new seeps being discovered at an “astonishing rate,” scientists have found, raising fears that future global warming predictions may have been underestimated.

TL/DR: You’re fucked.

Well, no. The scientists said the 1.5°C limit of the Paris Accord was created because climate models broke down quickly between 1.5°C and 2°C specifically because of the unknown potential of various tipping points. One of the major tipping points was arctic clathrates - enormous pools of frozen methane at the bottom of the arctic ocean that begin to melt and bubble up to the surface around 1.5°C. The warming potential of methane being 28x more potent than CO² , and 80x for it’s lifetime before being converted by UV rays to CO²

I like Natalia Shakova’s take on it. You can see at the end she is holding back tears because of the gravity of what’s in store. Check out the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis. This is 12 years old and she was saying they knew the dangers 8 years earlier when they started their quantification research. The scientists in the article are not shocked or surprised. They KNEW this was coming. Anyone paying attention knew this was coming. CNN is pretending to have amnesia and that this is new or shocking.

So 1.5°C of the Paris accord was a warning from scientists saying something like:

Warming progresses linearly up to about 1.5°C, with a 20 year lag time between emissions and warming. If you stop man’s emissions you can probably stop warming up to that point.

Beyond 1.5°C the risk of various tipping points, meaning positive feedback loops of natural phenomena, completely seperate from man’s emissions, kick in. If these events are triggered, stopping all manmade emissions does nothing stop halt planetary warming as phenomenal natural emissions will dwarf what mankind ever did and will run their course to whatever end. We can’t stop or slow it down.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are at +1.5°C now from the Industrial revolution’s 1800’s baseline. 2024 20 year average was +1.28°C from a lower standard 1950 baseline. That’s the average of 2004-2024. 2024 itself broke 1.5C. I’ve watched for 35 years how emissions and population go up. The IEA show that even as our renewables grew, so did our fossil fuels. Renewable only had the potential to save us if they agressively REPLACED fossil fuels 30 years ago. We didn’t. We supplemented our ever growing fossil fuel use to fund ever growing populations, industry and lifestyle and renewables was only added to the mix.

This means we are now sitting on the threshold of tipping points. Turning off our emissions now won’t protect us from a probable uninhabitable earth. The best we can hope for with lower human emissions, or none at all is to make things less bad, more slowly. One we got on this roller coaster, we’re in it until the end.

A perennial favourite, Gwynn Dyer a PhD Historian and Royal Military College Instructor, author, filmmaker and journalist has done some legwork on contextualizing what this means.

This is all old stuff. We’ve known this since the 80’s and all the science since has said it’s worse than we think. This CNN article is pretending perpetual amnesia that we didn’t know how bad it’s going to get. It’s deliberately softpedalling to protect the status quo.

You’re fucked. Doesn’t matter where on earth you are or whose flag you fly. Rich or poor. Young or old. All fucked. We are going to see a rapid de-civilizational shift from 8.2 billion techno-industrial people to … well, who knows? Somewhere between 2B and extinction.