Hydrogen Sulfide

Can you believe June marks the one-year anniversary of this silly blog? And when I started it last June, I was determined to avoid all the sensationalist "Insane Florida News" that is so prevalent among the chaos-selling mainstream media and the "Look at me, I'm so snarky" internet timewasters like Fark. I was especially insistent about not covering stories like the "naked face-eating zombie" that kept the bread-and-circuses crowd enthralled a couple years back. But as Robyn Hitchcock once said, "Everything you say you won't is what you will eventually."

This, then, is why I now find it necessary to invoke the zombie meme, in the service of covering a higher story - the alleged problem of methane and hydrogen sulfide in our environment. I'm not into doom and gloom, I'm interested in Earth Changes, and I can't help it if they sometimes overlap. And I do believe that we are witnessing the end of one era and the birth of a new one.

There's a very interesting blog called The Jumping Jack Flash Hypothesis, whose theory is outlined in detail here, but here's the short version:

The seas, lakes and oceans are now pluming deadly hydrogen sulfide and suffocating methane. Hydrogen sulfide is a highly toxic water-soluble heavier-than-air gas and will accumulate in low-lying areas. Methane is slightly more buoyant than normal air and so will be all around, but will tend to contaminate our atmosphere from the top down. These gases are sickening and killing oxygen-using life all around the world, including human life, as our atmosphere is increasingly poisoned. Because both gases are highly flammable and because our entire civilization is built around fire and flammable fuels, this is leading to more fires and explosions. This is an extinction level event and will likely decimate both the biosphere and human population and it is debatable whether humankind can survive this event.

He goes on to detail how the gradual "new normal" creep of these substances contribute to diminished capacity for sanity among human beings, and that with the increase of these gases, we will see - and in fact are seeing - an uptick in irrational behavior at one end of the scale and full-blown psycho zombie behavior at the other. He also proposes that as the gases increase, you will see more and more cases of people simply dropping dead without cause, more incidences of spontaneous combustion and unexplained explosions, sinkholes, animal die-offs, animals behaving unusually, accidents and disasters caused by poor judgment and human error, etc.

I want you to take a look at his blog and scroll through as many pages of it as you can before you go numb to it. The first instinct is, of course, to regard his research as the ultimate case of Confirmation Bias/Selection Bias. In other words, if you propose that something is causing a wide range of a certain type of news stories, and if you go looking for these news stories to confirm it, you will find them. America is a big place, and unexplained fires, deaths, and weird behavior are nothing new to the human condition. We should expect, then, that the news would provide us with loads of material about such, regardless of whether a "unified field theory" behind it all is being set forth.

And yet.... and yet. Poring over the massive pile of data presented, one can't help but feel there's something happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear. Though Confirmation Bias is a very real thing, so too is The Boiled Frog Syndrome, in which the human mind (and body) tends to adapt to a very slowly increasingly worsening situation and edits out troublesome data even when literally surrounded with it and swamped with it. (The concept comes from the idea, spurious or not, that a frog's body temperature gradually acclimates itself to temperature increase, so that it will allow itself to be boiled to death in a pot, even though he could jump out of the pot at any time.)

In our society so saturated with wi-fi, toxins in food, toxins in receipts, BPA in plastics, PCBs in electronics, Monsanto's herbicides, pesticides and GMOs, oil spills and Corexit, fracking chemicals, Big Pharma's zombie-making antidepressants and the reclaimed water they persist in, radioactive particles from Fukushima and from our own government's nuclear bomb tests, it seems not unreasonable to think that we as a species are in denial about the environment, even without taking the hydrogen sulfide theory into account. People nowadays just accept that they always have "migraines", that they always have "hay fever" and "allergies", that's it's just a part of life that cities like Louisville are constantly declaring "bad air quality days" and urging people to stay indoors if possible. People just accept that they sometimes have "brain fog", fatigue, and free-floating anxiety, and they chalk it up to the aging process that they have constant aches and pains and symptoms sometimes labeled "fibromyalgia" and "Morgellons".

Interestingly, though the increases of methane and hydrogen sulfide are often connected by many to discussions about "man-made global warming", the blog author doesn't dwell on that subject much (and neither do I.) Certain things are happening on Earth regardless of which blame game you wish to play, and I don't wish to play any at all. Ancient anaerobic bacteria and archaea that predate oxygen-using life are indeed starting to reassert dominance on this planet, and I don't have time to address politicized nattering from the right or the left.

Anyway. There's a very high quotient of this guy's casefiles that come from Florida, and though I'm not to going to repeat them here, I suggest you take a look while using the ctrl-F feature in your browser to find all the Florida entries on each page as you scroll through. Even if this guy is only 30% right, it's food for thought.

There's a lot of smoke there, but there's some fire.