Researchers Quantify Greenhouse Gases From Melting Arctic Permafrost: 'Potential To Alter The Planet Is Very Real' | ThinkProgress

Researchers Quantify Greenhouse Gases From Melting Arctic Permafrost: 'Potential To Alter The Planet Is Very Real' | ThinkProgress: "Surely the only rational conclusion that one, even a non-scientist, can draw from recent events is that a catastrophe is in its early stages. For our immediate purposes this is partly a climate catastrophe, but when one also considers biodiversity loss, oceanic acidification and stratification, the spread of anoxic and hypoxic ‘dead zones’, the loss of 90% of large pelagic fish, mass tree deaths across the planet, megafires and the general toxification of the biosphere by ubiquitous pollution of every kind, then certainly we are stuffed. The only way out, growing slimmer and less likely by the hour, is a concerted global program of rapid decarbonisation and centuries of hard graft in ecological repair. And to achieve that miraculous escape all dreams of global Empire, of the ineffable superiority of ‘Western Civilization’ over the rest of humanity, of the efficacy of unbridled greed as the path to human happiness and of inexorable, neoplastic, economic growth must be recognised as the nightmares that they truly are. Wealth must no longer be accumulated by a tiny caste of the infinitely avaricious, but rather must be redistributed back to the people who created every cent of it. And consumption and human population must be humanely reduced, yesterday preferably, but today must suffice. Any politician, economist or soothsayer with any other program is, I would assert, an idiot, a liar or an ignoramus, or some combination of these virtues." (comment by Mulga Mumblebrain)