5 ms·

Also permafrost is melting (irreversibly on human time-scales): http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/where-even-the-earth-is-melting-20121127-2a5tp

• pyre 14y ago
  > (irreversibly on human time-scales) This comes across as ambiguous and I didn't understand what you meant until I read the article. "It's happening at a rate that is irreversible on human time-scales"
  • rdtsc 14y ago
    I don't know what the original poster meant but I understand it to be that if it is cyclic phenomena and/or was/can be triggered by human activity, it has already entered into a phase that make it unlikely to be reversed no matter what humans do in say one to tens of humans lifetimes (say 100 to 1000 years). The system might correct itself or cycle back but it would be on very large time scales. The main gist from the articles is that the perma frost echo system is an amplifier for climate change. So it is like positive feedback. For maybe for what seems like a small change contributed by human activity, the permafrost echo system might respond and amplify that by some large factor. Anyway I don't know enough about the issue but that is what I understood from the article.
    • pyre 14y ago
      Maybe I wasn't even as clear as I intended, but I read it as: Now that this change has happened, 'putting the genie back in the bottle' would take an enormous amount of time. Even if there was a dedicated, directed effort to do so, we would probably be talking time-scales of millennia rather than things that us humans would actually be able to look forward to (even a couple of generations forward).