ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Here’s a brief compendium of news reporting dramatic effects of global warming that are already being felt around the world, from the Arctic to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Troubling bubbles

In the Canadian arctic, pure methane in massive amounts is seeping out of the boggy soil.

“On a calm day, you can see 20 or more ‘seeps’ out across this lake,” said Canadian researcher Rob Bowen, sidling his small rubber boat up beside one of them. A tossed match would have set it ablaze. “It’s essentially pure methane.”

AP correspondent Charles Hanley reports that air temperatures in northwest Canada, in Siberia and elsewhere in the Arctic have risen more than 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970 — much faster than the global average. The summer thaw is reaching deeper into frozen soil, at a rate of 1.5 inches a year, and according to the IPCC a further 13-degree temperature rise is possible this century. And that’s without calculating in the added effect of methane released from thawing Arctic soils.  Permafrost, tundra soil frozen year-round and covering almost one-fifth of Earth’s land surface, runs anywhere from 160 to 2,000 feet deep and is packed with carbon from tens of thousands of years of accumulated plant and animal matter. The top 10 feet of permafrost alone contain more carbon than is now in the atmosphere.

The prognosis is not encouraging.

How likely is a major release?

“I don’t think it’s a case of likelihood,” he [Stockholm University researcher Orjan Gustafssons] said. “I think we are playing with fire.”

Great Barrier Reef Said to Face Catastrophic Damage

Australian officials, commenting on a report issued by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, warn that catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s most extensive bank of coral, may be unavoidable if global warming continues unchecked.

Queensland state Premier Anna Bligh said today that warming is hurting reefs and that urgent action is needed to reduce run-off of nutrients and chemicals from farms that poses a second threat.

Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary of the report:

Almost all the biodiversity of the Great Barrier Reef will be affected by climate change, with coral reef habitats the most vulnerable. Coral bleaching resulting from increasing sea temperature and lower rates of calcification in skeleton-building organisms, such as corals, because of ocean acidification, are the effects of most concern and are already evident.

Change is seen in Atlantic from climate, fishing

The basic makeup of the ocean waters off the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic region has fundamentally changed in the past 40 years because of climate change, commercial fishing pressures and growing coastal populations, according to a new report.

The “new report” referred to is the 2009 Ecosystem Status Report, just released by the Ecosystem Assessment Program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) of NOAA’s Fisheries Service in Woods Hole, Mass. Global warming impacts include:

• Warming of coastal and shelf waters has led to northward shifts in distribution of some fish species and changes to a warmer-water fish community.

• The community structure of zooplankton, a major food source for whales and many other marine species including fish, has changed, due in part to climate and physical processes acting over the North Atlantic Basin, indicating the importance of winds and atmospheric circulation patterns to the function and structure of this ecosystem.

Here’s the introductory paragraph to the section on climate forcing:

Climate patterns over the North Atlantic are important drivers of oceanographic conditions and ecosystem states.  Steadily increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels can not only affect climate on global and regional scales but alter critical aspects of ocean chemistry. Here, we describe the atmospheric forcing mechanisms related to climate in this region including large-scale atmospheric pressure systems, natural ocean temperature cycles in the North Atlantic, components of the large-scale circulation of the Atlantic Ocean, and issues related to ocean acidification.