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Lincoln's Grave Warning Realized

...a letter from President Abraham Lincoln to William F Elkins on 21 November 1864:

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country...corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

Eight Principles of Uncivilization

by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine


‘We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’


  1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.

  2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.

  3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.

  4. We will reassert the role of story-telling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.

  5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.

  6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.

  7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.

  8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.



The Dark Mountain Manifesto

(excerpt)
Walking on lava

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.

The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.

What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.

Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new.

‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’ Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion,’ but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, but the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly.

The remainder of the essay can be read online: Dark Mountain manifesto.


Paul is the author of One No, Many Yeses and Real England. He was deputy editor of The Ecologist between 1999 and 2001. His first poetry collection, Kidland, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. His website is www.paulkingsnorth.net

Dougald writes the blog Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job). He is a former BBC journalist and has written for and edited various online and offline magazines. His website is www.dougald.co.uk

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The "Eight principles of uncivilisation" are expanded in the Dark Mountain manifesto (also available as PDF or purchased as a limited-edition, hand-stitched pamphlet.

See the site for the blog and information about their upcoming festival May 28-30.

Several Energy Bulletin contributors are on their Blogroll, including John Michael Greer, Sharon Astyk, Rob Hopkins and Dmitry Orlov. Also mentioned are Wendell Berry and Ivan Illich.

George Monbiot recently wrote a column in the Guardian about Dark Mountain Project: I share their despair, but I'm not quite ready to climb the Dark Mountain.

On Common Dreams, Robert C. Koehler wrote a related piece: Dark Green.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Original article available here
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Our American Objectives

"Our national goals must be to rejuvenate the domestic economy; transfer the economic basis of our nation from consumptive to productive; recapitalize education and the technologies industries; achieve complete energy independence; move towards renewable energy sources;
restore public confidence in the government's ability to undertake large national infrastructure projects, and re-assert its right to set goals and policies to ensure those projects proceed smoothly; define the overarching standards for a reconstructed America including a federal review of the building and planning codes now in use, and probably the writing of new mandates that set out 21st-century standards and priorities for energy use, urban and transportation planning, and environmental design, which once put into law and accepted into general use, will be very difficult to change; commit funding for a massive 10- or 20-year program that will upgrade or replace failing components of America's infrastructure as the nation is broke (as it was in FDR's day) and this kind of spending needs to be seen as the long-term investment in our economic future that it is; restore a fair, honest, broad-based system of public contracting that will put large numbers of Americans to work on these new projects (and write the new rules in a way that ensures that the firms doing the most innovative work don't have to compete with unfair behemoth corporations like Halliburton and Lockheed for the lion's share of the funding) so that once there is a healthy, competitive construction industry that knows how to build sustainable projects—and is relying on the government to keep it in business—we will get a political constituency that will fight to ensure that the rebuilding will continue for the next several decades, regardless of what political party is in power; use the forces of globalization and information to strengthen and expand existing democratic alliances and created new ones; employ these alliances to destroy terrorist networks and establish new international security structures; lead, through our historic principles, on international cooperative efforts in spreading economic opportunity and democratic liberties, nation building, counter-prolification, and optimum environmental protection and safeguards; and cherish, honor, and protect our history and traditions of liberty and freedoms domestically particularly with respect to the Bill of Rights."

"The renewed social contract for America with its middle class and poor must:
  • Raise the minimum wage still higher and on a regular basis. It has fallen far behind increases in inflation since the 1970s, and that affects higher level wages as well.
  • Encourage living-wage programs by local governments. Governments can demand that their contractors and suppliers pay well above the minimum wage. There is substantial evidence that this does not result in an undue loss of jobs.
  • Enforce the labor laws vigilantly. Minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws are violated to a stunning degree. American workers shouldn't be forced by their employers to understate the number of hours worked or be locked in the warehouse so they can't leave on time. Workers often make only $2 and $3 an hour.
  • Unions are not seeking a free pass to organize secretly when they advocate for open check-offs on cards to approve of a union vote. They are seeking to organize without persistent and often illegal management interference. Penalties for illegally deterring such organizing are so light, it makes little sense for management not to pursue strategies to stop organizing even at the cost of prosecution.
  • Request that trading partners develop serious environmental standards and worker-protection laws. This is good for them, bringing a progressive revolution and a robust domestic market to their countries. It is good for America, which will be able to compete on a more level playing field.
  • Demand that the president, governors and mayors speak up about unconscionable executive salaries and low wages. The influence from the top cannot be underestimated. A president who looks the other way sends a strong signal to business. A president who demands responsible treatment of workers will get a response. Business does not like such attention.
  • These measures should be accompanied by serious investment in modernized infrastructure and energy alternatives, which can create millions of domestic jobs that pay good salaries. It should also be accompanied by a policy that supports a lower dollar -- contrary to Rubinomics -- in order to stimulate manufacturing exports again. Accomplishing this may require a new system of semi-fixed currencies across the globe. The unabashed high-dollar policy of the past twenty years has led to imbalances around the world that have contributed fundamentally to US overindebtedness.
  • And finally, the nation needs more balance on the part of the Federal Reserve between subduing inflation and creating jobs. Americans can live with inflation above 2 percent a year. There is no academic evidence to support a 2 percent annual target, although the Fed has made this its informal target."

