'Many climate scientists say their biggest fear is that warming could melt the Arctic permafrost—which stretches for thousands of miles across Alaska, Canada, and Siberia. There is twice as much CO2 locked beneath the tundra as there is in the earth’s atmosphere. Melting would release enormous stores of methane, a greenhouse gas nearly thirty times more potent than carbon dioxide. If that happens, as the hydrologist Jane C. S. Long told me when we met recently in her office at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, “it’s game over.”'
The Climate Fixers / 2012
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