From Reuters: “More research [is] urgently needed into the possibility of a runaway release of methane, a powerful heat-trapping gas trapped in frozen soils in Siberia, Canada, Alaska and Nordic nations, it said in a 2008 yearbook issued at 154-nation talks in Monaco…. Vast amounts of methane entering the atmosphere “would lead to abrupt changes in the climate that would likely be irreversible,” UNEP said. “We must not cross that threshold.”

This isn’t actually new news. Take a look at Scientists warn thawing Siberia may trigger global meltdown, from WikiNews, from 2005.

We’ve known about this for two to three years and if we’d been paying attention, it would have been obvious: As frozen meat melts, it starts to rot. As frozen tundra melts, it starts to rot.

Rotting stuff puts out smells. Those smells include about a third methane, a mildly-noxious aroma. When mixed with sulfur, it make our farts stink.

But methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. So, as the formerly permanently-frozen top few feet of Siberia, Canada, Alaska, and Scandinavia begin to thaw, well, it’s going to rot. Meaning, it will put out methane. It will add a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. This will mean that the greenhouse effect will be increased.

What does that mean? “The permafrost has been intact for 11,000 years and started melting 3 to 4 years ago, according to Kirpotin.” (from above WikiNews, in 2005).

This is a long-term stability now disrupted, by climate warming.

This means that the permafrost even farther north will keep on rotting and spewing a powerful greenhouse gas, warming us further and much faster than previously expected.

One domino falls. No big deal. Bats collapsing. Bees collapsing. Amphibians collapsing.

It’s only warming. What’s the big deal? I like my winters mild.

Ian Sample “Warming hits ‘tipping point’“. The Guardian, Aug 11 2005

“Siberia’s rapid thaw causes alarm“. BBC News, Aug 11 2005

We’ve been watching this the last week. The bat syndrome continues.

Please remember, the evidence indicates this is hibernation interruption, not “white nose syndrome,” fungal infection, pneumonia, or other specific malady, in terms of the active agent. Those are symptoms (and/not) cause.

The bats are waking up hungry, literally starving, way too early. They also probably went to sleep, way too late. Now the emaciated-bat syndrome is being seen even more regionally.

From Republican-American (CT):
A mysterious disease has killed hibernating bats in New York and Vermont, is spreading into Massachusetts, and may already be in Connecticut…. Biologists have now identified sick bats in Chester, Mass., 40 miles north of Connecticut’s Barkhamsted Reservoir, and will be looking for them here in March.

Looking for them “here” in March??

We need to understand this now, not in a week. Mobilize! We need to know what this means, ASAP.

Something about the bat die-offs is really freaking me out. It’s the “90-97%” death rate, in colonies of thousands. It’s happening in caves in NY and Vermont. First noticed last winter in an isolated instance, it’s being found with increasing frequency in caves in the Northeast.

Why is this affecting me so much? Perhaps because I fell in love with bats years ago, working on a reference work on mammals — the many faces of bats are so astonishing. Perhaps it’s because they eat half their weight in insects every night, an amazing feat of evening echolocation that keeps farmers’ fields free from certain moths and thus their voracious larvae, removes a thousand mosquitos a night per bat. Or it’s that the cause of death is starvation, because their hibernation systems aren’t working right, and they’re agitatedly using up their fat stores too fast; they’re found as gaunt sacks of bones, outside the caves, as well as inside.

Or it’s because they’re such a joy to watch in the twilight sky, and I’ll miss them.

But in the end I’m freaked mostly by what I was thinking on the way into work: the fungal growth around the bats’ noses are indicative of weak immune systems, as well as lack of colonial grooming. What would make an entire colony’s immune systems weak? Well, perhaps some of the biome-breach realities that we’ve been seeing, where chemicals move up the food chain, disrupt endocrine systems, and cause strange immune system responses.

Picture this: some delectable insect that apple growers (let’s say) keep at bay with chemicals — a fly, a moth, or something like that — has evolved a resistance to that chemical. That means that the fly doesn’t drop to the ground dead (like it used to do), but rather flies around, perhaps ill, but not dead. It becomes ideal bat-food — a slow-moving prey without its wits about it.

Now, the top predator of the winged areas is ingesting thousands of these insects, nightly. Like swordfish, and tuna, and killer whales in the ocean, the chemicals concentrate in the predator (or scavenger). This may have been going on for the last couple years, and just now has built up to toxic levels.

Or, the late winter (as one bat-watcher noted) in the region resulted in the bats flying too late in the year, after the insects had disappeared; they went to bed hungry, and are waking up too early, hungry, emaciated, and ill.

I dearly hope that there’s a specific cause that can be identified, rather than remain the mystery that the bee colony collapse disorder is currently.

I fear we are reaching tipping points of toxicity in our biospheres, and it scares the hell out of me.