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Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

siberiantimes.com

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Re: Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

#321

Post by intended »

killjoywashere wrote: post #218
philipkglass wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A search on Google Scholar for "accelerated silicate weathering" will be more informative than my comment. But here's the shortish version... Naturally occurring silicates of magnesium, calcium, sodium, and potassium are thermodynamically prone to weather to carbonates in ambient conditions, when water absorbs CO2 and passes over rocks. In the case of magnesium and calcium in particular, the weathering leads to stabl…

Sooo.... we need solar-powered, sand-grinding/blowing machines in the Great Deserts (Sahara, Gobi, etc)?

People tend to forget that the deserts are also ecosystems.

Re: Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

#322

Post by Raphmedia »

rbobby wrote: post #230
Raphmedia wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Save it for your ticket to mars.

We added too much CO2 to atmosphere so we'll move to a planet with an atmosphere of 100% CO2... sounds like a plan! :)

If you can' beat them, join them?

Re: Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

#323

Post by BEEdwards »

Fiahil wrote: post #287
brogrammer2 wrote: post #258

Honest question: Why is Mainstream Media not covering this like it should be doing? Heck, this should be the breaking news every single day!! After all, this spells doomsday for the upcoming generations, so shouldn't it be the news that should be shown/covered almost everyday on the front page. The people have the right to know that their children and grandchildren will suffer because of something that is going on ri…

It's not all that bad, we will have the opportunity to live in a Mad Max like environment for real ! If we, humans, - as a species - are unable to focus away from dirty politics and gossips, then we don't really deserve to survive. Maybe we need to go through a few centuries of post-apocalyptic landscape to transform ourselves and evolve ?

What about Earth's other life?

It just gets to go extinct? Shit deal for everything else living on this planet, maybe it should go "Zoo" on us in self defense.

Re: Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

#324

Post by jnicholasp »

alicorn wrote: post #303
jnicholasp wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeast can't make metaphors, can't understand that they're in a fermenting bottle with limited food and increasing amounts of excreted toxins, and couldn't imagine or implement plans to do anything about that situation even if they could comprehend it. Humans can do all of those things - except, so far, muster the collective political will to take meaningful steps. So I don't know in what sense it would be useful to m…

Sorry, but you conflate IQ with individual values that are acquired mainly through culture and education. A higher IQ does not automatically mean that a person will care about global problems that have no immediate negative effect on their own life, affect everyones wellbeing in the long run and are hard to solve. Or that a society with a higher average IQ will magically create political and economical structures tha…

I'm not conflating IQ with values, I'm arguing that as average IQ goes up, the percentage of the population who will recognize that certain problems of non-immediate import will inevitably become immediate, personal problems, will also go up.

I agree with you that the mechanisms through which greater awareness and active concern for seemingly abstract problems will trickle into the global zeitgeist are things like education, culture, and social/political structures. But where do those come from, and what allows people to perceive their value and meaning? You can't teach people things that you don't understand, and they can't learn things that they can't understand. Better cultural and social structures are a result of better understanding; better understanding is more common with brains that are better able to perceive patterns and project consequences.

Re: Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

#325

Post by wu-ikkyu »

BEEdwards wrote: post #323
Fiahil wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not all that bad, we will have the opportunity to live in a Mad Max like environment for real ! If we, humans, - as a species - are unable to focus away from dirty politics and gossips, then we don't really deserve to survive. Maybe we need to go through a few centuries of post-apocalyptic landscape to transform ourselves and evolve ?

What about Earth's other life? It just gets to go extinct? Shit deal for everything else living on this planet, maybe it should go "Zoo" on us in self defense.

Life on this planet has persisted through far worse. Sure, we may bring many species down with us, but life on this planet will go on.

As the late George Carlin once said: "The planet is fine. The people are fucked!"

Re: Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

#326

Post by wu-ikkyu »

brogrammer2 wrote: post #258

Honest question: Why is Mainstream Media not covering this like it should be doing? Heck, this should be the breaking news every single day!! After all, this spells doomsday for the upcoming generations, so shouldn't it be the news that should be shown/covered almost everyday on the front page. The people have the right to know that their children and grandchildren will suffer because of something that is going on ri…

>Honest question: Why is Mainstream Media not covering this like it should be doing? Heck, this should be the breaking news every single day!!

Perhaps it is because of the influence of the largest industry in the world in terms of revenue: the petroleum industry. Money talks, or rather in this case, money hushes.

Where do you think the primary source of climate change denial propaganda comes from?

Re: Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

#327

Post by adamtait »

There's a team of scientists in the arctic who have an unconventional but (possibly) effective idea to reduce/slow the release of permafrost methane. The Zimov's have a Kickstarter up now - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/907484977/pleistocene-p...

Re: Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

#328

Post by adamtait »

BrailleHunting wrote: post #299

Another bigger problem, raised by VICE reporting, is tundra thawing, leading to ground collapsing 10-30 meters into huge sinkholes. Appearently, one of the possible solutions is replacing tundra forests with grasslands by megafauna and macrofauna grazing, including, potentially, cloned mammoths, because grassland freezes harder in the winter and keeps the permafrost froze during the summer months.

The Zimov's (Russian scientists) are behind this effort. Check out their Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/907484977/pleistocene-p...

Re: Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

#329

Post by rhino369 »

agentultra wrote: post #224

It's strange reading about this and realizing that to be able to do something about it I would have had to have been born twenty some-odd years before I was born. That it's literally too late to do anything about it. I was raised to care about these issues, to save the rainforest, to cut down on pollution, recycle -- to do something about it. And that it would've taken a concerted effort from everyone to take the sam…

If drastic action is taken now we'd only see 2 degree warming. That is far from the end of the world.

If we do nothing we'll see 5-8 degrees, which would change the climate pretty drastically.

It's not too late at all.

Re: Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

#330

Post by jnicholasp »

pasquinelli wrote: post #261
jnicholasp wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeast can't make metaphors, can't understand that they're in a fermenting bottle with limited food and increasing amounts of excreted toxins, and couldn't imagine or implement plans to do anything about that situation even if they could comprehend it. Humans can do all of those things - except, so far, muster the collective political will to take meaningful steps. So I don't know in what sense it would be useful to m…

"Yeast can't make metaphors, can't understand that they're in a fermenting bottle with limited food and increasing amounts of excreted toxins, and couldn't imagine or implement plans to do anything about that situation even if they could comprehend it. Humans can do all of those things - except, so far, muster the collective political will to take meaningful steps." you mean the thing that allows any of those other t…

Bridges require foundations, pier columns, truss cables, and roadways in order to function. Each is necessary to the function of the whole; none has priority, and it doesn't make sense to single out any one of them as the thing that allows any of the other things to matter at all. In particular, it doesn't make sense to point at a bridge under construction that doesn't have the final piece in place yet, sneer at it because it doesn't have that piece, and suggest that it's pretty much exactly the same as no bridge at all.

20 points on average might push enough people from "unable to genuinely perceive long-term threats as threats" to "able to genuinely perceive long-term threats as threats", that it would move us past the political tipping point of collectively caring enough about doing something meaningful to both figure out what to do (devote money and resources to research) and to do it.

Individual carbon footprints are not meaningful - it doesn't matter how well an individual paddles their canoe when that canoe is in a swimming pool on a cruise liner. What matters is how the liner is piloted. If all people suddenly disappeared off the earth, except for those people who happened to be standing in Walmarts at the time, do you think that society would be better or worse at recognizing and handling abstract, long-term threats like global warming than the society composed only of graduate students would be?

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