Editorial: Another ‘vicious circle’

Saturday, Sept. 9, 2006 | 7:41 a.m.

There was more distressing news on climate change this week. A study in the journal Nature reported that troubling amounts of the greenhouse gas methane are escaping long-frozen soil as global warming melts the world's permafrost. It was yet another wake-up call for the Bush administration and other U.S. policymakers who have yet to take global warming seriously.

The news on methane followed a separate study released a few months ago in the journal Science, which reported that the amount of carbon dioxide - the gas more typically associated with global warming - also is escaping permafrost in far greater amounts than was once believed. The study said that the carbon dioxide that seeps into the atmosphere from melting permafrost may be 100 times greater than the amount caused by burning fossil fuels.

Now the Nature study has added grim news about methane - perhaps an even greater villain because it is even more effective than carbon dioxide in trapping heat inside the Earth's atmosphere.

The Nature report focused on Siberian permafrost known as yedoma, shedding new light on an area that researchers had not thoroughly analyzed before.

The scientists used a newly improved method of measuring methane release. Their distressing discovery: methane, formerly frozen in the soil for thousands of years, is bubbling up to the surface of the melting permafrost at a rate five times faster than previously measured.

Methane helps create a "vicious circle," Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, told the Associated Press. As global warming speeds the release of greenhouse gases, more heat is trapped, the planet is further heated, and more of the permafrost melts.

"That's the thing that is scary about this whole thing," Field said. "There are lots of mechanisms that tend to be self-perpetuating and relatively few that tend to shut it off."

The methane release in Siberia is not just a Siberian problem. It ultimately affects the entire planet. And it can be argued that the global warming that accelerates permafrost melt is a result, in part, of U.S. polluters. By some estimates, the United States produces 25 percent of the Earth's greenhouse gases.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has done virtually nothing to curb emissions and continues to thumb its nose at the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This nation should be leading by example in a worldwide effort to attack global warming. But Bush fiddles while the world warms.