[This 3-parter will look at the tundra-climate connection, modeling of tundra loss from future warming, and some new research.]

The tundra is probably the single most important amplifying carbon-cycle feedback. None of the IPCC’s climate models, however, include carbon emissions from a defrosting tundra as a feedback.

Yet, as NOAA reported last month (here), levels of methane (a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) rose last year for the first time since 1998, which may be an early indication of thawing permafrost. So it seems like a good a time for a review and update of what we know.

The tundra or permafrost is soil that stays below freezing (0°C or 32°F) for at least two years. Normally, plants capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis and slowly release that carbon back into the atmosphere after they die. But the Arctic acts like a freezer, and the decomposition rate is very low. The tundra is a carbon locker. We open it at our own risk.

We now know the Arctic contains far more carbon than previously thought (Science, subs. req’d) — nearly 1000 billion metric tons of carbon (some 3600 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide). That exceeds all the carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere. The permafrost may contain more than a third of all carbon stored in soils globally, much of it in the form of methane. Problem: Global warming is melting the top layer of permafrost, creating the possibility of large releases of soil carbon, and that is a potentially devastating vicious cycle. We are defrosting the tundra freezer-and at an unprecedented rate.

We know methane is bubbling up out of the tundra far faster than previously thought (Nature, subs. req’d). In fact, a 2006 study by Alaska researchers (GRL, subs. req’d) finds rapid degradation to key elements of the permafrost “that previously had been stable for 1000s of years.” The study, titled “Abrupt increase in permafrost degradation in Arctic Alaska,” concludes that this recent degradation exceeds changes seen earlier in the 20th Century by a factor of ten to a hundred.

What’s happening in Siberia is even more alarming:

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The most serious impacts of global warming involve water and the hydrological cycle:

• Sea level rise and storm surges
• Droughts and desertification
• Deluges and Flooding
• Loss of snowpack and inland glaciers

That’s why “The Water Environment Federation (WEF) and a coalition of national water organizations called on Congress to recognize the severe impacts that global climate change will likely have on water resources in the United States.” The groups noted that climate change is already begun to effect water resources around the country. The letter to Congress (here) calls for a number of measures including

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I don’t. But should you?

You can’t read everything or listen to everybody. Life is just too short. I debated Christy years ago so I know he tries to peddle unscientific nonsense when he thinks he can get away with it.

But some of the more than 360 (!) comments in my recent post “The deniers are winning, especially with the GOP” can’t seem to get enough of the analyses by these two scientists University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) who famously screwed up the satellite temperature measurements of the troposphere.

In the interest of saving you some time, which is a major goal of this blog, let’s see why these are two people you can program your mental DVR to fast forward through. First off, they were wrong — dead wrong — for a very long time, which created one of the most enduring denier myths, that the satellite data didn’t show the global warming that the surface temperature data did. As RealClimate wrote yesterday:

We now know, of course, that the satellite data set confirms that the climate is warming , and indeed at very nearly the same rate as indicated by the surface temperature records. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making mistakes when pursuing an innovative observational method, but Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong. They did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess, as has now been done.

Amazingly (or not), the “serial errors in the data analysis” all pushed the (mis)analysis in the same, wrong direction. Coincidence? You decide. But I find it hilarious that the deniers and delayers still quote Christy/Spencer/UAH analysis lovingly, but to this day dismiss the “hockey stick” and anything Michael Mann writes, when his analysis was in fact vindicated by the august National Academy of Sciences in 2006 (see New Scientist‘s “Climate myths: The ‘hockey stick’ graph has been proven wrong“).

In their solo careers, Spencer and Christy are still pros at bad analysis. Read more

Normally I would listen to Robert Hirsch and the legendary Charlie Maxwell, over CNBC’s “Mad” Jim Cramer. But Hirsch (here) and Maxwell (here) are making headlines for saying $12-$15 gasoline is around the corner, based on Maxwell’s projection of oil “reaching $180 a barrel in 2015 and $300 a barrel in 2020.”

Sorry guys, every extra $40 barrel is another dollar a gallon or so at the pump. Don’t quite know how they did the math, but they did it wrong.

When Mad Money‘s Jim Cramer is the voice of sanity, you know the energy world is topsy-turvy, but I happened to catch him explaining to Matt Lauer on Today that such prices take us to $6 to $7 over the next few years, yes, but $12 to $15 gasoline requires a price of oil that the world is exceedingly unlikely to get to any time soon — $450 to $500 a barrel by my estimate. The world would almost certainly go into a deep global recession long before we hit those prices.

But the situation is dire, as I’ve noted many times (see below). The WSJ has a front page article today, “Energy Watchdog Warns Of Oil-Production Crunch: IEA Official Says Supplies May Plateau Below Expected Demand,” which begins ominously

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