Brian Merchant at Motherboard writes
If We Release a Small Fraction of Arctic Carbon, 'We're Fucked'—Climatologist. An excerpt:
This week, scientists made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw "vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor," as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations. The plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat more powerfully than carbon dioxide, the chief driver of climate change—was unsettling to the scientists.
But it was even more unnerving to Dr. Jason Box, a widely published climatologist who had been following the expedition. As I was digging into the new development, I stumbled upon his tweet, which, coming from a scientist, was downright chilling:
If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd.
— @climate_ice
Box, who is currently a professor of glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, has been studying the Arctic for decades. His accolade-packed Wikipedia page notes that he's made some 20 expeditions to the Arctic since 1994, and served as the lead author on the Greenland section of NOAA's State of the Climate report from 2008-2012. He also runs the Dark Snow project and writes about the latest findings in the field at his blog, Meltfactor.
In other words, Box knows the Arctic, and he knows climate change—and the methane plumes had him blitzed enough to bring out the F bombs.
Now, the scientists in the Arctic didn't fully understand why the plumes were occurring. But they speculated that a warmer "tongue" of ocean current was destabilizing methane hydrates on the Arctic slope.
I called the scientist at his office in Copenhagen, and he talked frankly and emphatically about the new threat, and about the specter of climate change in general. He also swore like a sailor, which I've often wondered how climatologists refrain from doing, given the urgency of the problem—it's certainly an entirely accurate way to communicate the climate plight. […]
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h/t to digby
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Welcome to the Matrix:
In a clever runaround after Congressional outrage over the TIA program, the DOJ is is funding a new, Florida-based program called "The Matrix". Created by someone who offered to be a federal drug informant, who's already lost several contracts because of his background, this will allow state and federal officials to correlate criminal and private databases.
Organizers said the system, dubbed Matrix, enables investigators to find patterns and links among people and events faster than ever before, combining police records with commercially available collections of personal information about most American adults. It would let authorities, for instance, instantly find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup truck in a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event.
The state-level program, aided by federal funding, is poised to expand across the nation at a time when Congress has been sharply critical of similar data-driven systems on the federal level, such as a Pentagon plan for global surveillance and an air-passenger-screening system.
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DOJ, despite clear and overwhelming Congressional disapproval, decided to fund a similiar, highly intrusive program, but on the state level. In many ways, this makes TIA looks like childplay.
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Tweet of the Day
Texas Republicans are arguing that marriage equality could lead to incest. You know what DEFINITELY leads to incest? Creating Adam and Eve.
— @TheTweetOfGod
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, a real life
My Parents Open Carry story.
Joan McCarter joins in with commentary on Ran(d) Paul's dine & dash; the new NBC/WSJ polling on Congressional popularity, income inequality, policy priorities & more. Big money attacks on Obamacare aren't moving the needle. "Accidental Congressman" bounced; "top two" open primary, an idea promoted by Chuck Schumer to boost turnout, yields a two Republican race in WA-04. Pondering the rules implications of a GOP Senate. Another drawn-out fight over the torture report, unless maybe the new leaker gets hold of it. Lastly, the continuing storyline of GOP grifting.
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