Climate change update - 10/08/2015

Guy and I had the chance to catch up and as part of this we recorded this brief update on methane emissions

A climate change update from Guy McPherson

From Guy’s website


 “Another example in the region comes from the 10 September 2015 issue of Geophysical Research Letters with a paper titled, “Rising methane emissions from northern wetlands associated with sea ice decline.” 

As is clear from the title, the paper demonstrates “that rising wetland methane emissions are associated with sea ice retreat.” 

More evidence of these types of interactions is on the rise. A paper in the 5 October 2015 issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A takes the average of two conservative warming scenarios offered by the IPCC and concludes frozen soil carbon — found primarily in the form of methane — responds rapidly to warming. 

Specifically, ” for every one degree Celsius of global warming, the amount of permafrost carbon that enters the atmosphere is equivalent to 1.5 years of global carbon dioxide emissions”. “

Discussion meeting issue ‘Feedbacks on climate in the Earth system’ organised and edited by Eric W. Wolff , John G. Shepherd, Emily Shuckburgh and Andrew J. Watson