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The Arctic is Full of Toxic Mercury, and Climate Change is Going To Release it (washingtonpost.com)
We already knew that thawing Arctic permafrost would release powerful greenhouse gases. On Monday, scientists revealed it could also release massive amounts of mercury -- a potent neurotoxin and serious threat to human health. From a report: Permafrost, the Arctic's frozen soil, acts as a massive ice trap that keeps carbon stuck in the ground and out of the atmosphere -- where, if released as carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas would drive global warming. But as humans warm the climate, they risk thawing that permafrost and releasing that carbon, with microbial organisms becoming more active and breaking down the ancient plant life that had previously been preserved in the frozen earth. That would further worsen global warming, further thawing the Arctic -- and so on. That cycle would be scary enough, but U.S. government scientists on Monday revealed that the permafrost also contains large volumes of mercury, a toxic element humans have already been pumping into the air by burning coal. There are 32 million gallons worth of mercury, or the equivalent of 50 Olympic swimming pools, trapped in the permafrost, the scientists wrote in a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. For context, that's "twice as much mercury as the rest of all soils, the atmosphere, and ocean combined," they wrote.
>> There are 32 million gallons worth of mercury, or the equivalent of 50 Olympic swimming pools, trapped
Wait - how many Library of Congresses does that convert into? Or is there a car analogy you could use?
It can cause mental retardation. WHit people with mercury poisening are about as smart as
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And 15 minutes could save you 15% or more...
When, 10 years from now, this latest scare-mongering fails to materialize like countless others before it, the respectable scientists among Slashdotters will refuse to own it, because it was not a scientific statement.
Indeed, it is not.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Another msmash abortion of an article about doom and gloom that probably won't happen.
From the left wing perspective of course.
For context, that's "twice as much mercury as the rest of all soils, the atmosphere, and ocean combined,"
Why is there twice the mercury in the arctic? Or, should I just RTFA?
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
For context, that's "twice as much mercury as the rest of all soils, the atmosphere, and ocean combined," they wrote.
You mean, that twice as much mercury as contained in the rest of all soils [...]
I mean, really.
That's about the only scare tactic they haven't tried ... yet. It's almost like they're trying to sell the idea that Earth was in a state of divine perfection before now, and any change that happens MUST be some kind of fucking disaster that is going to require enormous sums of money and amounts of study to fix.
It's warmed before. We survived. Life adapted and thrived. It'll be fine. You know, I didn't vote for Trump, but the more of this chicken little bullshit I see the more I understand his position. It's not that deep down he really disbelieves the scientists, he's just fucking sick of the drama and hyperbole and realizes the only way to reign it in and stop the fear mongering is to just say it doesn't exist and go away, kthxbye.
"See!", say Trump.
LOL
Maybe we can start to develop some mean to remove the mercury from permafrost... an then apply it to the Chinas first emperor tomb to finally open it :) (one can dream....)
...has officially devolved into self-parody. I suppose it was inevitable.
I am a bit disappointed in this one, msmash.
I mean, you knocked it out of the park with the AGW fear mongering, but it lacks pretty much completely in all other SJW categories. You could at least have found a link that blamed the patriarchy for all this.
It's like you just aren't trying anymore.
I for one liked Freddie
I found out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a glacier they installed after I flooded the earth with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the earth with a deadly neurotoxin, so get comfortable while I warm up the neurotoxin emitters.
Ah, that glacier may have had some ancillary responsibilities. I can't shut off the flooding defenses. Oh well.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Maybe there's already too much mercury in the atmosphere and that's why we have so many mentally ill (men who think they're women and women who think they're men). And the lesser affected (those that don't but still think it's perfectly normal). And then everyone in between who've invented new genders.
I read the arcticle, it seems rather short, explanation wise on the source of the mercury.
It simply says that the mercury plants collect is not released back in the atmosphere but in the soil and stays there.
There had been more mercury in the atmosphere since we start burning coal ~3 centuries ago but that doesn't seem much considering it has layer of > 10000 years of other plant already accumulated.
Couldn't it be that they are simply measuring the first layer that are thawing that are indeed pretty toxic but the rest will be ok?
This just in: Trump pledges $1B to innovative Clean Mercury plants
For context, that's "twice as much mercury as the rest of all soils, the atmosphere, and ocean combined," they wrote.
This assertion does not pass the sniff test without a proposed mechanism to drive mercury concentration so unilaterally to one part of the globe, and away from the vastly larger (in both area and volume) remainder. It might be true (maybe ... ), but it does have the ring of fear mongering.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
See Subject: We alwys hear that PEOPLE need more fresh water so why is is melting bad?
Besides mercury is a good thing, I was exposed tons as child and show no problem.
