Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch - 3

Serious as a heart attack comes to mind.

Regular readers of Daily Kos know that it is a moderate site when it comes to global warming and conspiracy theories because those regular readers know Daily Kos tends to be highly cautious about such matters.

So, I was a bit taken aback with a post there by Meteor Blades, who read some information on another moderate site that was alarming.

The subject was methane release in the Arctic, specifically in the sense of a "tipping point" being reached, a point of no return to business as usual.

It is not "radical" to consider what is real and what is happening now, nor is it "radical" to contemplate the consequences of the government ignoring Oil-Qaeda madness that seems to be designed to kill a lot of people.

The Time Magazine cover, above, from some years back, conveys the feeling generated by the post at Daily Kos:

This week, scientists made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw "vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor," as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations. The plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat more powerfully than carbon dioxide, the chief driver of climate change—was unsettling to the scientists.

But it was even more unnerving to Dr. Jason Box, a widely published climatologist who had been following the expedition. As I was digging into the new development, I stumbled upon his tweet, which, coming from a scientist, was downright chilling:

If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd.
— @climate_ice

Box, who is currently a professor of glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, has been studying the Arctic for decades. His accolade-packed Wikipedia page notes that he's made some 20 expeditions to the Arctic since 1994, and served as the lead author on the Greenland section of NOAA's State of the Climate report from 2008-2012. He also runs the Dark Snow project and writes about the latest findings in the field at his blog, Meltfactor. In other words, Box knows the Arctic, and he knows climate change—and the methane plumes had him blitzed enough to bring out the F bombs.

Now, the scientists in the Arctic didn't fully understand why the plumes were occurring. But they speculated that a warmer "tongue" of ocean current was destabilizing methane hydrates on the Arctic slope.

I called the scientist at his office in Copenhagen, and he talked frankly and emphatically about the new threat, and about the specter of climate change in general. He also swore like a sailor, which I've often wondered how climatologists refrain from doing, given the urgency of the problem—it's certainly an entirely accurate way to communicate the climate plight. […]

(Meteor Blades, cf. Motherboard, Salon, Stockholm Univ.). Regular readers here at Dredd Blog know that "radical" is not a word we shy away from, so long as it is the reality going on around us.

From posts in this series, one will quickly discern that Dredd Blog wants you to know what is going on, whether that knowledge is disturbing or not, such as in Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch where I speculated that the recent, mysterious Siberian Craters were methane related.

As it turns out, Dredd Blog suspicions are, more often than not, confirmed (Nature: Siberian Craters Methane Related).

Regular readers know that together we have been watching the methane plumes for years:

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years. In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the 8th joint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

(New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 5, cf. Perfect Storm ...). On the other hand, those who want to water reality down (so people don't "panic") are not doing a service, they are deceiving others.

They are doing the bidding of Oil-Qaeda.

In this context, the governments of the world that are not serious about saving civilization are serious about destroying it (MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact, 2, 3, 4, 5).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.