by Nancy Houser

Created on: September 24, 2007

"Further global warming of 1 C defines a critical threshold. Beyond that we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know," says Jim Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, September 2006.

With 150 nations gathering for the UN Climate Summit, excluding President Bush and the United States, on Monday, September 24, 2007-we shall look back last fall when Jim Hansen and his colleagues analyzed global temperature records, finding that surface temperatures have been slowly increasing by averages of 0.2 degrees C. every decade for the past 30 years.

The highest of this temperature increase was in high altitudes, located in the Northern Hemisphere, such as Siberia and North America. According to the team's findings, the Earth was as warm last fall as within the past 10,000 years, while being "within 1 degree C of being its hottest for a million years". The team predicted that another ten years of "business-as-usual" methods, with everyday outputs of carbon emissions, would prevent the northern ecosystems from preventing any runaway climate change. And to top it off, the frozen plant material in Canada and Siberia were believed to be a "ticking time bomb" of climate change.

However, surprise findings were found recently when both Siberia and Canada began to thaw, which led to serious water conditions. According to an article in Science by Noreen Parks, "A Climate Bomb Defused?" this thawing process began to foster the growth of Sphagnum mosses and other water-loving plants. Ideal for bacteria, the process of decomposing thawing plant material in the peat tripled methane emissions as weather warmed. This bad news has been part of the global warming threats from the get-go. The surprisingly good news was recently discovered when wind-blown seeds and spores led to an explosion in plant growth of the area. Viewed as a "John Wayne rescue", the plant increase came to the rescue of the area, providing a temporary fix by balancing out the greenhouse impact of methane release-released in the September 2007 issue of "Global Change Biology."

The plant growth spurt allowing the wet peatlands to accumulate over three times the amount of organic matter, with half being carbon. Parks' article states that normally, as temperatures would warm, "permafrost-enriching would thaw and exacerbate global warming by triggering soil bacteria to release enormous quantities of methane-a greenhouse gas 23 time more potent than carbon dioxide." This latest research has changed that theory, if only temporarily. (http://www.amarsodyssey.com/2007/09/23/temporary-fi x-for-greenhouse-effects-in-canada-and-siberia/)

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