WASHINGTON—While we all attempt to discover whether the faculty advisor to the Georgetown Prep yearbook back in 1983 was drunk or dead, or if he even existed at all, we also should take note that the handbasket is accelerating alarmingly toward its ultimate destination. From The Washington Post:

Set against the austere peaks of the Western Brooks Range, the lake, about 20 football fields in size, looked as if it was boiling. Its waters hissed, bubbled and popped as a powerful greenhouse gas escaped from the lake bed. Some bubbles grew as big as grapefruits, visibly lifting the water’s surface several inches and carrying up bits of mud from below. This was methane. As the permafrost thaws across the fast-warming Arctic, it releases carbon dioxide, the top planet-warming greenhouse gas, from the soil into the air. Sometimes, that thaw spurs the growth of lakes in the soft, sunken ground, and these deep-thawing bodies of water tend to unleash the harder-hitting methane gas. But not this much of it. This lake, which Walter Anthony dubbed Esieh Lake, looked different. And the volume of gas wafting from it could deliver the climate system another blow if lakes like this turn out to be widespread.

This is the part of the story that's amazing.

One thing she was sure of: If the warming Arctic releases more planet-warming methane, that could lead to. . . more warming. Scientists call this a feedback loop. “These lakes speed up permafrost thaw,” Walter Anthony said. “It’s an acceleration.” There was only so much the team would learn from the instruments they had hauled here. To get a firsthand look, they would have to get in. They’d brought their wet suits.

The Washington Post Getty Images

These people needed to bring shotguns to ward off grizzly bears just to get to where they had to get in order to conduct this research. Then they went diving into a lake full of methane. These people had to want it badly.

A week before the trip, Walter Anthony had published a major study delivering worrisome news about Arctic lakes in general. Her husband, Peter — also a scientist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks – was a co-author. The research tackled the central question now animating scientists who study permafrost soils, which can reach depths of nearly 5,000 feet and were laid down over tens of thousands of years or more as generations of plants died and sank beneath the surface. Because of the cold, those carbon-rich remains never fully decomposed, and the soil preserves them in an icy purgatory. Now, though, as the Arctic warms, decomposition is starting up — and it gives off greenhouse gases.

This is more than merely an academic phenomenon. The end of the permafrost means that huge chunks of land get ripped away along Alaska's Arctic coastline every time a storm hits, and the storms hit harder because the seas don't freeze as hard or for as long as they used to freeze. The Native people now can't use what they laughingly call the "Eskimo freezer," which was the practice of preserving meat in the winter by burying it in the permafrost.

The Washington Post Getty Images

More to the point here, though, the release of Arctic methane would change the whole game as far as the climate crisis is concerned.

Scientists know the permafrost contains an enormous amount of carbon — enough to catastrophically warm the planet if it were all released into the atmosphere. But they don’t know how fast it can come out and whether changes will be gradual or rapid. That’s where Walter Anthony’s work came in.

Overall, if Walter Anthony’s findings are correct, the total impact from thawing permafrost could be similar to adding a couple of large fossil-fuel-emitting economies — say, two more Germanys — to the planet. And that does not take into account the possibility of more lakes like Esieh, which appears to be a different phenomenon from thermokarst lakes, emitting gases faster.

This is groundbreaking science delivering a substantial warning. And, reading it here in the Capitol, you realize that, for fully half of the American political system, these people are diving into freezing lakes full of methane for nothing, because, for fully half of the American political system, the problem they are studying doesn't exist, or it's a natural cyclical event, or there's nothing we can do about it anyway.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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