Global Warming is just a (((Soros))) and (((ROTHSCHILD))) funded lie to weaken USA.
APK
P.S.=> Teh the jew bankers want to enslave all of AMERICANS and convert them to their cult... apk
That's funny. Thanks, I needed a good laugh.
OK, 50 olympic pools of mercury sounds pretty dangerous. If someone dropped 50 pools of mercury somewhere, this definitly would be dangerous. But then again: How did it get there? Why concentrated in the arctic? I'm pretty sure no one disposed the worlds obsolete mercury thermometers there, so... coal burning? How many coal was burned in the arctic? Probably not much compared to past and modern industrial centers.
So I'm setting up this hypothesis: If coal burning is the main source of mercury, the arctic received much less of mercury than any other part of the world. Only due to the climatic situation there, it was trapped in the ice. But then, even tose 50 pools can only be a fraction of mercury pollution compared to the rest of the world.
bickerdyke
They lost me right there. Which may well mean they don't care about enlightening anyone, WaPo seems to write primarily to rile their base of paying supporters. It's a good business model and it lets them vent their desires for spiteful revenge so how could they resist it.
I'll wait for another source.
It's probably wise to start preparing for the changes that are coming. We're inherently lazy. It doesn't take a genius to notice that when it comes to protecting the environment or heath a lot of folks wait until it's almost too late before doing anything. It's one of the reasons why I find people who deny climate change for the most part disappointing. Most are playing the let's ignore it until it becomes a serious issue at which point it's either harder to fix or fatal. And in many ways it's already starting, many areas are seeing more flooding, fires and general weather damage that they have never seen before. The flood of migrants into Europe are primarily folks in Africa fleeing multi-year droughts for example. Now I'm not one to say that the world will end but at the very least it might be a good idea to be prepared for it. Insurance companies for example are taking this seriously because they're often on the paying end when things go south because they don't want to go bankrupt when the next disaster hits.
As humans, we should take responsibility for our actions and clean up the messes we make, even if it's not an immediate threat. The environmental problems we face are a tragedy of the commons. To solve these issues, every product sold should have an additional tax for how much environmental damage was done in it's construction. The tax would go directly to companies that actually clean up the messes being made. This would solve the landfill problem in it's entirety and create a massive new job market dedicated toward reversing the damage already done.
The only remaining problem is the people who don't care about how badly they are damaging the planet as long as they save a buck.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
From the study : "The turnover time associated with the microbial decay of frozen organic matter is ~14,000 years (Figure S28), making the Hg locked in permafrost effectively stable on human time scales. However, projections indicate a 30–99% reduction in near surface permafrost by 2100, and, once thawed, the turnover time for microbial decay drops to ~70 years (Koven et al., 2013; Schaefer et al., 2011). This makes the reservoir of Hg in permafrost soils vulnerable to release over the next century, with unknown consequences to the environment."
The title suggests a factual statement where the paper suggest a possible scenario outcome based on predictions. a possible sample of a clickbaity WPost science article which may require more study into how much of it is 'fake news' ?
I did however approve of the moderators including the original paper in the post, most impressive.
What if only screaming progressive SJWs sucked-down that Hg ? Slippery babes they literally tried blo-jobbing the Arctic tundra! Silver-throated howlers woot ... then the silence hahaha. Don't say never as the goddess of bitch-fucking trims her tab and zeros in ...
No, it's not alarmism. I guess you don't want to be told there's a car coming, because that would "alarm" you and you're such a precious snowflake you cannot be allowed to hear discouraging words, no matter what.
asshole.
Learn some science and find out how wrong you are.
First, mercury is NOT toxic neither in liquid nor in solid (cinnabar) forms. Full stop.
Second, there's only two ways that TRANSFORM mercury into a toxic SUBPRODUCT:
1) When some fish species eat mercury, they transform it into methyl-mercury. If we it the methyl-mercury it will be toxic for as. But we can only metabolize it because of the "methyl" part. In fact, mercury has (and still is) being used in medicine for centuries: as purgative (drinking one drop, it's huge density will literally push the shit out of you) and as ANTISEPTIC for injuries in "mercromine" (merc = mercury). This way it might affect us. Note: I lived in Almadén (Spain), one of the only three dead volcanoes that have mercury in the world, where you can literally pat stones with mercury EVERYWHERE, with an artificial lake nearby, and we have same "mercury intoxication ratio" than the rest of the world.
2) The worst, most active and directly dangerous, is to INHALE mercury. But, it doesn't happen on normal temperatures (it's ebullition happens 357 ÂC, 675 F). In fact, the only ones affected by this are in the workers melting cinnabar to extract mercury (my father was one of those and, with the proper protections, never had any health issue).
So, why is there so, but SO MANY LIES about this?
