Green Options

Besides posing threats to structures and landscapes on a local scale, melting permafrost emits carbon dioxide and methane, according to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), making permafrost a threat on a global scale.

Want to argue about the causes of global warming? OK… but as you do so, keep in mind this slideshow by a group of high school students in Kwigillingok, Alaska. The effects of climate change aren’t matters of theory for these kids and their families: they’re seeing them first-hand.

via Twilight Earth

The Northwest Passage is opening up. As Arctic ice melts, the shipping season will grow, and with it, the pressures on the fragile Arctic ecosystem.

Fourty percent or more of the Amazon rainforest will be “decimated” by the middle of the next century even if we cut all CO2 emissions by 2050, said the UK Met Office. The finding was presented this past month in Copenhagen, which is preparing to host the UN Climate Change Conference in December.

In this satellite image of deforestation in Brazil, tropical rainforest appears bright red, while pale red and brown areas represent cleared land. Black and gray areas have probably been recently burned.

This month, as the results of data analyses come in, climate scientists are getting a more detailed, far clearer picture of the ‘State of the Poles’ and the effects of warming and climate change in these most extreme regions of our planet. Although this project is actually the culmination of two years work (encompassing 160 separate studies and costing 1.2 billion dollars) it has been officially deemed the ‘International Polar Year’ (IPY).

One of the most important findings of this project is a confirmation of what many climate scientists have suspected for a couple of years now–that the impact of climate change on our environment is happening at a much faster rate than previous computer models predicted. This is true even for the four major reports released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the last of which was released in 2007).

Scientists have today warned that global warming could rapidly accelerate as millions of tons of methane escape from the arctic seabed. According to preliminary findings, as the Arctic region gets warmer massive deposits of the greenhouse gas - 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - are rising to the surface.

Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University, one of the expedition’s leaders, said in an email from their Russian research ship that, for the first time, the team had discovered an extensive area of methane release so intense that “the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.” The team believe that the accelerated release is connected to rising temperatures throughout the Arctic region.

The Canary Project is banking not only on the old saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words," but that the right picture — or pictures — can resonate and inspire viewers to take action against global warming.

Founded in 2006, The New York-based Canary Project initially set out to build public awareness of climate change by photographing landscapes around the world that are already feeling the impact. It has

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Editor’s note: This week, Celsias’ editor Craig Mackintosh takes a look at one of the biggest threats posed by global climate change: melting permafrost. This post was originally published on September 18, 2007.

As fascinating as it may seem to see a scientist potentially holding a pile of mammoth-poo in his hands, this is not a good sign.

Over 10% of the earth’s surface is covered in tundra, a thin layer of slow-growing plant matter (dwarf shrubs, grasses, mosses,

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