The Continuing Case for The Second Bill of Rights for All American Citzens

...from Michael Lind on Salon.com on 11 January 2010 ....

The Case for Economic Rights

FDR said it and it holds 66 years later: There are benefits and opportunities every American should expect to enjoy

Three score and six years ago, the greatest president of the 20th century gave one of his greatest speeches. On Jan. 11, 1944, in a State of the Union address that deserves to be ranked with Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" and King's "I Have a Dream" speech, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for recognition of a "Second Bill of Rights." According to FDR:

"This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights -- among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty. As our nation has grown in size and stature, however -- as our industrial economy expanded -- these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness."

Roosevelt did not argue that economic rights had superseded basic, old-fashioned political and civil rights. The argument of authoritarians and totalitarians that economic rights are more important than non-economic liberty was abhorrent to him. Instead, with the examples of the fascist and communist regimes of his time in mind, he argued that the purpose of economic rights was to support and reinforce, not replace, civil and political liberties:

"We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. 'Necessitous men are not free men.' People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all -- regardless of station, race, or creed."

President Roosevelt was not promoting economic rights that were necessarily enforceable in court, but rather economic benefits and opportunities that every American should expect to enjoy by virtue of citizenship in our democratic republic. Many of the rights he identified have been secured by programs with bipartisan support. These include:

"the right to a good education" (the G.I. Bill, student loans, Pell Grants, Head Start, federal aid to K-12 schools) and

"the right of every family to a decent home" (federally subsidized home loans and tax breaks for home ownership). But even before the global economic crisis, the U.S. fell short when it came to full employment --

"the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation"

-- and a living wage --

"the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation."

Roosevelt's vision was controversial at the time and is contested today. When it comes to providing a safety net for Americans, there are three distinct paradigms, which I would describe as economic citizenship, welfare corporatism and faith-based charity.

Supporters of faith-based charity among "theoconservatives" such as Marvin Olasky argue that modern social insurance like Social Security and Medicare was a mistake. The medieval British and colonial American systems of relying on religious institutions to care for the sick and poor should have been continued and built upon, with government subsidies to "faith-based institutions."

The secular business-class right, however, has shown little interest in faith-based charity, perhaps because it is difficult for rent-seeking bankers, brokers and other private sector actors to extract huge amounts of money from tax-exempt church hospitals and church soup lines. The right's preferred alternative to the progressive vision of economic citizenship is what I call "welfare corporatism." Whereas economic citizenship views protection against sickness, unemployment and old age as entitlements of citizens in a democratic republic, welfare corporatism treats these necessities of life as commodities like groceries or appliances, to be purchased in a market by people who are thought of as consumers, not citizens.

Let's contrast ideal versions of the two approaches. In the ideal America of economic citizenship, there would be a single, universal, integrated, lifelong system of economic security including

single-payer healthcare,

Social Security, unemployment payments and

family leave

paid for by a single contributory payroll tax (which could be made progressive in various ways or reduced by combination with other revenue streams). Funding for all programs would be entirely nationalized, although states could play a role in administration. There would still be supplementary private markets in health and retirement products and services for the affluent, but most middle-class Americans would continue to rely primarily on the simple, user-friendly public system of economic security. As Steven Attewell points out, the Social Security Act of 1935 was intended not merely to provide public pensions for the elderly but to establish a framework for a comprehensive system of social insurance corresponding to President Roosevelt's "right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment." Attewell writes: "We need to go back to the original drawing board -- the Social Security Act of 1935 -- to finish the job it began and create a truly universal and comprehensive social welfare state."

In the utopia of welfare corporatism, today's public benefits -- Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and, in a few states, public family leave programs -- would be abolished and replaced by harebrained schemes dreamed up by libertarian ideologues at corporate-funded think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Tax subsidies would be funneled to insurance companies, brokers and banks. Social Security would be replaced by a bewildering miscellany of tax-favored personal savings accounts. Medicare would be replaced by a dog's breakfast of tax subsidies for purchasing health insurance and personal medical savings accounts. Unemployment insurance would give way to yet another Rube Goldberg scheme of tax-favored unemployment insurance accounts. As for family leave -- well, if you're not wealthy enough to pay out of pocket for a nanny for your child or a nurse for your parent, you're out of luck.

