The Foreign Service Journal, February 2008

F O C U S F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 31 related sources of methane in the past 200 years are due mainly to increased burning of grasslands, forests and wood fuels, the use of landfills, more intense livestock raising and other agricultural activities, coal mining, wastewater treatment, rice cultivation and leakage of nat- ural gas from fossil fuel production. Natural sources, accounting for the other 30 percent of atmospheric methane, include wetlands, termites, oceans, hydrates and wildfires. For example, it has been estimat- ed that Russia’s West Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tons of methane, a quarter of all the CH 4 stored on the land surface of the earth. Recent assessments suggest that as the tundra and permafrost thaw, the potential for releases of methane during this century are real, though the time scales are uncertain. However, because the release of methane creates a positive feedback process, if the process begins at some threshold of increased tem- perature, the only way to halt continued release is to lower global temperatures — an unlikely prospect. The simple message, based on the IPCC and ACIA assessments, is that delays at the beginning only create substantially longer delays later on. Given these realities, it is essential that societies implement both adaptation and mitigation measures on time scales that will limit both the magnitude and timing of climate change. The IPCC and other assessments recommend that action plans begin within the coming decade. There is a high degree of agreement and much evi- dence that all stabilization levels assessed to date can be achieved by deployment of a portfolio of technologies that are either currently available or expected to be commer- cialized in the coming decades. This assumes, however, that appropriate and effective incentives are in place for their development, acquisition, deployment and diffusion and to address related barriers. According to the IPCC, such stabilization strategies would slow average annual global GDP growth by less than 0.12 percentage points. Further delay has the potential to both increase sub- stantially the magnitude of the impact and prolong the