I just watched The Blob for the first time and not to spoil it but cold is the only way to stop it so they ship it to the arctic. And these old B movies get a lot of flack for not actually being scary but the last line of the film was that the blob can’t be killed but at least it’s stopped “so long as the arctic stays frozen” and lemme tell you that is THE most terrifying line a viewer in 2018 could hear.
Tag: climate change
For the first time since 1941, anthrax has hit Western Siberia, with 1,500 reindeer dying and 13 Yamal nomads being hospitalized including 4 children.
This is because unusually high temperatures (it’s 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal) have melted permafrost containing the corpse of a reindeer that died of the bacteria 75 years ago.
Anthrax goes dormant when frozen, turning into a spore that reanimates when the temperature rises. Scientists estimate it can survive in this state for a minimum of 100 years.
In Siberia, dozens of herders have been relocated, a quarantine is in place and a state of emergency has been declared by the mayor.
This renews concerns that ancient viruses and bacteria could once again pose a threat, as the earth warms.
In 2014 scientists discovered that a Siberian virus, pithovirus sibericum, which lay dormant in permafrost for 30,000 years, became infectious again once thawed.
The article:
this is not a consequence of global warming i had ever envisioned but now it’s the scariest thing i’ve ever heard
Hey, so remember back in 2014 when they first found that virus and we all went “we’ve all seen enough science fiction to know how this goes” and then there was no news ever again?
Yeah.
The thing about how horrifyingly, lethally hot this summer is (across basically the entire northern hemisphere) is that yes, it is, and yet if I live for another 60 years maybe 40 of them are going to be hotter than this one. Maybe even that’s optimistic. Any acknowledgement of how bad it is right now is inseparable from the realisation that it not only can be worse, but absolutely will be worse.
I’m not saying anyone should be panicking, but I am saying that as a society, as a planet, we ought to be pouring resources into finding ways to keep people alive under these unprecedented conditions; it’s going to be one of the major public health and civil engineering challenges of this century, and we can see it coming. Yet instead, because capitalism, what we are in effect doing is pouring resources into finding ways to make these conditions worse.
That’s not acceptable.
DarkestElemental616 