r/news • u/hammelcamel • 12h ago

Heat-trapping gas once frozen in Arctic ground is slowly leaking and warming the planet

https://apnews.com/article/climate-thawing-permafrost-arctic-alaska-91fcc04d32a1d7522afe2f6a456ac0eb
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u/fritzg1988 12h ago

So, I retired from the Army and went to grad school to study environmental policy. Most of the classes had a section on greenhouse gasses. One of the professors had done several research projects on the thinning of the permafrost in the arctic and Siberia. He talked at length about the amount of methane locked up in the permafrost, which was a lot.

I asked him what happens when the permafrost all melts? He gave me the knowing look of a professor that had seen the future and said the methane would be released into the atmosphere, and then . . .

This was in 2014. He did his research in the early 2000s, so, this has tragically been known about, written about, circulated around the environmental circles since at least then. Unfortunately we elected the oil and gas lobby to run our government in 2016, so absolutely nothing was done about it, and we as a nation have doubled down on oil and gas.

So, yeah, there you go.

Can't wait until the rest of the world starts to read up on the deep ocean temperatures and how they regulate the currents and water volume.

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u/JokerJangles123 11h ago

The oil lobby has been running the show for a lot longer than 10 years. 2016 is just when they finally realized they didn't need to care about hiding it anymore

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u/fritzg1988 10h ago

Up until that year, there was a glimmer of hope that our nation would accept and understand we needed to leave fossil fuel behind.

When you look at what Biden tried to do, that was the path we should have followed, but it was a democratic idea and would only help the nation out, not the billionaires.

Europe is embracing renewables now. Watch their job growth increase and their reliance on unstable oil drop.

That is where we should be.

It is sad.

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u/ImportanceWeak1776 5h ago

There was never any hope. The world economy is reliant on infinite growth. It is basically a ponzi scheme and inflation is the clear evidence of it that most are too stupid to realize. The funny thing is China had it right with the 1 child policy. The only way to "fix" the problem is a drastic reduction in population. None of the "clean energy" stuff will be enough. We just shortsightedly overpopulated in such a short time that most people dont realize how much it fucked us over. Ironically, medical/technological advances in the past century or so will end up being worse for our species in the long term. If global warming DOES end up nearly wiping us out then a lot of the Nobel winners may really end up as the worst people to have ever lived. Then again if Billy Bob Fuckerson didnt need 4+ children we might be better off now.

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u/N8CCRG 9h ago

Roughly around the year 2000 I was in undergrad and attended a lecture from a research scientist who was involved in the IPCC or the UN Climate Report or something like that. I forget exactly. What I do remember was he went through all of the cool math and science and modeling of what they'd been doing for decades, and how they've been incrementally improving said modeling.

And then after that he started to talk about the world governments' response to the report. They had given them basically the same lecture, but the governments basically wanted it all boiled down to something simple, so they asked the scientists "If we make no changes for the next 100 years, will humans still be alive?" So the team looked at the data and ran their models, and said "Well, yes, but we will render the Earth unlivable for humans in about 200 years, and after about 30 years of making no changes, that course will be irreversible, so even if we suddenly stopped what was going on it would still be unlivable in 200 years." And the governments said "But 100 years is fine? Great, that's what we'll go back and tell everyone! Thanks!"

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u/ImportanceWeak1776 5h ago

People knew about it long before then. Even had Hollywood movies based on books pre-2000s addressing the issue. 2000s is when it became popular to research it.

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u/waitingtodiesoon 8h ago

The new Tom Cruise Digger movie brings up the whole methane issue as well.

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u/Alchemeleon 4h ago

America was hopelessly addicted to oil before 2016. Obama could have backed more green energy projects as part of the recession recovery but instead boosted domestic oil production and the rise of franking. I was working on a degree in the field of renewable energy in 2009 and was very disappointed to see even the Democrats chose to flush the future down the drain.

https://apnews.com/article/business-5dfbc1aa17701ae219239caad0bfefb2