The strongest case for economic citizenship instead of welfare corporatism is economic. Economic citizenship is more efficient and cheaper in the long run, because the government need only meet costs, while subsidized private providers must make a profit. The Democratic and Republican supporters of welfare corporatism justify their system of massive subsidies for for-profit healthcare and retirement security with the claim that market competition will keep down prices. If only that were true. Competitive markets are probably impossible to create, in the highly regulated insurance sector and the highly concentrated financial sector that sells private retirement goods and services.

It follows that a policy of subsidizing oligopolies and monopolies, via government subsidies to consumers, in the absence of government-imposed price controls, is a recipe for cost inflation, as the providers jack up their prices, sending the consumers back to Congress to demand even more public subsidies. By its very nature, welfare corporatism funnels public resources, in the form of tax breaks, to rent-seeking, predatory firms in the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector, with ever-swelling dead-weight costs on the economy. Welfare corporatism equals corporate welfare.

Unfortunately, most progressives have failed to make the case against the libertarian myth of market competition in the provision of social insurance. All too many, including President Obama, have made the too-clever-by-half argument that the public option would keep prices down by means of market competition. In other words, the center-left has borrowed a bogus argument about competition from right-wing free-market fundamentalism in order to defend a token public program that ceased to be of any interest once Obama and the Democrats in Congress ruled that Americans with employer-provided insurance would be banned from joining the public option. When you're reduced to parroting the opposition's erroneous theories, in the process of begging for a slight modification of the opposition's pet program, you clearly don't have the nerve or the patience to play the long game in politics.

In a response to one of my earlier columns, Will Marshall wonders how I can dare to criticize the legacy of Bill Clinton, a Democrat. My reasons should be clear by now. I am not a partisan Democratic operative focused on winning the next election. I am interested only in strengthening the republic through a gradual expansion of economic citizenship in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights. If this means criticizing Democratic presidents who expand welfare corporatism instead of economic citizenship, so be it.

As part of his opportunistic policy of triangulation between his own party and the opposition, Bill Clinton joined the Republicans in a three-pronged assault on New Deal economic citizenship. He and the Republican Congress abolished Aid to Families With Dependent Children, a flawed and unpopular means-tested program for the poor that should have been reformed as a national program rather than turned over to the states as the neo-Confederate right insisted. Instead of piecemeal expansion of single-payer healthcare, Clinton pushed a version of employer-based welfare corporatism plus subsidies that came out of the playbook of moderate Republicans like Nixon. And we now know that Clinton secretly agreed to support Newt Gingrich's drive to partly privatize Social Security, in return for dedicating the federal government's imaginary future surpluses to what was left of Social Security. In 2005, Will Marshall argued in favor of private accounts, on the grounds that they would soften up Americans for cuts in Social Security: "If today's workers start saving and investing more in stocks and bonds, the returns they earn would allow us to trim their Social Security benefits later, without reducing their overall standard of living."

While George W. Bush pushed for partial privatization of Social Security, he failed because of massive public opposition. But Bush and the Republican majority in Congress succeeded in enacting the Social Security drug benefit, a flawed but genuine expansion of economic citizenship. Clinton is the only president to have successfully supported the destruction of a New Deal entitlement, while Bush presided over the greatest expansion of the Rooseveltian entitlement system since Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare.

For his part, Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, rejected single-payer in favor of a moderately conservative welfare corporatist approach to healthcare reform. In contrast, Obama's proposal for student loan reform, an idea discussed in the Clinton years, would move in the right direction, away from welfare corporatism and toward economic citizenship, by replacing subsidized third-party lenders with direct government provision of student loans to needy college students.

Parties are coalitions of interest groups, they are not public philosophies, and presidents, great and minor, are and have to be opportunists. In contrast, reformers only have a chance of succeeding if they stick to their basic principles and keep their eyes on the prize. Progressives should support any politician, Democrat or Republican, who expands economic citizenship to the detriment of welfare corporatism, and they should oppose any politician, Democrat or Republican, who expands welfare corporatism to the detriment of economic citizenship.

Any more questions?

Monetary Cost of Iraq War

21 February 2009

Big Change Coming Sooner Than Most Can Imagine

...From Margot Roosevelt in the Friday 20 February edition of The Los Angeles Times...

