Heat Means Hot

June 8, 2012

Under cloudy skies this morning up here along California’s northern coast, but still real cool — not so everywhere.
One weather/environment event this week that went near-completely under the radar — hot rain in Saudi Arabia of 109 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest known temperature that rain has fallen at, anywhere in the world.

Mankind cannot fathom what the world is actually going on with the planet.
There’s so much bad shit floating around it’s really hard to keep a grip on every-day life with a shitload of folks in reality are dead-people walking, unaware of the death grip civilization has on their lives.
And despite all the warnings, all the flashing lights and jinking alarms, we’re creeping faster and faster toward a disaster beyond even my most-fertile imagination.

(Illustration found here).

Hey — Duh!

Accordingly, because of the nowadays, warmth ain’t just in Arabia as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday released its climate overview: The spring of 2012 was the culmination of the warmest March, third warmest April, and second warmest May. This marks the first time that all three months during the spring season ranked among the ten warmest, since records began in 1895.
And furthermore:

The U.S. Climate Extremes Index (USCEI), an index that tracks the highest and lowest 10 percent of extremes in temperature, precipitation, drought and tropical cyclones across the contiguous U.S., was a record-large 44 percent during the March-May period, over twice the average value.
Extremes in warm daytime temperatures (81 percent) and warm nighttime temperatures (72 percent) covered large areas of the nation, contributing to the record high value.
The warmer-than-average conditions, which persisted through winter and spring, limited snowfall over a large portion of the country.
According to the Rutgers Global Snow Lab, the spring snow cover extent across the contiguous U.S. was the third smallest on record.

Also on Thursday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced a weird discovery in the Arctic — shit growing way below the the ice.
Via National Journal:

“Part of NASA’s mission is pioneering scientific discovery, and this is like finding the Amazon rainforest in the middle of the Mojave Desert,” said Paula Bontempi, NASA’s ocean biology and biogeochemistry program manager.
The expedition, in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas along Alaska’s western and northern coasts, found rapidly growing blooms extending 72 miles into the ice caps.
The speedy growth is a phenomenon previously thought to be impossible, as researchers assumed the thick ice blanketing the Arctic Ocean blocked out most of the sun that phytoplankton need to grow.
The findings indicate not only that the ice in the region is thinner and younger than previously thought, but also that scientists may have to reassess the level of carbon dioxide entering the ocean if these blooms are common.

Sounding alarms right now, however, seem to be falling on deaf ears.
Even if the warnings are way-pointed — on Wednesday, the scientific journal Nature published a study titled, “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere,” which cried out for attention.
From the abstract: Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence.
In another word, Whoa!
Grist explains:

As examples of past global state shifts, the authors cite the Cambrian explosion (“a conversion of the global ecosystem from one based almost solely on microbes to one based on complex, multicellular life,” which took a comparatively brief 30 million years), the Big Five mass extinctions, and the last glacial-interglacial transition, which started about 14 thousand years ago.
The difference today is that human beings are generating “forcings” (influences on biophysical systems) of unprecedented power at an unprecedented rate.
These forcings include “human population growth with attendant resource consumption, habitat transformation and fragmentation, energy production and consumption, and climate change.”
The authors emphasize that all these forcings “far exceed, in both rate and magnitude, the forcings evident at the most recent global-scale state shift, the last glacial-interglacial transition.”

So we’re moving faster toward destruction than anytime in world history.
Even the most-informed people aren’t paying close attention –the real truth is in the details, but most US peoples don’t won’t the particulars, just the broad overview.
Well, ya got it, boys.

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