These days, there are many concerns about the environmental wellness of the planet, and how the wellbeing of future generations may be affected. However, the single greatest uncertainty about the effects global warming will have is how much the planet will feed on itself.
Human emissions cause climate change, and the feedback from increased temperature could mean that new pools of carbon are released into the atmosphere, which will magnify the trend in turn. There are other types of feedback, on the other hand, that could be released and potentially slow down global warming. Climate scientists can only make estimates at this point about how these conflicting possibilities will achieve balance, but the majority of scientists do believe that the overall result will be the planet’s temperature rising substantially.
Permafrost is one such worrisome potential feedback, and it underlies a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere. Ancient organic material, containing double the carbon as that which now exists in the atmosphere, is buried in that frozen ground and now the permafrost is starting to warm. Therefore, that carbon is beginning to escape. When frozen hard, permafrost supports the ground surface in a similar way to how concrete pillars support buildings, but the ground can turn mushy and collapse when it thaws, and forms of a bog or lake that is likely to give off methane gas.
The feedback potential of permafrost makes the mathematics of climate change control even more difficult, and the United Nations Environment Programme released a report in November which warned that at present, scientists do not have a sufficient handle on the situation. The report also called for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to formally assess the permafrost feedback. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a UN body that reviews and summarizes climate science at various periods, and the report requested new monitoring efforts overall.
However, the problem of climate change is going to be an even more difficult task if current estimates about the potential for carbon release from permafrost are correct, because the potentially large carbon release from permafrost has not previously taken into account by the long-running global negotiations over emission limits.
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