Meanwhile methane—a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon in the short term—has started hemorrhaging into the atmosphere from thawing arctic permafrost, and no one really knows what to do about it. This, like the albedo effect of polar ice loss and numerous other self-reinforcing warming effects that have been unlocking in recent years, can potentially cause the Earth to continue warming all on its own regardless of future human behavior.

That's all on top of the western empire ramping up world-threatening aggressions against both nuclear-armed Russia and nuclear-armed China simultaneously, a multi-front cold war the likes of which we've never seen before and which is only just barely getting started. And if we don't wipe ourselves out by climate collapse or nuclear war, we could still easily do it fairly soon with weaponized AI. 

So our species is facing existential threats on myriad fronts which could easily lead to horrifying extinction-level events which we could easily see unfold in our own lifetimes.

And it's just so very strange how we don't talk about that more.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/its-really-weird-how-little-we-talk