Scary

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....

But calculations by Dr Sitch and his colleagues show that even if methane seeped from the permafrost over the next 100 years, it would add around 700m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year, roughly the same amount that is released annually from the world's wetlands and agriculture.

It would effectively double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming, he said.

Here.

This is incredibly bad news. One of the nightmare scenarios for global warming is that we get locked in to a positive-feedback loop, where the earth begins warming, which releases more greenhouse gases, which accelerates the warming, etc etc. The UN predictions for global warming - between 1-4 degrees by 2100 - don't take positive-feedback in to account. This means that we could blow right past the UN's predictions a lot sooner than we thought previously.

Wouldn't want to own beachfront property these days. The 30-year mortgage might not be worth a lot...