It's been a beautiful summer on the East Coast -- a little too beautiful. So many of my friends are saying, "Boy, this is great weather" -- and then adding, "It's a little creepy, isn't it? We don't get weather like this." Yeah, well, a lot of things are changing these days and God only knows what's next. Via Vice.com:

This week, scientists made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw "vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor," as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations. The plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat more powerfully than carbon dioxide, the chief driver of climate change—was unsettling to the scientists.

But it was even more unnerving to Dr. Jason Box, a widely published climatologist who had been following the expedition. As I was digging into the new development, I stumbled upon his tweet, which, coming from a scientist, was downright chilling:

"Even if a small fraction of the Arctic carbon were released to the atmosphere, we're fucked," climatologist says http://t.co/PaXFxcAf0r — Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) August 1, 2014

Box, who is currently a professor of glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, has been studying the Arctic for decades. His accolade-packed Wikipedia page notes that he's made some 20 expeditions to the Arctic since 1994, and served as the lead author on the Greenland section of NOAA's State of the Climate report from 2008-2012. He also runs the Dark Snow project and writes about the latest findings in the field at his blog, Meltfactor.

In other words, Box knows the Arctic, and he knows climate change—and the methane plumes had him blitzed enough to bring out the F bombs.

Now, the scientists in the Arctic didn't fully understand why the plumes were occurring. But they speculated that a warmer "tongue" of ocean current was destabilizing methane hydrates on the Arctic slope.

I called the scientist at his office in Copenhagen, and he talked frankly and emphatically about the new threat, and about the specter of climate change in general. He also swore like a sailor, which I've often wondered how climatologists refrain from doing, given the urgency of the problem—it's certainly an entirely accurate way to communicate the climate plight.

First of all, I asked Box if he stood by that tweet. He did. He'd revise it a bit, to include surface carbon—methane locked in the permafrost that's also beginning to leak out—because if we loose enough of either, we're in trouble.

"Even if a small fraction of the Arctic carbon were released to the atmosphere, we're fucked," he told me. What alarmed him was that "the methane bubbles were reaching the surface. That was something new in my survey of methane bubbles," he said.

"The conventional thought is that the bubbles would be dissolved before they reached the surface and that microorganisms would consume that methane, and that's normal," Box went on. But if the plumes are making it to the surface, that's a brand new source of heat-trapping gases that we need to worry about."