It's been hot lately

I'm beginning to become convinced that by the time the corporate honchos and their sock puppet scientist skeptics are forced to accept the fact of global warming, it will be too late. New Scientist for last Thursday has the latest:

The world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.

The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

[Sergei] Kirpotin[, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia,] describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre across.

And that may not be the worst of it: If we're lucky, the bogs will dry as they warm, in which case the methane will oxidize and enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. If we're not lucky and the bogs stay wet,

as is the case in western Siberia today, then the methane will be released straight into the atmosphere. Methane is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

In either case but worse in the second, the greenhouse gases enhance the warming trend which then accelerates the melting which releases more gases in the sort of feedback loop about which climate scientists have been increasingly concerned.

You know those little "my present mood" thingies some bloggers have? If I had one, it would now say "We're doomed."