200 Hours Towards Unstoppable Extinction
This is bad news… At some point in the very near future, we’re going to be looking at a period of time encompassing as little as 200 hours where the world’s permafrost can potentially melt, dumping gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Where the tipping point lies for runaway permafrost thaw is so uncertain that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change doesn’t factor it into its reports. But new research shows we might reach it sooner than we think.
An American study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October showed that, once reawakened, the hungry microbes in permafrost can pump out greenhouse gases remarkably quickly. After only 200 hours of thawing almost half the carbon in a sample of 35,000-year-old Alaskan permafrost was released into the atmosphere.
Actually, the IPCC doesn’t include permafrost for reasons other then what this article claims. But I don’t want to digress from the main points of concern here.
There’s 1.7 trillion tons of carbon locked away in the world’s permafrost. It will only take a very small amount of this huge reservoir to melt to catastrophically change global temperatures. And it could happen very, very quickly.
This would trigger a lot of very bad things across the world, all of which I have written about before. Big bad storms, the likes of which humanity has never seen. Devastating floods, biblical deluges and extreme drought conditions as the global weather patterns go absolutely apeshit. Forget food, once this begins, there won’t be any, agriculture will be dead.
Nobody knows yet when this trigger point will happen. It won’t happen all at once, due to location and areas that remain cold, but it doesn’t need to. Only a little bit of the world’s permafrost needs to melt for this unstoppable event to begin. Temperature increases will accelerate – along with evaporation rates, elevating atmospheric moisture very quickly. And all that moisture WILL come thundering down… somewhere, devastating lives, homes, farms, crops, factories, cities, entire regions, while others will be experiencing thousand-year droughts or even worse. The world’s refugee situation will go into massive overdrive as die-off from starvation accelerates.
Update: Climate migrants could dwarf other refugee flows – experts
Last year, 11 million people fled conflict or violence in Syria, Afghanistan and other troubled regions of the world, he said. But the average number of people displaced by natural disasters, including floods, storms and droughts, has averaged 22.5 million a year since 2008 and is growing, he said
Old news here, covered before, but these predictions are now unfolding on humanity. And America sleeps on and on, entrenched in massive denial and ignorance… It’s rather unbelievable really.
Scientist think it’s already happening as permafrost measurements are being taken all over the world. Recall the massive pingo’s discovered in Siberia? Those are caused by warming soils releasing methane into the atmosphere – yet another warming contributor now being dumped in the world’s atmosphere and even many times worse then carbon dioxide.
That’s a sure sign of melting permafrost, but there are many, many others being recorded around the coldest regions on the planet. Update: That Lake That Was Going to Fall Off A Cliff Actually Did. Holy cow! In the Northwest Territories!
The remaining half of the lake may still drain as the newly exposed permafrost begins to melt, and the government advises people to avoid the area. Many other slumps throughout the region continue to alter the landscape and are clouding and clogging waterways with loads of sediment that scientists have found to have strong negative effects on aquatic ecology. According to Pisaric, these changes have provoked deep anxiety among the Gwich’ins of Fort McPherson, worries he said are shared among many communities across Canada’s north.
“The processes that are driving these impacts of climate change up north are being produced elsewhere, and these lands and the people who live on these lands are being affected by things happening thousands kilometers away from where they live,” said the professor.
Homes in Alaska are sinking into the once-frozen soil as the permafrost destabilizes. Frozen tundra is turning into marshy bogs. Huge tracts of land in the once-frozen tundra covered North are now sprouting trees and bushes. Even Antarctica is melting!
So it’s already happening, we just don’t how how bad it is and how fast it is accelerating or frankly, how much “time” humanity has got. One thing is absolutely for certain – it’s not as much time as we’re being told.
It really doesn’t matter where you surf online, if you bother to read what’s being posted on the actual climate events now occurring, it’s bad and getting worse. I don’t think trying to keep up with this is worth my time (but it’s worth yours – educate yourself) since I already know plenty about what is happening. But here’s a commentary I’d like to share:
Rapid climate change – coming soon, probably far sooner then anyone ever thought possible.
Seventy-five degrees at 11:00 pm in Austin, Texas. Not 11:00 am, or four in the afternoon, but 11:00 at night. Halfway through December. Overnight lows, almost every night, 10-12 degrees above the already abnormally hot 1999-2014 ‘normal.’ (This is nothing new; overnight lows have been increasingly warmer than ‘normal’ for several years, more consistently and at a greater magnitude than daytime highs.) As my daughter said this evening, “It’s hot.” Yes it is, punkin. Yes it is. The past two Decembers magnolias have bloomed at least a little here in Austin; last year they bloomed, then the flowers froze two days later. This year they’re flowering in full force, like it’s Spring, the sweetness almost overpowering as I walk by a thirty footer in full bloom.
I’m sorry to the hopeful, but I just don’t see how we pull this one out. (Especially after watching Kevin Anderson’s videos.) People cowering behind AC in climate controlled homes, businesses, cars, malls, restaurants, movie theaters….lost in screens and consumption and rampant materialism….completely dissociated everywhere they go and in everything they do from actual perceptual awareness of the changes happening week in and week out, changes readily noticed and felt if the windows are open and you feel, actually feel what’s going on, day in and day out. How are a people so wedded to distraction, to comfort and entitlement going to make the necessary, drastic shift to a much lowered level of consumption, to what amounts to virtual eradication of almost everything that’s now taken for granted as modern existence? How are a people so shut off from the vicissitudes, the cycles of the natural world (not “Nature,” but the world just outside one’s doors and windows) and so shut down perceptually going to willingly accept the required shift to aware, sustainable lifestyles? I hope I’m underestimating the potential for America and Americans to change. I just don’t see that change happening, if it does happen, in time to forestall bad juju. We are drunk on Empire, and drunks don’t give up their poison willingly. It takes some kind of external forcing and we got one helluva external forcing ramping up as we speak, you betcha…..