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Scientists Amazed as Canadian Permafrost Thaws 70 Years Early:
Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.
[...] With governments meeting in Bonn this week to try to ratchet up ambitions in United Nations climate negotiations, the... findings, published on June 10 in Geophysical Research Letters, offered a further sign of a growing climate emergency.
The paper was based on data Romanovsky and his colleagues had been analyzing since their last expedition to the area in 2016. The team used a modified propeller plane to visit exceptionally remote sites, including an abandoned Cold War-era radar base more than 300 km from the nearest human settlement.
Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognizable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier.
The vista had dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks - waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst. Vegetation, once sparse, had begun to flourish in the shelter provided from the constant wind.
[...] Scientists are concerned about the stability of permafrost because of the risk that rapid thawing could release vast quantities of heat-trapping gases, unleashing a feedback loop that would in turn fuel even faster temperature rises.
No word on whether or not the Wicked Witch of the West had anything to do with it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @08:08PM
You ask me a numeric question. I tell you my prediction is that it's 50, with a viable range of 40 to 60. Whether the actual answer is 90, or 10 would mean exactly the same thing - whatever I'm using to predict things is worthless.
Things happening radically ahead of pace doesn't mean "See, everything we predicted would happen - but even faster!" It simply means that people making predictions are likely using completely broken models. These models have, time and again, proven themselves to be extremely inaccurate even on relatively short time frames such as the 10-30 year range which we now have numerous prediction:test pairs to contrast against. This, of course, does not mean that we should go balls out and start building coal plants every 50km, but it does mean that what these models say about what Earth might look like 50, or 100 years in the future is almost entirely irrelevant.
We've had 40 years of alarmism now, and it seems to have done nothing but split society into two groups. One group that's having borderline anxiety disorders with a neverending series of apocalyptic predictions, and another group that's grown even more distant from the issue in no small part because of constant reminders, such as this, that climatologists are starting to act more and more like astrologers. That's also not a random slight - astrology was treated as a science as serious and scholarly as any other for hundreds of years. Even thought we can now see it was based on less than nothing (e.g. - one important aspect of astrology is planets suddenly stopping and starting to go the other way - an optical illusion driven by the assumption that everything in the universe rotated around the Earth), the ability for weak correlations to affirm biases was enough for many very intelligent individuals to take it very seriously for many centuries.
The only thing that gives climatology an austere of meaningfulness is that 'they may not be getting it exactly right, but climate science is hard and they are definitely getting the general trend correct.' But this general trend is meaningless. The Earth is obviously warming and has been warming since even before the industrial revolution. This argument of a 'general trend' meaning something is like me claiming to have a system that can predict where the stock market will be in 100 years, and because I said it'd be really high - you defend my model because, even though it gets everything completely wrong, it says the stock market will go up and, lo and behold, the market is going up!