Wet bog

by WhiteBoyBob
Staff writer

THE world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region. The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world's least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford. Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

Carbon dioxide that has been slowly trapped over hundreds of millions of years in the form of fossil fuels has been released in a few decades, and we are not slowing down.
Well, nice hot summers for us; hooray. Well, maybe. Unless the Gulf Stream shifts and we end up like Canada. And the currents feeding into the Gulf Stream in the southern Atlantic Ocean are already shifting north.

Hard evidence of sustained global warming is piling up like salesmen in early morning fog on the M4. Yet the popular press is still chanting the mantra “Blip in the weather. Just normal cycles of hot and cold. Warmer summers; good for tourism.” It’s like the heavy smoker who insists that it is not really as dangerous as doctors make out because they haven’t died yet. And lets face it, the public would much rather listen to the voices that tell them to keep consuming because everything is going to be all right. Why listen to extremely intelligent experts in the field when a selfish dullard like Jeremy Clarkson can reassure you that by being greedy and thoughtless you are doing the right thing. We are repeatedly told that do-gooders are trying to spoil the party, and to a certain extent that is true.

We all live together on the surface of a small, delicate planet with finite resources and space. We cannot afford to continue to party like a drunken teenager, not thinking of the consequences. But then as a neighbour of my parents said, “It’s not my problem and I’ll be dead and gone when it is. Our children and grandchildren will sort it out I’m sure”. Long live altruism.