Bubbles of Warning, Beneath the Ice

By Margot Roosevelt
11:44 AM PST, February 20, 2009
Four miles south of the Arctic Circle, the morning sky is streaked with apricot. Frozen rivers split the tundra of the Seward Peninsula, coiling into vast lakes. And on a silent, wind-whipped pond, a lone figure, sweating and panting, shovels snow off the ice.

The young woman with curly reddish hair stops, scribbles data, snaps a photo, grabs a heavy metal pick and stabs at white orbs in the thick black ice.

"Every time I see bubbles, I have the same feeling," says Katey Walter, a University of Alaska researcher. "They are amazing and beautiful."

Beautiful, yes. But ominous. When her pick breaks through the surface, the orbs burst with a low gurgle, spewing methane, a potent greenhouse gas that could accelerate the pace of climate change across the globe.

International experts are alarmed. "Methane release due to thawing permafrost in the Arctic is a global warming wild card," warned a report by the United Nations Environment Programme last year. Large amounts entering the atmosphere, it concluded, could lead to "abrupt changes in the climate that would likely be irreversible."

Methane (CH4) has at least 20 times the heat-trapping effect of an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide (CO2). As warmer air thaws Arctic soils, as much as 50 billion metric tons of methane could be released from beneath Siberian lakes alone, according to Walter’s research. That would amount to 10 times the amount currently in the atmosphere.

At 32, Walter, an aquatic ecologist, is a rising star among the thousands of scientists who are struggling to map, measure and predict climate change. Parts of her doctoral dissertation on Siberian lakes were published in three prestigious journals in 2007: Science, Nature and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

According to one of her studies, methane emissions from Arctic lakes were a major contributor to a period of global warming more than 11,000 years ago.

"It happened on a large scale in the past, and it could happen on a large scale in the future," says Walter, who refers to potential methane emissions as "a time bomb."

Methane levels in the atmosphere have tripled since preindustrial times. Human activities, including rice cultivation, cattle raising, and coal mining, account for about 70% of releases, according to recent studies. Natural sources, from tropical wetlands to termites, make up the rest. But those estimates had not incorporated the bubbles Walter was probing on an autumn morning on the Seward Peninsula.

That gurgling gas could change the entire model for predicting global warming. And lakes are not the only methane source: Newly discovered seeps -- places where methane leaks to the surface -- from the shallow waters of Siberia's vast continental shelf are also likely to upset previous assumptions.

Walter's work "has gotten a lot of attention," said John E. Walsh, chief scientist of the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks. "She found direct evidence of methane releases in high-latitude lakes. That was not fully realized before."

In a field where the science often seems opaque, Walter's research has a flashy side. She enjoys igniting methane seeps with a cigarette lighter, leaping away as the gas flares as high as 20 feet.

"It's fun," she says. "And it is informative."

Videos of the stunts have swept through the Internet, rare visual evidence of possible danger ahead. At a recent Senate hearing, Al Gore played a clip of her lighting a methane seep. The BBC, the Discovery Channel and the History Channel have featured her in documentaries.

But the complex science of Arctic methane is only beginning to be understood. In the desolate wilderness of the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, a sense of urgency is palpable among Walter and three fellow researchers, hunkered down in neon-orange tents.

An occasional helicopter ferries supplies from Nome, the closest town, soaring over scattered herds of caribou. A red fox scampers through the brush. Across a snowfield, bear tracks recede into the distance, a reminder that field science isn't for sissies.

"Can you shoot a gun?" Walter asks a visitor, as she heads out to one of 20 lakes she is surveying. When the answer is noncommittal, she hands over bear spray and instructs: "Don't use it until the bear is right up close, facing you."

Nowhere is the evidence of a heating planet more dramatic than in the polar regions. Over the last 50 years, the Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Last summer, for the first time in recorded history, the North Pole could be circumnavigated. Ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica are melting rapidly. Polar bears and emperor penguins are threatened with extinction.

Even as glaciers and sea ice have captured the most headlines, growing concern is now focused on the transformation of permafrost -- soils that are frozen year-round.

Today, 20% of Earth's land surface is locked up in a deep freeze. But scientists predict that air temperature in the Arctic is likely to rise as much as 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. That is expected to boost the emission of carbon compounds from soils.

The upper 3 meters (about 10 feet) of permafrost store 1.7 trillion metric tons of carbon, more than double the amount in the atmosphere today, according to a recent study in the journal Bioscience.

"We are seeing thawing down to 5 meters," says geophysicist Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska. "A third to a half of permafrost is already within a degree to a degree and a half [Celsius] of thawing."

