Global Warming 2006: Our worst fears are exceeded by reality

It has been a hot year. The average temperature in Britain for 2006 was higher than at any time since records began in 1659. Globally, it looks set to be the sixth hottest year on record..You could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve heard it all before. You may think it’s time to turn the page and read something else. But you’d be wrong. 2006 will be remembered by climatologists as the year in which the potential scale of global warming came into focus. And the problem can be summarised in one word: feedback.

..The once-frozen peat bogs of Siberia – bigger than France and Germany combined – began to “boil” furiously in the summer of 2006 as methane bubbled to the surface. Exactly how much is being released into the atmosphere is unknown, although some estimates put it as high as 100,000 tons a day – which means a warming effect greater than America’s man-made emissions of carbon dioxide.
It has been a hot year. The average temperature in Britain for 2006 was higher than at any time since records began in 1659. Globally, it looks set to be the sixth hottest year on record. The signs during the past 12 months have been all around us. Little winter snow in the Alpine ski resorts, continuing droughts in Africa, mountain glaciers melting faster than at any time in the past 5,000 years, disappearing Arctic sea ice, Greenland’s ice sheet sliding into the sea. Oh, and a hosepipe ban in southern England.

You could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve heard it all before. You may think it’s time to turn the page and read something else. But you’d be wrong. 2006 will be remembered by climatologists as the year in which the potential scale of global warming came into focus. And the problem can be summarised in one word: feedback.

..”The main concern is that the more we look, the more positive feedbacks we find,” says Olivier Boucher, a climate scientist at the Met Office. “That’s not the case when it comes to negative feedbacks. There seems to be far fewer of them.� The sentiment is echoed by Chris Rapley, the director of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge: “When we look at the list of all the feedbacks in the climate, the list of positive feedbacks is worryingly long – a lot longer than the negative feedbacks.

..The once-frozen peat bogs of Siberia – bigger than France and Germany combined – began to “boil” furiously in the summer of 2006 as methane bubbled to the surface. Exactly how much is being released into the atmosphere is unknown, although some estimates put it as high as 100,000 tons a day – which means a warming effect greater than America’s man-made emissions of carbon dioxide.

The Independent