What does greenwashing mean? Please share some examples of greenwashing.
Anand Raj
Climate Enthusiast August 25
Welcome to 2025, where climate change has turned the Arctic into Earth's most dangerous time capsule. Scientists are now warning that melting permafrost could unleash potentially deadly microbes that have been trapped in ice for millennia, because apparently our current roster of global catastrophes needed a horror movie sequel.
Arctic temperatures are rising more than twice as rapidly as the rest of the world, which means we're essentially speed-thawing a prehistoric biological weapons vault that nature spent thousands of years carefully locking away. It's like finding a tomb marked "DO NOT OPEN" and deciding to use it as a storage unit.
The preview of coming attractions already played in 2016: a Siberian anthrax outbreak killed over 2,300 reindeer and infected 36 people, including a 12-year-old boy who died. The culprit? Thawing permafrost exposed a reindeer carcass buried in 1941, releasing anthrax spores that had been patiently waiting 75 years for their moment.
I contribute to Arctic warming every day while living thousands of miles away from any permafrost. My carbon emissions are participating in a slow-motion biological jailbreak that could unleash pathogens my immune system has never encountered.
Every time I start my car, turn on the AC, or order something shipped across continents, I'm voting for faster Arctic warming. I'm essentially funding the world's most expensive and dangerous archaeological excavation, except instead of ancient treasures, we are digging up microscopic time bombs.
The profound irony weighs on me: my comfortable modern life is systematically unlocking nature's quarantine protocols.
Let's examine our new science fiction reality, where the plot twist is that we wrote ourselves into the disaster movie:
Chapter 1: The Deep Freeze Storage System For millennia, permafrost has acted as nature's maximum-security biological prison. Temperatures so cold that even the hardiest microbes went into suspended animation, creating what scientists call "viable but non-culturable" organisms. We've essentially been living above the world's largest collection of sleeping biological weapons.
Chapter 2: The Great Thaw In summer 2016, Arctic temperatures were 20-100% higher than previous decades, turning solid permafrost into microbe soup. The trigger of the anthrax outbreak was the activation of spores due to accelerated permafrost thaw during the summer heat wave. Climate change isn't just melting ice - it's running a revival program for ancient pathogens.
Chapter 3: The Prison Break Melting Arctic ice increases human and animal interactions, raising the risk of infectious disease spread. We're not just releasing old microbes; we're creating new pathways for them to find hosts. It's like opening all the doors in a maximum-security facility during a power outage.
Chapter 4: The Unknown Arsenal Researchers have identified infectious organisms at Norse sites in Greenland, which means we're potentially dealing with pathogens that predate modern medicine by centuries. Our antibiotics were designed for contemporary threats, not prehistoric ones.
The beautiful cosmic joke: we've spent billions developing biosecurity measures against human-engineered bioweapons while accidentally creating the perfect conditions to release nature's own biological warfare stockpile.
Since we're living in a timeline where ancient microbes are climate change's newest recruits, here's your survival guide for the emerging paleomicrobial age:
Level 1: Personal Preparedness Start thinking of climate change not just as an environmental issue, but as a biological security threat. Every degree of warming is a key turning in ancient biological locks.
Level 2: The Reality Assessment The world isn't paying enough attention to the potential threat posed by microbes emerging from melting permafrost. We're treating this like science fiction when it's already science fact.
Level 3: The Uncomfortable Questions Ask your local health department what their preparedness plans are for novel pathogens from thawing permafrost. Most won't have an answer, which tells you everything about our readiness level.
Level 4: The Arctic Monitoring Protocol Support research into Arctic microbiome surveillance. We need early warning systems for biological threats emerging from the thaw, not just weather monitoring.
Level 5: The Carbon Connection Every carbon emission is a vote for faster Arctic warming and more permafrost thaw. Your energy choices are directly connected to humanity's exposure to prehistoric pathogens.
Here's how to fight back against our accidental biological time travel experiment:
The Permafrost Protection Campaign: Demand that climate policies include specific targets for permafrost preservation. Make politicians explain their plans for preventing the great microbial prison break.
The Arctic Awareness Initiative: Share permafrost threat information with the same urgency people share zombie movie trailers. Make ancient microbe risk as viral as cat videos.
The Biosecurity Reality Check: Ask environmental organisations how much they are investing in permafrost-related disease preparedness versus other climate adaptation measures.
The Corporate Accountability Audit: Email companies about their role in Arctic warming and permafrost thaw. Make them explain how their emissions contribute to unleashing prehistoric pathogens.
Because if we're going to accidentally engineer the most expensive horror movie in human history, the least we can do is acknowledge that we're both the screenwriters and the intended victims.
The 2016 outbreak resulted in the culling of more than 200,000 reindeer. That's just the opening scene. The sequel promises to be much more ambitious in scope.
Source: UN Environment Programme's "Navigating New Horizons" report and multiple peer-reviewed studies on Arctic permafrost pathogen risks.