Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "Melting wetlands - How can nature slow down climate change? | DW Documentary" video.

  1. There are no actual global observational data on changes to permafrost. The Li et al 2022 paper 'Changes in permafrost extent and active layer thickness in the Northern Hemisphere from 1969 to 2018' states "The temporal change characteristics of the permafrost extent and ALT [active layer thickness] for the NH [Northern Hemisphere] have not been studied." These things have only been poorly estimated or modelled. The aforementioned paper modelled permafrost extent decreased from 23.25 × 10⁶km2 (average from 1969 to 1973) to 21.64 × 10⁶km2 (average from 2014 to 2018), with a linear rate of −0.023 × 10⁶ km2/a. That's an annual change of 0.099 of a percent. That's negligible and could just as easily be increasing due to the uncertainty in the modelling. Out of global estimated emissions of methane of around 600 Tg CH4 per year, the best estimate of emissions from pan-Arctic permafrost is 1 Tg CH4 per year (Elder et al, 2021), so that's less than 0.17%. It's almost nothing.
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