Massive Permafrost Thaw Documented in Canada, Portends Huge Carbon Release

Desdemona has a new article, Massive Permafrost Thaw Documented in Canada, Portends Huge Carbon Release, with the original article here. I don’t comment on Desdemona anymore, Jim started censoring commentary some time back.

This type of melting was expected and would account for the escalating levels of methane being detected. Once you grasp the scale of what’s happening, you’ll quickly realize that it is virtually impossible for this process to reverse itself. You’d have to have a seriously long deep-freeze to restore the frozen soil temperatures – and then you’d still be left with the billions of tons of CO₂ and methane still left in the atmosphere, raising temperatures higher and higher.

Which fits right in with this: Carbon Dioxide Could Reach 410 PPM This Month

Nothing but lip-service from most of the world on how to deal with this accelerating problem. But meanwhile, back in the land of the stupid, Members of Congress met to discuss the costs of climate change. They ended up debating its existence.

Does anybody really need any more evidence that humans are incapable of acting responsibly? Or that the whole topic of climate change is going to find humans racing at the very last second to try to save themselves from catastrophic climate change? By then, nearly everything else will already be dead. This is why the geo-engineering people are so anxious to get started. They already know that geo-engineering is what will ultimately be tried. But geo-engineering does not fix bad behavior (or bad attitudes, or ignorance, or stupidstition, or well… you get the idea).

It is not conjecture to state that all of this (and so very much more) will lead towards our collapse. Our species likes to dither around while earnestly practicing ecocide. Monetization of all living things and even the very elements guarantees we will always find a way to destroy it as we exploit it. This false notion of  monetary “valuation” is so deeply embedded within the psyche of almost every human being that it’s proving to be an impossibly persistent meme that penetrates to the very depths of human existence.

I contend, and will to my dying day, that humans have gone off the rails long ago. Our trajectory is plainly clear, it’s not a better world being built, it’s a polluted, raped and ruined one. But the technologist and industrialists pay huge sums of money to media whores to convince the populations of the world that all this plundering is essential and even beneficial. It’s not.

We’ve managed to screw up everything in reality. You have really open your eyes and your mind to see it and understand it correctly. Cities are not “beautiful”, they’re horrible blights upon the landscape, pumping out billions of tons in pollution and wastes. City lights aren’t beautiful either, blotting out stars and obliterating that night sky. Humans are enamored with our civilization, but what it really represents is destruction and death of all kinds of living things. Rivers, streams and water ways, meadows and fields, forests and hillsides, billions of living organisms and entities all living in a astounding splendor of life. But not after humans arrive and build their cities, towns and housing tracts. It’s all destroyed and wiped out, and what tiny bits remain are oppressed fragments of the former existence.

Monoculture “parks” and lawns, polluted with fertilizers because we’ve even destroyed the natural life-giving ability of the soil and microbes. Straight lines towering into the skies and on the ground, with millions and millions of rows of ugly human boxes built from dead trees dragged thousands of miles from their natural habitats. Sterile urban landscapes where nothing but blowing trash actually moves at night. Heat islands of glass, steel, concrete and asphalt, all diverting the natural rain, wind and runoff to concrete canals and sewers filled with the refuse of human activity. Traffic lights for spewing carriages of plastic, glass, rubber and steel, the human occupants inside ‘safe’ and utterly oblivious to the destroyed and ruined life outside of their racing coffins.

Humans are enamored with all the new, shiny things civilization produces. We’ve become addicted (and indebted) to the drip-feed of technology and innovation and invention. But we’re truly ignorant at what price this was all obtained – how the environment was raped, plundered and pillaged, the mountains and mountains of waste and residues created, the polluted streams and waterways, the fish kills and vast levels of wildlife utterly destroyed, the atmospheric pollution and toxins being pumped out across the entire world. We’re too busy staring at screens to even notice all the death around us.

We’re destroyers of life and we simply do not care.

