Crystal clear and a bit chilly this wee-early Monday, with the moon hanging like a white orb out over the Pacific.
We’re forecast for some rain later today along California’s north coast, but we’ll just have to wait and see — weather here is always of the moment.

Parsing through the news this morning, there’s generally the same-old-shit just redefined or updated for a new week, but it’s just still the dumb-ass crap of man at work to destroy the planet. Not much new out of the climate-change genre, other than it’s still getting worse.
There’s still “massive problems” to be handled and more “promises, promises” that something will be done before we all bake alive.

(Illustration found here).

However, there are no promises in bullshit — President Obama’s State Department, which now has lead-foot, nit-twit John Kerry at the helm, kept hid some pertinent facts regards its A-Okay report earlier this month on the Keystone XL pipeline. Another example of why we’re f*cked.
Via Mother Jones last Thursday: But when it released the report, State hid an important fact from the public: Experts who helped draft the report had previously worked for TransCanada, the company looking to build the Keystone pipeline, and other energy companies poised to benefit from Keystone’s construction.
And MJ added this:

After a half-dozen inquiries, a State Department official emailed this statement: “Some information in the administrative documents that was required for State Department conflict of interest procedures has been redacted.
This redaction protects the private information of ERM’s previous clients.”
Asked who exactly made the redactions, the official said: “On background, I don’t know.”

No wonder we’re up shit creek without a paddle — and the shit creek is rising as apparently warming has not stopped, slowed, but quickened its pace.
In a newly-released study published in Geophysical Research Letters, it appears the big swoop in heat is coming from the deep oceans, which has in its way, accelerated climate change. All this “…means less short term warming at the surface but at the expense of a greater earlier long-term warming, and faster sea level rise.”
Skeptical Science this morning has the details:

Completely contrary to the popular contrarian myth, global warming has accelerated, with more overall global warming in the past 15 years than the prior 15 years.
This is because about 90 percent of overall global warming goes into heating the oceans, and the oceans have been warming dramatically.
As suspected, much of the ‘missing heat’ Kevin Trenberth previously talked about has been found in the deep oceans.
Consistent with the results of Nuccitelli et al. (2012), this study finds that 30 percent of the ocean warming over the past decade has occurred in the deeper oceans below 700 meters, which they note is unprecedented over at least the past half century.
Some recent studies have concluded based on the slowed global surface warming over the past decade that the sensitivity of the climate to the increased greenhouse effect is somewhat lower than the IPCC best estimate.
Those studies are fundamentally flawed because they do not account for the warming of the deep oceans.
The slowed surface air warming over the past decade has lulled many people into a false and unwarranted sense of security.

Yes, indeed, a false sense of security. But where’s the outcry, where’s the noise?
Deniers and bullshitters, i.e., Republicans, have been called “climate zombies” because of their attack on humanity and civilization, which like a wave from the un-dead, will fester the eating of brains for thought

The problem in getting the great wad of humanity to f*cking-listen-up on climate change has been compared to the scenarios found in those widely-popular zombie flicks and TV shows, i.e., ‘The Walking Dead,’ or ‘28 Days Later,’ to name just two of a ton of them, and how in these narratives there’s no happy endings.
The big offset is the supposedly defining two-degree limit for warming — a bullshit dangerous idea.
From a Christopher Shaw piece at the UK’s Guardian last Friday:

The mass media have been willing to communicate the policy makers’ two-degree line because they are orientated towards, and act as a largely uncritical echo chamber for, the voices of the most powerful on significant policy issues.
But perhaps the most important reason why NGOs and journalists have failed to offer any critique of the two-degree limit, and why many academics and other commentators have replicated the concept unthinkingly in their work, is that without the idea of a dangerous limit there is simply no climate change story to tell.
I can best explain this by returning to the zombies.
Stories generally have three elements; a thesis (the existing order), the anti-thesis (the thing that threatens to disturb that order) and the synthesis (the new order that emerges after the threat has been dealt with).
That is what gives a story its narrative arc and tension.
The great thing about proper zombie films is that they play havoc with this structure.
There is a thesis and an anti-thesis but no synthesis.
The zombies are never destroyed and no new stable order emerges.
And that, I fear, may be the truth of the climate change story.

Modern life is whacked — talk about giving a shit in an age of unparalleled horror:

It’s easier to put a phone in someone’s hand than it is to build a proper sanitation system.
According to a UN report, six billion of the seven billion people in the world have mobile phones, while just 4.5 billion have access to a toilet or latrine.
…
Around 1.1 billion people live in countries where defecating in the open is still a very common practice.
It can cause diarrhoea and other illnesses that kill about 4500 children a day, and the countries where open defecation is most prevalent have the highest fatality rate for kids under five, the highest poverty levels and the biggest wealth disparities.
But they have mobile phones.

Call 9-1-1 you dumb-ass, brain fart.