We're all gonna die!!!
or at least get a little warmer and there isn't anything we can do about it.
It's a conspiracy -- the Earth is trying to kill us.
From
The New Scientist:
Siberia's pools burp out nasty surprise
Northern Siberia's thaw lakes are belching out up to five times as much methane as previously thought. And as global warming causes the permafrost to melt, lakes worldwide could emit even more methane, reinforcing climate change.
Katey Walter at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and her colleagues developed a new technique to measure the amount of methane bubbling out of two lakes in northern Siberia. In autumn, when the lakes froze over, they identified regions where methane was being released by searching for gas bubbles pushing through the ice. They then placed umbrella-shaped bubble traps over the hotspots and measured emissions daily for one year. At both lakes, the gas flux was five times as high as previously estimated. Walter's team also got similar figures from smaller studies on more than 100 other lakes in the region (Nature, vol 443, p 71)
Human activity is still the biggest source of atmospheric methane, but lakes can no longer be ignored. "Until now we didn't realise that lakes were such an important source," says Walter. Over the coming years methane flux from Siberian lakes is likely to increase, as melting permafrost releases carbon into the lakes. "Bacteria eat this carbon and burp out methane," says Walter.
And the Kyoto was based on an outdated climate model that didn't include Water Vapor (the worst of the "greenhouse gasses" by far) because it didn't fit their agenda.
And in another 400 years, the Earth will start cooling and there is not a thing that we can do about it.
Posted by DaveH at September 6, 2006 9:46 PM