If the Earth were alive as a living organism, it would be of no surprise that though it be slow and ponderous to respond, that it would finally react and take action against the human vermin that covers its surface. Using natural and immutable forces that would monumentally dwarf all human abilities, the Earth would slowly began to shed its infection through larger and larger events and ‘extremes’ – earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, temperature, droughts, floods, winds, fires and storms, impacting the virus that has crept across its surface and plundered its depths, wrecking the infrastructure and their ability to survive.

And who could blame the Earth, if it were alive? As guests here, we’ve behaved very, very badly, wrecking and destroying every living room and despoiling all the bathrooms, even the sleeping rooms have become playgrounds for our insatiable appetites for entertainment. The living rooms are filled with an endless array of dead things and boxes blaring incessant levels of noise and sound. We lie about, partying and drinking, reveling in our ‘mastery of the world’ and the ‘dominion of men’ in sterile, empty boardrooms, utterly blind to the insufferable suffering of trillions of other creatures we’ve crushed under our hands and swallowed down our gullets. We don’t hear their screams or their cries or consider their suffering. We don’t think they even have the right to exist except for our exclusive use, no matter how torturous and painful that might be, but we’re convinced ourselves that we most certainly do. We even fabricated ourselves an imaginary god that declares our exclusive ‘rights’ to the entire planet, but we’re puzzled how often this doesn’t work out.

Our eyes are blinded by the glitter of gold and the glare of screens that explode the wealth of human activity all across the globe. And we think to ourselves that life is grand and great and good while we refuse to seriously discuss the real evil that we’ve become or any of the massive levels of harm, suffering, destruction and pollution that we leave in our wake.

It’s time for a massive change on the planet. And if we will not do it (and we won’t), then it will be done to us. And we deserve it. Our disrespect for life itself (not just human life) is the real reason we are going to be destroyed. If we had cultivated that ethic, we would not even be having these conversations. There would be no pollution, no climate change, no destruction, no suffering and no hunger. There would be no debt and no depression. The myriad of mental illnesses and diseases we’ve self-inflicted would be gone. Our lives would be without work, employment would be a thing of the happily forgotten past. The planet would heal. But this is now all very, very unlikely.

If we just hadn’t built a civilization like this, there would still be massive amounts of life on this planet, sustaining itself almost indefinitely with no pollution anywhere. And we would be happy – finding life, freedom and opportunity that would boggle our imagination, existing in a far, far happier state then we are now. But we’re not. We’re dead wood within, convincing ourselves that we’re still alive, but rotten to the core. We killed off our inner spirit, the flame of life that made our existence here meaningful and joyful. We’ve become voracious, devouring, insatiable zombies, consuming anything and everything that moves in our quest to find “meaning” and “purpose”. Work, enslavement, debt and consumption now define us, and we’re bewildered why this doesn’t really work.

If it grows, we cut it down, and make it into something else. Burn it? Of course, as fast as we can, who cares what it does to the atmosphere or water?  Level it? Yes, absolutely, we might find something of “value” there that we can sell. Dig it up? With bigger and bigger machines, belching out mountains of toxic waste and pollution in our quest for wealth and “more”.

If you took the time to read as much as I do about the state of the world and the environment, you’d swiftly realize that our impact has been gargantuan upon the planetary surface, even ruining the atmosphere and virtually all of the worlds oceans (almost 4/5ths of the world). While “it can’t possibly continue”, it most certainly will, because we cannot stop our appetites for growth. And though some of us know we should stop, we cannot. Even in the very remotest and “poorest” regions of the world where humans still live out a meager existence, it’s impossible for us now to stop trying to find a way to exploit the environment for our advantage, because the entire system is rigged to force us into competition for wealth (money).

Netflix has some really great videos that depict this situation. All you have to do is watch them and pay close attention to what you’re seeing. We cannot stop.

I’m going to end this here. No closing paragraph. No words of comfort (there aren’t any). No “proper” summary. I just want to leave you with foreboding thoughts, because that is exactly the message I’m trying to convey here.