If only 1% of permafrost carbon were to be released each year, that could double the globe's current annual carbon emissions, Romanovsky notes. "We are at a tipping point for positive feedback," he warns, referring to a process where warming spurs emissions, which in turn generate more heat, in an uncontrollable cycle.

Walter's work is crucial, according to Romanovsky and others, because global warming hinges partly on the ratio of how much carbon is released as CO2 vs. how much as methane, a molecule that contains both carbon and hydrogen. Methane, although a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, breaks down more quickly. But when it does, it oxidizes into a carbon dioxide molecule, which can last more than a century in the atmosphere.

Out on the lake, Walter explains: When organic matter (dead plants and animals) rots in the ground, it gives off carbon dioxide. Much of the organic material of thawed permafrost is expected to release carbon dioxide.

But as ice inside permafrost melts, small sinkholes open in the ground and fill with water, joining together to form millions of ponds and lakes. Organic matter slips from eroding shorelines to lake bottoms, where microbes feed on it. Because lake bottoms are oxygen-free, the microbes generate methane in addition to carbon dioxide -- as in the burping La Brea tar pits.

"These lakes are getting bigger -- in some places by a meter a year," Walter says, scooping out slush from the hole she has punched through 6 inches of ice. Into the seep, she inserts a plastic umbrellalike contraption fitted with a bottle to collect gas and a suspended brick to hold it straight.

Before Walter perfected the methane trap, when she was a graduate student in Siberia, she would swim in near-freezing water, dodging leeches and muskrats. Once she caught pneumonia. Another time, her hair caught on fire as she ignited a methane seep.

On the Seward Peninsula trip, she hikes up to eight miles a day from lake to lake through snowdrifts. Her hip is black and blue from a fall through the ice. "Methane is hard work," she says with a smile.

At each seep, Walter places a small red flag so her colleagues can find the bubbles. Lawrence Plug, a geophysicist from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia; Guido Grosse, a German geologist; and Benjamin M. Jones, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher, help shovel off the ice in straight-line paths, take notes on the size of each bubble group, record the location with global positioning system devices, and measure the depth of the lakes.

In the evening, in a cramped cook tent, jars of peanut butter and Nutella sit amid satellite data maps and a textbook on "Applied Linear Statistical Models." Frosted hats and mittens drip from a clothesline. Jones cooks up a batch of hamburger as Walter labels methane bottles with a marker and enters data into her laptop.

Over the next two years, the researchers, funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, will move between Siberia and Alaska. They will drill permafrost cores, map seeps and analyze data to produce a model of how methane from Arctic lakes might affect Earth's future climate.

"By figuring out how quickly permafrost thawed in the past, we can test our models to predict how fast it could thaw in the next 100 years," says Plug, who will make the complex calculations. "If the temperature warms a couple of degrees Celsius, the lakes could expand at two or three times their current rate."

Elsewhere, scientists cast a wary eye toward clouds of methane bubbles roiling the waters of the Siberian continental shelf. Those emissions, possibly from sub-surface permafrost, are even harder to measure than lake emissions.

Meanwhile, researchers are debating the possibility of eventual seeps from methane hydrates -- icy formations beneath the continental shelves and the ocean bottom, and far below land-based permafrost.

Walsh, at the International Arctic Research Center, emphasizes the "huge range of uncertainty" as to how much climate change methane emissions could trigger. "The potential is there for large releases. But there is also a risk of alarmism."

To many Alaskans, it is hardly news that permafrost is thawing: Across the state, houses have been collapsing and trees tipping over. Researchers estimate that repairing affected schools, roads and bridges will cost up to $6 billion over the next two decades.

But the global implications have yet to sink in.

Out on the wild frontier of climate research, far from the legislatures and the diplomatic gatherings where climate policy is debated, Katey Walter and her colleagues focus on what they call "ground truthing."

And beyond that laborious data-gathering, Walter has a mission: to spread the word about what is happening. At the beginning of her field trip, she stops in Nome and leads a group of fifth-graders, many from Native Alaskan tribes, out to poke holes in the ice of a nearby lake and light methane flares.

She talks to them about people who live in faraway cities, driving automobiles and working in industries that emit carbon dioxide. And how that causes warming that is felt in the Arctic. And why, even though there are so few people in Alaska, the ice around them is melting.

"That's what we're studying," she explains. "It's all related."

*

The impact of this warming gas being released so suddenly and quickly into the atmosphere will be much faster and greater than many realize. Along with the man-made pollutants being released in staggering numbers, methane will trigger a climate jolt that will be plainly shocking to mankind within the next few to several years. And it won't be pretty....

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-global-warming-methane22-2009feb22-g,0,1032287.graphic

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