Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Study: Undersea gas could speed global warming
If the world continues to get warmer, vast amounts of methane gas trapped in ice under the sea could belch up and worsen climate change, according to a study.
"We may have less time than we think to do something (about the prospect of global warming)," Dr. Ira Leifer, a marine scientist at University of California Santa Barbara, said in an interview.

Leifer is the main author of a study that looks at how "peak blowouts" of melting undersea formations called methane hydrates could release the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. The study was published Thursday in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, a climate science publication.

So methane is the main problem now, not CO2? I'm really confused now. And scared.

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".

Did you read the simple statement okie?

co2 could cause the ice to melt which would increase methane which might make the models too low for warming.

Warming climate could alter weather, farming in the Midwest
By Alan Bjerga
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Last week's heat wave may have felt like something Midwesterners had never experienced before. But scientists are confident they'll get more chances to experience it again as climate change encourages more extreme weather.


Higher temperatures and more turbulent weather will affect everything in the Midwest - from what trees dot the landscape to what wildlife roams the region to what crops farmers raise to how cities allocate water.


Weather unpredictability would make dry years more common and wet years less effective for crop-growing. The result could be more reliance on crops such as dryland wheat and cotton and less reliance on corn and other rain-intensive crops.


But because the variables in the Midwest haven't been explored as deeply as on the more heavily populated coasts, the overall impact of global warming on Midwestern agriculture remains unclear, said Chuck Rice, a Kansas State University agronomist.


"In the middle part of the country, the (research) models aren't as good," he said.


While heat waves come and go, a gradual increase in Earth's atmospheric "greenhouse gases" is expected to make global weather more volatile over the next century, giving the Midwest more extremes like last week's 110-degree days.


The trend toward more severe weather could change the Midwest significantly in upcoming decades. And though government response has been quiet so far, those who study global warming say citizens and governments need to wake up to the problem now.

Animals are on the run. Plants are migrating too. The Earth's creatures, save for one species, do not have thermostats in their living rooms that they can adjust for an optimum environment. Animals and plants are adapted to specific climate zones, and they can survive only when they are in those zones. Indeed, scientists often define climate zones by the vegetation and animal life that they support. Gardeners and bird watchers are well aware of this, and their handbooks contain maps of the zones in which a tree or flower can survive and the range of each bird species.