Well, it happens all this shit started when Spain started to remove the lead pipes it had installed, that are DIRECTLY DEADLY. So, for the people to not learn about this, they created this lie.
Well, it seems you eat it all...
https://travelstotheedge.com/
with Art Wolfe. At Glacier Bay S.W. Alaska. He was walking through an old growth forest,he asked his guide if he knew how old the trees were the guide said "200 years"
he knew this because 200 years ago Captain Vancouver was there then and the glaciers had just receded. Later they were kayaking in Glacier Bay the guide said 200 years
ago the glacier at that point was 4,000 to 6,000 feet thick.
The church of climate change, I don't believe. Might as well be magic, siting things that the average person cannot validate, deep sea temperatures, things in the arctic and Antarctic, the great pacific garbage patch (this turned out to be completely fake).
Clean coal
That's the ticket to solving this whole greenhouse, global warming thingy. We need to make coal great again.
Again! It's true I swear this time I'm right!
Give me a break.. This is stupid on it's face..
Where does all that mercury actually GO when it's released? To the bottom of the ocean where it get's covered by silt perhaps? Unless you are making the case that this makes it into the food chain or environmental exposure is going to rise in non artic locations where human exposure will be enough to reach harmful levels, why all the alarm?
We've know that heavy metal levels in heavily polluted waters tend to mediate as time moves on. This stuff gets buried under silt and gets isolated from the environment. Sure, it's not great, but it's also not something that doesn't fix itself once you stop releasing the problem substances. In this case, release in the artic is a problem how? How much food do we get from artic sources? Not much we cannot do without.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Does it...
Want to Break Free?
Is this before or after the projected 10-year pause in global warming due to decreased solar activity? Google search is pulling back articles from 2012 to say global warming wasn't linked to solar activity, except that it has for the last 5 years, and could happen again for at least another decade or more.
gotta love these biased articles
I am also supporter of long term sustainability, but I don't like this type of business related to government over regulation and ISO certification trolling. It is very nice idea to create CO2 exchange and trade quotes for all sorts of emissions. The result of this will legally allow selected businesses to pollute our atmosphere and environment. I am 100% against of any emissions trading. If we ban emissions of some type it should be banned for everybody without exceptions.
As this global worming phobia. It is nice idea to manipulate public opinion, but I don;t see any issues if Hudson bay will be as worm as Cuba now.
Donald Trump says there's no such thing as Global Warming so don't worry, everything will be fine!
We already get lots of mercury in Vaccines.
Love how you idiots can't read between the lines and automatically assume that human did this.
The article describes 32 Million gallons of mercury being released, 3.2E7 gallons
The US federal drinking water standard is 2 parts per billion or 1 part in 500 million, 1:5E8 gallons
Multiplying, that means this is safe if it is diluted in 1.6E16 Gallons of water.
The volume of the ocean is 3.52E20 gallons.
Is there a proposed mechanism that could cause the mercury to be concentrated in a specific region?
We need to nuke the planet and create a nuclear winter in order to stop this from happening?
Setup a company to harvest and trap mercury? Is the chemistry that difficult? How much $$$ would 50 swimming pools of mercury actually be? Would it be cost effective to simply trap and store this? 50 Olympic swimming pools is a lot, but could easily be contained in a medium sized industrial facility.
At this point, humanity deserves it. We had a good run.
Actually, you can validate the core of the theory in your basement. You could use a balloon to verify the upper atmosphere is dense in CO2 and not H2O. Getting a good baseline for the amount of global atmospheric carbon is hard, so you might have to do some real research there.
The heat properties of CO2 were discovered by Tyndall in 1859, and you have much better equipment available than he did. I would imagine you would need an IR light source, an IR-transparent container, a thermometer, and some CO2 and H2O. I mean sheesh, where would you find any of that stuff? You should be able to demonstrate that both CO2 and H2O are greenhouse gases, and you should be able to demonstrate a feedback effect between the two.
As for the observations that make this a global problem, you'll need to make some measurements of the composition of the upper atmosphere, which is pretty trivial. The hard one will require either measuring the turnover rate of the oceans, or a multi-year measurement of atmospheric carbon levels. Or you could trust the various measurements made since 1959 on that one.
The theory is that adding CO2 to the atmosphere pushes the CO2-dense region further out into space. This means that outgoing radiation takes a longer path to get to space. Because of this extra insulation, the lower atmosphere warms. Since there is lots of this "water" stuff lying around waiting to be part of the atmosphere, and it's a much better greenhouse gas, and the air can hold much more of it when it's warmer, this could be considered to be a real problem. You might want to look into it.
Could we all PLEASE return to sanity and recover a sense of perspective?
