Terrible animated sitcom The Family Guy aired a rerun, centered around Robin Williams, just moments before the public learned of Williams’ tragic suicide. Some of Earth’s 7 billion sentient humans suspected this meant that he had been sacrificed by the elite deviants of the Bavarian Illuminati.

There is no good news in this story, just to prepare you, except maybe for the neutral information that learning of the people who believe this—or thought it was worth joking about on social media—will not greatly expand the net total group of humans on Earth whom you already despise. In a Venn diagram, they heavily overlap with the “people who watch Family Guy reruns on BBC 3” and “people who use Twitter” groups—preexisting shit-listers, basically.

In the episode, (pain-induced wince) “Fatman and Robin”, titular family guy Peter Griffin gains some Midas touch where everyone he comes into physical contact with transforms into his favorite comedian, Robin Williams, until there comes to exist a great many Robin Williamses in his dumb fucking town. He likes it at first, but then gets so overwhelmed by their presence that he attempts suicide.

The parallels, when you stop to not think about it, are staggering: 1. Robin Williams; 2. Suicide. Clearly, the Illuminati masters of the universe, the PTB who control the media and use it to give us all cryptic “hints” as to how they wield their hegemonic power, were once again gesturing toward their handiwork by scheduling this rerun on BBC 3 the very same night of Williams’ “suicide” (or forced Illuminati sacrifice).

Living, breathing, real people broadcast this notion, some in public, using their given names:

Customary Demystification

The Illuminati has not existed since the year 1785. Rumors that it continued to exist past this point were first revived by anti-Democracy monarchists, (people who would hate you and your freedoms, for what it’s worth) who claimed to see the hidden hand of Illuminati scheming during the French Revolution. You should actually love the Illuminati. We should be so lucky as to discover that they were still in existence, continuing their secret society to further Enlightenment-era ideals like self-government and reason, etc .

OK. Now that you’ve experienced a fleeting moment of pleasure and superiority at the expense of these ignorant crazies on Twitter, it’s time for us to talk about your Internet reading habits.

This is an intervention.

You are wasting valuable time and resources, that we, as citizens of this small planet, can ill afford. To better explain, let’s start with another eye-catching news item, the mysterious giant holes in Siberia.

For decades now, climate change scientists have been warning us about the danger of triggering certain natural mechanisms that would rapidly accelerate the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, one of them very specifically being the melting of high-latitude tundra in Siberia and the Arctic. Amidst the ice are large quantities of ice-like compounds, methane hydrates, that enter into the atmosphere as methane when the tundra’s permafrost melts. Methane, as you may vaguely recall, is 24 times (or if you need a scarier equivalent value: 2,400 percent) more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

Back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, climate scientists, geologists, and one of President Clinton’s favorite books suggested that the melting of Siberian permafrost (and submerged permafrost offshore in the Arctic) could release more than ten times the amount of methane than was already then in the atmosphere. It’s a threat signalling the runaway escalation of climate heating beyond humanity’s capacity to control it.

Here is Jason Eric Box, a professor of glaciology at at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, explaining how we should be reacting to this issue:

Using a vast and credible set of climate measurements and physics, James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren makes the case that humans overloading the atmosphere with carbon would eventually trigger the release of vast additional carbon stores locked in shallow sea gas hydrates and from Arctic tundra.

In my professional opinion as a climatologist with more than 70 externally reviewed scientific publications, after 12 years of university education focused on atmospheric and oceanic science, and followed by 10 years of university lecturing on micro and mesoscale meteorology theory and instrumentation, Hansen’s warnings should be met with an aggressive atmospheric decarbonization program. We have been too long on a trajectory pointed at an unmanageable climate calamity; runaway climate heating. If we don’t get atmospheric carbon down and cool the Arctic, the climate physics and recent observations tell me we will probably trigger the release of these vast carbon stores, dooming our kids’ to a hothouse Earth. That’s a tough statement to read when your worry budget is already full as most of ours is.

In a recent interview with Scientific American, a geophysicist who studies permafrost at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Vladimir Romanovsky, whose team recently visited the mysterious Siberian holes, came to a troubling conclusion linking them to this potential cataclysmic scenario:

From the photo of the Yamal crater, “it’s obvious that some material was ejected from the hole,” Romanovsky said. His Russian colleagues who visited the site told him the dirt was piled more than 3 feet (1 m) high around the hole’s edges.

The crater’s formation probably began in a similar way to that of a sinkhole, where water (in this case, melted ice or permafrost) collects in an underground cavity, Romanovsky said. But instead of the roof of the cavity collapsing, something different occurred. Pressure built up, possibly from natural gas (methane), eventually spewing out a slurry of dirt as the ground sunk away. Anna Kurchatova, a scientist at the Sub-Arctic Scientific Research Center in Russia, made a similar observation to The Siberian Times.

Unlike the Illuminati supposedly killing Robin Williams, there is credible evidence mounting for this explanation, and it’s worthy of your attention.

Close your eyes. Feel the warm comfort of your palms against your face. Pinch the bridge of your nose, between your eyes, with your thumb and index finger. Loosen up with a few neck rolls.

Now: let’s all resolve to stop patting ourselves on the back for being smarter than certain idiots, and starting acting like we’re as smart as we think we are. Sincerely.

[h/t to the International Business Times and to boingboing.]

To contact the author, email matthew.phelan@gawker.com, pgp public key.