Will Alaskas now longer growing seasons help ease global warming or add to it via the tundra thrawing?

Question

http://www.kansascity.com/105/story/722891.html#recent_comm

Will nature channel the nourishment of this soil into a great flowering of plant life that soaks up greenhouse gas and tamps down the causes of climate change?

Or will a microbial awakening of decomposition simply belch out more planet-heating carbon dioxide?"

Answer 1

Rather than giving an uninformed opinion like many in this forum or (worse!) using your question to rant about conspiracies, denigrate liberals, selfishly whine about how much it will cost me or some other topic only barely related to the question, I will do what I've always done: Listen to the facts.

"The analyses are still taking shape, and they don’t yet clearly reveal whether a warming tundra mellows out climate fluctuations or revs them up" (from the link you provide). In other words, we cannot answer your question (yet).

Answer 2

Methane stored in the frozen ice (called: methane hydrates) will be released as the ice melts and will make the situation far worse than it is.  You ain't seen nothin yet.  

Methane is 21 times worse of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide...

Answer 3

Why panic a thousand years ago the Inuit farmed those lands and grazed their flocks over that same tundra. People who have listened to way to much scare and panic rhetoric need to settle down and read some good material that is true not manufactured.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamourous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L.Mencken

Answer 4

Both are wrong because this happens there ever few hundred years and if left alone the natives do well by shifting to growing crops and herding food animals as they did during the time of the Viking settlements.

Answer 5

I'll go with the latter