1. I was thrilled to play a small part in this powerful new installment of our 2 degrees C series, which is set in Eastern Siberia. @antontroian and @mrchavezphoto traveled there and came back with stunning words and images washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/… 
2. This is the scene of some of the most rapid climate change on Earth.
3. Using the Berkeley Earth dataset we – well, @JohnMuyskens – calculated that in the specific region that we visited the warming is actually 3 C (5.4 F) above preindustrial temperatures when the last 5 years are compared with 1880-1899.
4. What is special about Eastern Siberia is that not only is there permafrost, but it is an especially thick and icy variety called Yedoma. We created a video explainer here to show you how it formed, and why it contains so much carbon
5. As we report in the story, the Yedoma permafrost contains so much carbon that, were it all to someday get into the atmosphere, it would be a climate catastrophe.
6. Carbon contained in Yedoma, if emitted, would amount to more than half of ALL emissions from human greenhouse gases and deforestation, from 1750 all the way through 2011.
7. So this is no joke. It is a massive amount of carbon in a special type of thick permafrost that has already been dramatically disturbed.
8. That’s the science and the global risk – but this story is about what is happening locally. Which is also very stunning and dramatic.
9. You get scenes like this.
10. And this.
11. People’s lives are massively affected already. The thing about Siberia, unlike some other parts of the Arctic and near Arctic, is that there are really a lot of people there. Several million living on permafrost.
12.There have accordingly been sharp changes to farming, villages getting partly washed away in rivers (which now have more water in them thanks to the thawing permafrost), major impairment to traditional forms of transportation (often dependent on frozen rivers, lakes, etc)...
13. ...and climate-driven migration out of the countryside and into regional cities. One, Yakutsk, is also built on permafrost.
14. Among many other scenes @antontroian takes us to a horse farm where ponies have died from unusual blizzard events and the warping of the land has reduced available pasture.
15. But some are finding new opportunities to exploit in this changing landscape.
16. The story also follows would-be mammoth hunters who are seizing on the opportunity presented by the rapidly thawing Yedoma to try to uncover ten-thousand plus year old tusks that can be sold for a lot of money due to ivory demand, mainly in China.
17. A scene from one of their excursions.
18. Not only is permafrost thaw making this strange (and not entirely legal) pursuit possible, it actually seems to incentivize more permafrost degradation.
19. .@antontroian writes that “some people are collecting mammoth tusks at near-industrial scale. They use high-pressure hoses to blast away riverbanks and hire teams of young men to comb the wilderness for months at a time.”
20. Just think about that for a second.
21. But then, everything has been turned upside-down by the warming in Siberia and as the story puts it, people are “trying to survive.”
22. In the end it just brings us back to one of the key themes of this series.
23. We talk about climate change mostly as a global average. And in this case the warming is a little over 1C (1.8 F).
24. But people don’t live at that average, and there are already many extremes – including a few places that, believe it or not, have warmed even faster than eastern Siberia.
25. In these places, radical climate change is already here and even if we do somehow hold warming globally to 1.5 or 2C, they’re going to have to live not only with the current level of change, but actually a good deal more as well.
26. Climate change isn’t fair. It has major zones of amplification in the ocean and on the land alike -- and not only in the Arctic. Far beyond it.
27. Stand by for more dispatches from these locations – and, again, here is the Siberia story. washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/…
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