If you’ve been paying attention to the environment and climate change news, you know we are already in trouble and very likely some measure of fucked. It’s even easier to absorb and get in your head when a climatologist actually uses the words “We’re fucked.”
“Even if a small fraction of the Arctic carbon were released to the atmosphere, we’re fucked,” he told me. What alarmed him was that “the methane bubbles were reaching the surface. That was something new in my survey of methane bubbles,” he said.
The scientists’ video of methane bubbles in the Arctic Ocean.
“The conventional thought is that the bubbles would be dissolved before they reached the surface and that microorganisms would consume that methane, and that’s normal,” Box went on. But if the plumes are making it to the surface, that’s a brand new source of heat-trapping gases that we need to worry about.
—If We Release a Small Fraction of Arctic Carbon, ‘We’re Fucked’: Climatologist