last three or four years.
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http://www.terranature.org/methaneSiberia.htm

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Warming is also the triggering variable for the release of methane in the arctic.<51> Methane released from thawing permafrost such as the frozen peat bogs in Siberia, and from methane clathrate on the sea floor, creates a positive feedback.<52>
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#Feedback