Summary: http://bit.ly/L0DzFo There is more carbon frozen in far North than in all living things & the atmosphere. It has begun to thaw. Interview with Prof. Antoni Lewkowitcz and Academy of Science speech by Dr. Charles Koven. Radio Ecoshock 120530 1 hour. Gas pipelines in Siberia are rising out of the ground, while in Alaska oil pipelines sag. Houses and factories built on permafrost are tipping. Evergreens are slanting in so-called "drunken forests". Under the whole north, land is becoming unstable as the climate warms. I'm Alex Smith. We're going to find many answers to a simple question: What if the permafrost thaws? I attended a conference session on that very subject, with expert scientists, at this year's meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. We'll hear the latest. But it was rough going. After the session, which was technical and carefully hedged with scientific doubts, I ran into the soil expert for the European Union, Luca Montanarella. I told him, in spite of all I'd heard, I still didn't know whether we should be worried or not. "You'd like to worry, wouldn't you?" Luca replied, "But we have many more things to worry about now, further south." Of course Luca is Italian. There were riots in the streets of Italy. The government had fallen, and the banking system might soon follow. In the course of preparing this program on permafrost, I ran into as many opinions as experts. The permafrost may thaw over hundreds of years. The carbon stored there will come out slowly, one said. Another suggested when that thaw comes, it will already be too late for our civilization, ruined by a changed climate further south. Other scenarios predict 50 to 80% of permafrost will thaw during this century. Maybe the released greenhouse gases will only equal ten or twenty years of our current emissions, one of our guests says. Only! Another brand new scientific paper suggests permafrost melt may have caused the great mass extinction 55 million years ago. We've never seen it. The frost was supposed to be permanent, and has been during human time on Earth. Now the signs of big changes are all around in the Arctic. What is coming? We can only model the future, with very imperfect tools, and guess the rest. Before we dive into expert level testimony about the latest science, let's start with a more user-friendly Radio Ecoshock interview. See my detailed notes below on my interview with Antoni Lewkowicz from the University of Ottawa. He's one of the world's recognized experts on permafrost, and yet quite good at explaining these issues to the public. See my detailed notes from the Lewkowicz interview below. Our theme music this week is from Laurie Anderson's latest album. The big question for this program, and for the world, is "What if the Permafrost thaws?" I was unable to find a figure for the amount of the world soil and rock that is frozen. The BBC clip we ran earlier claimed 60% of Russia is permanently frozen ground. There is some permafrost in the Andes of Chile, but most is obviously in Russia, Canada, and Alaska. The United States Permafrost Association estimates about 25% of Earth's surface is frozen, and permafrost may account for up to 40% of all soils on the planet. As you hear from Dr. Lewkowicz, interest in these frozen northern soils and rocks dropped - until scientists began to calculate a carbon budget for the world. The Wikipedia entry, which is still under construction, says this: "The most recent work investigating the permafrost carbon pool size estimates that 1400–1700 Gt of carbon is stored in permafrost soils worldwide. This large carbon pool represents more carbon than currently exists in all living things and twice as much carbon as exists in the atmosphere." Maybe so, but as we'll learn from our next expert, not all of that will reach the atmosphere. And we don't know how long it could take to get there. CHARLES KOVEN: WHAT DO CLIMATE MODELS PREDICT? Dr. Charles Koven is a permafrost and soils expe