As science and engineering produce better equipment, we can detect ever-smaller quantities of stuff. When you combine the increasing ability to detect tiny quantities with BOLD TYPE in newspapers and on web pages listing names like LEAD, MERCURY, and ARSENIC which the general public has been told are KILLERS (EEEK!!!!) and multiply by the total ignorance most people have for things like scale, proportion, risk, and cost-benefit analysis, you get insanity and paranoia and horrible public policy.
Lead, Mercury, Arsenic, and Asbestos are all naturally-occurring substances and each have been handled (for the mostpart, safely) by large numbers of people for centuries and often these substances saved many lives when earlier generations of tech offered no superior solutions.
Lead is certainly bad... if you injest too much or if a pregnant woman is exposed to too much, but the vast majority of people who have had lead exposure throughout human history either had no ill effects, or actually gained more than they lost. Without lead, couuntless people would not have had modern plumbing and water that, by current standards is "unsafe" but by the standards of the time was FAR safer than any other alternative. Without lead, modern electronics and computers would not exist, and any person who has had an X-ray, an MRI, an EKG, a CAT scan, had a heart attack, etc in the past few decades might have died.
Asbestos is certainly bad... if you inhale a bunch of the dust, but millions of people (including me) would have been burned to death without it in the pre-Nomex era.
Mercury can possibly hurt you, but (short of Victorian-era hat makers going nuts after decades of handling many pounds of it bare-handed on a daily basis) very few average persons have ever been harmed by it. OK, pregnant women should avoid mercury-tainted sea food. Plenty more pregnant women (like all sorts of other people) throughout history have benefitted from better healthcare via mercury thermometers than have been harmed by it.
Arsenic can certainly kill you if you injest it in artificially-concentrated doses, but most people seem perfectly happy to willingly expose themselves to the naturally-occurring quantities in .... APPLE SEEDS.
The average person is more likely to win the powerball lottery TWICE than to ever be harmed to any detectable level by all four of the afore-mentioned SUPER-SCARY, LIKELY-TO-END-THE-WORLD substances [sigh]
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Its not right for these folks to hold onto our planets financial resources as such. These resources are needed to clean up our planet...but the $$ is being held and nothing is being done with it. Maybe GREED is the great filter that determines whether life makes it to the stars or not... greed I would imagine to be quite universal.
[($)]
.... we broke the fuckin' planet!!!! :: runs around flapping my arms like a faggot ::: Save us, Algore! Save us!!!!!11!!
Its safer on mars... soon to be more hospitable to life than earth.
[($)]
Just another in their latest aresenal of climate scare tactics.
It's the hottest day ever, the sky is falling, they sky is falling!
Just distractions from the real issues like over population, poverty, conflict, over fishing, synthetic micro fibre clothing polluting the oceans.
The people that push climate alarm are mega rich and use more fossil fuel energy in one year than the average joe does in a lifetime. Hypocrits.
all hail our silver coloured overlords.
So wait - they are SOOO concerned about mercury in the artic being "released" but not concerned about the mercury in vaccines (or should I call an "adjuvent"). They tells us mercury is good for you that's why it's in the vaccines. So why should we give a raging rats ASS about mercury being released from the artic.... Make up your minds you stupid global warming conspiracy theorists.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
...methane, and it is only a matter of time until I release it.
Holy shit the Talos Principle is real! We have to get to work creating AIs that are humanlike to take over when we all die!
My Grand Dad brought home a large Lipton instant Tea jar full of Mercury. He claimed it was used at work for cleaning.
I've swallowed Mercury, not on purpose - was going to shoot it like a empty Bic Pen spit wad when it fell down my throat.
Couldn't get rid of it, putting it down the drain was an experience. It would sit in the U-tube of the sink thwarting any attempt to remove and unclog (no one knew Mercury was poured down it). One day the U-tube shattered spilling Mercury all over, the Mercury had crystallized the metal.
Finally buried it, and it stayed for awhile; until company was over, me digging idly in the soil and look a Mercury mine. He came over regular to dig after that.
This was in Junior High and I haven't seen any problems.
I've seen Nervous system damage to the Japanese due to Mercury fumes, I'm not too sure it can hurt one otherwise.
Unless we're looking to farm the Arctic, I don't see a problem.
32 million gallons of mercury is far from the 164 billion it would take to go over the 2 parts per billion safety level for mercury. And that's just the Arctic ocean, not even taking into account further dilution as the Arctic waters blend with the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The article is just more dumbass liberal FUD.
The sky is also falling, eventually youâ(TM)ll be exposed to the vacuum of space. Then what will you do?
I wonder how much that mercury compares with the amount released into our environment by the fluorescent light bulbs mandated around the world to replace the incandescent light bulb? Just wondering, you know?
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