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Carbon in exile - Siberia melts away
Posted by christian on 1 December 2009.
If you live in a developed country, you're pretty well insulated from climate change. Shifts in weather patterns, heavier rainfall, gradually rising sea levels and temperature increases - at the moment western society absorbs these changes without us really noticing much difference. But for the indigenous peoples of the arctic who live on one of the front lines of climate change, such shifts in the planet's behaviour are much more obvious.
The Nenets people of the Yamal peninsula are nomadic reindeer herders who live within the Arctic circle on the northern coast of Siberia. In summer they graze their herds on the tundra of the peninsula, and in winter as the ground freezes they move south to milder parts of the Siberian steppes. They use the frozen surface of the landscape to cross the large rivers that criss-cross the peninsula. But things are changing.
The arctic is the most sensitive area of the planet to climate change. While the global average temperature has risen by around 0.8 degrees, some parts of Siberia have warmed by as much as five or six. And so the Nenets have noticed the freeze is happening later and later in the year. The reindeer herders have to wait longer and longer before they can move their animals south across frozen ground.
Here, on the frontiers of the world, the warming of Siberia is already threatening a way of life that has remained fairly constant for thousands of years. It's not only that the Nenets have to move later in the year - many of the freshwater lakes that dot the landscape are leaking away as the frozen walls of earth that contain the water melt, and collapse. And so the Nenets are also losing the fishing that provides one of their main sources of food.
Eternal ice
Siberia is a landscape that's underpinned by frozen ground called permafrost, but this ground is beginning to thaw. Off the coast, the coastline and even whole islands made of permafrost are vulnerable to an Arctic sea that is increasingly turbulent as sea ice also disappears. The sea is literally washing away the melting land. Melting permafrost is causing roads, pipelines and foundations to collapse across the country. Every year, there's an increase in the area of ground that melts in summer and the area that doesn't refreeze in winter.
This isn't just a problem in the arctic. This melt has global implications, because it's going to speed up climate change.
Permafrost is like a giant frozen compost heap - full of dead plants, animals, trees and other carbon-rich organic matter, and in places it reaches 1500m deep. While it stays frozen, that carbon is locked up in the ground. But as the arctic warms and the permafrost thaws, microbes start to break down that organic matter, releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
Flaming lakes
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas - probably causing, tonne for tonne, around 25 times more global warming over a hundred years than carbon dioxide. By lighting escaping methane, scientists can capture dramatic images of plumes of flame bubbling up through holes cut into Siberian lakes.
Melting permafrost is releasing additional emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. Permafrost contains massive amounts of carbon - probably about twice what's currently in the atmosphere, and about five times more than all greenhouse gases we've released by burning fossil fuels. While we don't have a really clear understanding of how much carbon might be released as the permafrost melts, it's fair to say that any extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from melting permafrost are bad news.
Because of the melting permafrost, what happens in the arctic doesn't stay in the arctic. And so we need strong political action from world leaders at Copenhagen. We need to control the warming that's leading the arctic to melt away. It's probably too late to stop climate change ending the Nenets' traditional way of life for good. But if we don't act now, that's going to be the case for pretty much everyone.
Regime shift
Could this possibly have anything to do with the fact that the PDO regime shift of around 2000 moved the major warm spot in the North Pacific over to the Siberia side from the Canada side? Or that the Arctic Oscillation is moving in the same direction?
What, exactly, were the corresponding Siberian surface temperatures around 1960, the last time we had a regime change in the same direction?
What actual borehole evidence is there that this warming is unusual and not simply periodic? It seems to be offering no real obstacles to the native way of life.
And of course the methane is converted almost immediately to CO2 by natural processes, and anyone who actually understands the science knows that CO2 is not only harmless, but actually good for the environment, increasing available forage for the herds. Why this worried tone?
That's a lot of rhetorical
That's a lot of rhetorical questions and not much argument there.
Nevertheless...
Methane isn't coverted immediately. While it's a short-lived greenhouse gas which degrades to CO2, it causes much greater warming during its short lifespan. Considered over a hundred year period, methane causes about 25 times more warming than an equivalent amount of CO2, worked out by considering how it degrades in the atmosphere.
On the regional processes: No regional process can explain this warming, because it's not happening regionally - it's happening across the entire Arctic. In the North of Alaska warming is also taking place, and is much more pronounced. From the beginning of the 20th century to the 1980s, the temperature of the upper permafrost horizon increased by 2 - 4 °С, and over the next 20 years to 2002, by another 3 °С on average. In the North-West of Canada, the upper permafrost layer warmed by 2 °С during the past two decades.
On the Nenets...
As you'll notice from the piece and the video, the Nenets have a narrowing window of opportunity to move their herds, and less access to one of their staple food sources.
Now, you could go to Siberia and tell them that the changes they're seeing are actually good for the environment and good for them, and that they should buck up their ideas. That would take some confidence in your arguments, and some guts.
To me, posting climate-skeptic mumbo jumbo on the Greenpeace blog doesn't seem to require either
The Real Threat
I dunno. Looking around, trying to answer my own questions, several points seem evident:
a) It looks as though a more immediate threat to the Nenets' way of life is the sudden influx of Russians in the '70s and '80s, presumably in connection with plans to pipe all of that lovely methane to Germany.
b) On the other hand, there are half again as many Nenets now as there were in 1970, though still not enough to match the population of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. They are not doing as well as the polar bears, which have doubled since 1970.
c) According to Polyakov et al. 2002. Observationally based assessment of polar amplification of global warming. Geophysical Research Letters 29: 10.1029, long-term coastal Arctic air temperature records (including those on the Kara Sea) show "strong intrinsic variability, dominated by multi-decadal fluctuations with a timescale of 60-80 years." This is suspiciously close to the periodicity of the PDO, whence my question.
d) Further reinforcement of my PDO paranoia comes from Prof. Wibjorn Karlen of Stockholm University, who in a brief note in the May 2005 Ambio points to a warm 1930s in the Arctic, cooling until the '70s, and warming thereafter. Admittedly his emphasis is on Svalbard data (78 deg N), but he clearly believes it to be representative of the Arctic in general. This pattern correlates precisely with the PDO-driven Alaska temperature reconstruction of Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Odd coincidence.
e) Sediment studies from further south in Siberia clearly show that the taiga area, anyway, has followed global patterns of extreme warming and cooling throughout the Holocene, which in turn suggests that Nenets have successfully coped with this phenomenon before.
I make no particular claims to courage -- in fact, I would be a very bad reindeer herder in the Arctic, and my admiration for the Nenets is boundless. I claim only rationality.