The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Permafrost

Say Goodbye to Permafrost (And Civilization)?

Globe on FireSo, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are now higher than they have ever been since homo sapiens have existed.

Meanwhile, on Russia’s arctic coast, which is permafrost, the temperature is 29C, 84F.

That means the permafrost is melting.

Because we continue to pump green house gasses out, because every scenario includes more significant warning, I will state again: We are not going to avoid permafrost melting.

Permafrost holds vast amounts of methane. Methane is, short term, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

This will likely then lead to methane releases from arctic seas. It will lead to faster melting of glaciers and polar and antarctic ice. As oceans warm, they will expand further, leading to sea level rises.

Increased temperatures will lead to even more extreme weather events such as category 6 hurricanes.

We will see changes in weather patterns and so on.

But the key point is that we are about to hit the accelerator, and there is no actual possibility of avoiding it, which will almost certainly lead to exponential, uncontrolled increases in climate change.

We are, for all practical purposes, past the point of no return. We will lose our coastal cities, for example, the only question is when. The glaciers and snowcaps in most of the world will go away, leading to many rivers drying up.

Etc, etc…

Climate change is not a question, it is a certainty, and the question is not, “Will it be bad?” but “How bad?”

The answer is, almost certainly, “Very, very bad.”


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Arctic Permafrost Defrosting and the Age of War and Revolution

Globe on FireFor well over a decade, I have written that we are past the point of no return on climate change. My reasoning was that hothouse gasses already in the atmosphere, or which were for sure going to enter the atmosphere given our lack of action, were enough to trigger massive carbon and methane releases.

Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon…

We’ve seen that methane, which accounts for only 14 percent of emissions worldwide, traps up to 100 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a five-year period. This means that even though carbon dioxide molecules outnumber methane 5 to 1, this comparatively smaller amount of methane is still 19 times greater a problem for climate change over a five year period, and four times greater over a 100 year period.

It is even more potent in the short run. Meanwhile, the arctic circle was about 30 degrees warmer this year than normal, and permafrost is un-perma-ing.

Huge slabs of Arctic permafrost in northwest Canada are slumping and disintegrating, sending large amounts of carbon-rich mud and silt into streams and rivers. A new study that analyzed nearly a half-million square miles in northwest Canada found that this permafrost decay is affecting 52,000 square miles of that vast stretch of earth—an expanse the size of Alabama…

…Similar large-scale landscape changes are evident across the Arctic including in Alaska, Siberia, and Scandinavia

There is no way we are avoiding near-worst case scenarios for climate change without aggressive geo-engineering (completly unproven, and requires political willpower). We will see temperature increases in some parts of the world which are currently highly populated. These increases will make those places uninhabitable outside of air conditioning. Changes in rainfall patterns will large current agricultural powerhouses to fail; an effect which will be compounded by the fact that we have vastly drained and polluted our groundwater in prime agricultural areas.

Later on, we will see vast rises in the ocean level. Virtually every city sitting on a seashore today will be gone in a hundred years, some of them a lot sooner.

This stuff is baked into the cake. It is essentially unavoidable. It has been effectively and politically unavoidable for quite some time now.

Do not expect the political, economic, and social arrangements you favor to survive this. The waves of refugees will be magnitudes larger than those currently shaking the Middle East and Europe. There will be water wars; people will not sit still while they are dying, they will fight. Some of those wars will involve, at the least, the use of tactical nukes.

Capitalism, Democracy, the Chinese Communist Party, etc…any system and group of people who can reasonably be blamed for this, will likely be on the block. When hundreds of millions to billions start dying, they will not go gently into that long dark night. No, they and those they leave behind will look for people, ideologies, and organizations to blame, and they will plenty of them, because everyone and everything who had any power has failed to prevent an entirely forseen and largely preventable disaster.

Our failure will not be considered acceptable to those who pay the bill, and our “capitalism” and “democracy” and “corporations” and “free trade” and everything else you can think of will be on the block, liable for destruction.

This is coming on faster than many expected. Added to ecosphere collapse, the current cyclical capitalist sclerosis, and vast arsenals, it is going to be immensely damaging.

If you aren’t old, or sick, you’re going to suffer some of this. If you’re young, you’re going to suffer a lot of this, assuming you aren’t an early casualty.

So it is. So it shall be. We were warned, we chose not to act, because corporations needed profits or something.

So be it.


The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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