Global warming the Siberia effect? Deforestation

[oldcolner]

A serious Saturday topic - maybe off topic

Just watched Simon Reeves trip across Russia part 1 and he showed in several locations in the east how global warming was impacting there. I had no idea of the vastness of Russia with one train the Trans Siberian Express going through 7 time zones.
40% of Russia is built on permafrost and in several locations in Siberia this is melting sufficiently to damage foundations of buildings, with them leaning and collapsing. Another location showed a massive sink hole which had recently been created miles across and hundreds of feet deep and was growing at 15 metres a year.
Siberia is mostly forest and one part of that the size of India is being deforested at at rate of an area the size of Wales each year. They are not replanting. It is shipped to China to be made into things for the West. The Russian FSB (exKGB ) were sensitive to him filming the lorries full of trees and followed him, took his driver off for tests took their passports away and transported him onto the train after holding him on several occasions.
The points he made were
As trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen the more we deforest the more CO2 levels rise. He also explained that Permafrost traps massive amounts of methane which is worse than CO2 at global warming. The faster ithe permafrost melts the greater the methane released and the greater becomes the global warming problem.
Deforestation is also happening in the Amazon and Malaysia Indonesia etc.
So all this stuff about coal and diesel is a side issue. Russia will be sinking to a hole of its own making and taking us with it.
Maybe they should send Trump to Siberia.

[The Bedlington Terrier]

"Maybe they should send Trump to Siberia?". Let's hope so OC!

[sinkov]

Maybe they should send 59/60, along with assorted Greenpeace, WWF and LibDem climate change alarmists. Knock some sense into them before they do much more damage.

[oldcolner]

I think the experience would confirm all their worst fears.

This article highlights the many consequences of melting permafrost

In the 1980s, the temperature of permafrost in Alaska, Russia and other Arctic regions averaged to be almost 18°F,” the U.S. Geological Survey explained in 2015. “Now the average is just over 28°F.”

it’s possible to revive 30,000-year-old viruses trapped in the permafrost.Last August, an outbreak of anthrax in Siberia sickened 72 people and took the life of a 12-year-old boy. Health officials pinpointed the outbreak to an unusual source.

Abnormally high temperatures had thawed the corpses of long-dead reindeer and other animals.

For tens of thousands of years, permafrost has acted like a freezer, keeping 1,400 gigatons (billion tons) of plant matter carbon trapped in the soil. (That’s more than double the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere.)

https://www.vox.com/2017/9/6/1606217...afrost-melting