Western Siberia thawing

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Warming hits 'tipping point':

"Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.

The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere."

This is being called an "ecological landslide". We've also got a volcano which is slowly erupting and increasing the size of the island it is on. Every nation has to pool its resources to work out what we are going to do about this and what we plan to leave for the future. If it's our behaviour which is causing this, why would we serve ourselves at the expense of future inhabitants of earth. We need to get serious about it and we need to seriously take up all the issues which have been raised. If we got ourselves into this mess, we can get ourselves out of it. Siberia is being called irreversible. Is that what we want?It's heated up 3 degrees over the past forty years. As I said, we don't need to worry about any cataclysmic event doing us in, we are doing it so nicely ourselves. And we think we are clever and better because we have "reason". So why don't we use it? Scoring political points for the methods we use seems rather trite, don't you think, in the light of the damage we've done getting rich quick?