With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

freezing over in winter. And Euan Nisbet, of London's Royal Holloway
College, who oversees a big international methane-monitoring program that
includes Siberia, said his estimate was that methane releases from the
western Siberian peat bog were up to 100,000 tons a day, which meant a
warming effect on the planet greater than that of all the U.S.'s man-made
emissions. "This huge methane flux depends on temperature," he said. "If
peatlands become wetter with warming and permafrost degradation,
methane release from peatlands to the atmosphere will dramatically
increase."
So I wrote up Kirpotin's story for New Scientist magazine, emphasizing
the methane angle. It went around the world. The London Guardian
reproduced much of it the day after the story was released, under the
front-page banner headline "Warming hits 'tipping point.'" In Dr.
Strangelove, one nuclear device dropped on Siberia unleashed a thousand
more. Here, in the real world of melting Arctic permafrost, one degree of
global warming could unleash enough methane to raise temperatures
several more degrees.
I had visited western Siberia a few years before, traveling with Western
forest and oil-industry scientists to Noyabr'sk, a large oil town on the south
side of the great peat bog. On a series of helicopter rides, I had seen
thousands of square miles of still-intact swamp sitting on top of permafrost.
The landscape was terribly scarred by human activity: divided into
fragments by oil pipelines, roads, pylons, and seismic-survey routes;
smeared with spilled oil; littered with abandoned drums, pipes, cables, and
the remains of old gulags and half-built railways; and shrouded in black