Researchers Tally the Global Cost of Melting Permafrost

Click here to access article by Tim Radford from Climate News Network based on a study by two scientists at Cambridge University, Chris Hope & Kevin Schaefer, published in Nature Climate Change (a science journal behind a paywall).

Although the emphasis in Radford's report is on the dollar costs, the social costs are much more striking to me. Presumably the researchers thought that by emphasizing dollar costs, they could more readily catch the attention of our capitalist ruling class.

The two scientists report in Nature Climate Change that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise as they are doing now, the thaw of the permafrost and the loss of the ice caps could release 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon now locked in as frozen organic matter.

What would follow would include a higher chance of catastrophic floods, wind storms, heat waves and drought, the accelerated melting of the Greenland (and West Antarctic) ice sheets, rising sea levels, the loss of agricultural land and rising energy demand as more and more people began to depend on air conditioning. 

This brief summary doesn't begin to capture the devastation in the lives of people impacted by these natural disasters resulting from human-caused climate destabilization.