Arctic warming at faster pace than projected

[jpak]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5920570.html

TOOLIK LAKE, ALASKA — Ground here that for tens of thousands of years was frozen solid is terra firma no more.

Across the tundra and coast of the Arctic Ocean, land is caving in. Soils loosed by freshly thawed earth set off a new era of rot, and of bloom — dumping a bonanza of nutrients into a top-of-the-world environment that swirls from months of midnight sun to deep-freeze dark.

Will nature channel the nourishment of this soil into a great flowering of plant life that soaks up greenhouse gas and tamps down the causes of climate change?

Or will a microbial awakening of decomposition simply belch out more planet-heating carbon dioxide?

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[kestrel91316]

1. "Faster pace than projected" - am I the only one who thinks scientists

need to work on their modeling? Nothing is linear anymore - it's ALL accelerating these days........

[izquierdista]

2. Don't be too hard on them

Linear models are the only way to model. If you try to include non-linearities, they will turn around and bite you in the ass. Even if there is one non-linear part to a model, it is best to do a piece-wise combination of models than to make one linear model. In something like the arctic climate, where you have scads of non-linear interactions, plus input data that has lots of random variation, it is hopeless.

[kestrel91316]

4. ......which is why anybody who pretends to know where we are

headed is smokin' crack.

Sigh.

[kgrandia]

5. See the comments?

At the end of the article.... sigh.

[DCKit]

3. The warming is going to be exponential...

as more methane is released from the melting permafrost.

[XemaSab]

6. Looks like I'm late to the party

:(