Feedback is Hell

“The undiscovered polar regions are the home of men.” Henry David Thoreau, December 16, 1850.

One day in the not-so-distant future, the imaginative hold of the Polar regions will be largely history, melted away into dreams. Zones of purity and terror, the once mysterious Poles obsessed peoples for centuries. Emily Dickinson, for one. She called the back hall in the Homestead “the Northwest Passage,” and was fascinated by the search for the Erebus and Terror, the fatefully-named ships of the doomed Franklin Expedition of 1845. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein begins and ends in the Arctic, as the creature escapes to the northern ice, promising to immolate himself… but I wonder if he had second thoughts? Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym is lost somewhere towards the South Pole… thought by the addled Poester to be the portal into a Hollow Earth. And, more prosaically, I just finished reading the young Arthur Conan Doyle’s diary of an Arctic whaling expedition, grim, gory work — they only managed to kill a few whales, but butchered thousands of seals — in the cold, from which I clipped this image:
Feedback I:
The north is melting. The ice you know about. But tundra and its permafrost is a huge sink of greenhouses gases that, as it thaws, comes alive at the microbial level. This starts the release of carbon dioxide — there’s more than twice the amount in permafrost than currently in the atmosphere — into the planetary greenhouse. And as old organic matter thaws out enough to rot, methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, starts flowing out as well.

As the tundra warms in summer, dwarf birch and willow grow taller, replacing the hardy mosses which once toughed-out the old, harsher winters. During the winter, the now taller trees anchor snow drifts, which insulate the soil below, allowing the microbes to continue their heedless work. These critters can remain active even in freezing temperatures, but the warmer it is for them the better.

Feedback II:
As the ice melts, the race is on to exploit the fossil fuel and mineral resources of the Arctic, as well as to send more carbon-based fuels through both the fabled Northwest Passage and the eastern route (a supertanker full of LNG is making the first trip this way at this moment) to Asia. This all adds up to more fuel on the fire. The gangster regime of Russia, the Chinese dictatorship, the corporate oligarchy of the U.S.; none of these should be expected to do good here as they race in a frenzy towards the end, deranged creatures clawing each other in madness.