Climate Change Tipping Point
It's Getting Hot in Herre

From the London Guardian's Climate Change special section, disturbing news from Siberia:

A vast expanse of western Sibera is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn today. Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures. [...] Climate scientists yesterday reacted with alarm to the finding, and warned that predictions of future global temperatures would have to be revised upwards. "When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it's unstoppable. There are no brakes you can apply," said David Viner, a senior scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. "This is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone. The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing."

I've been pretty busy this week, and I hope to have some down time from my compost bin building this weekend to do some pent-up posting, including a summary that I've been keeping around for awhile on the triumverate of climate change articles that appeared in the New Yorker last May (one of which is concerned primarily with melting permafrost). I may joke about this subject a bit, what with my nod to Nelly in the subhead above, but this is all deadly serious stuff--something we Americans tend to take as fluffy philosophical debate but which the Europeans, who have lost thousands of lives in heat waves during previous summers, are keenly attuned to. We need to be better tuned. Alright, I'll get off my whiny soapbox now.