Fog and overcast again here on California’s north coast, but the ordinary is punched out of significance by it being Friday — yipee, yipee.
Days seem to get shorter and shorter — weeks and months seemingly even faster. This is the most-interesting, and most-terrifying little period in recent world history.

Seemingly, the entire earth is in chaos — right now, the most-pleasant scenario on earth is the two hurricanes bearing down on Hawaii, the first such storms in more than 22 years, all the rest is pure, terrifying shit.

(Illustration found here).

One word announces tragic horror — Iraq, in all kinds of ways, on some many different levels. Then, there’s the Ukraine, and Liberia, Gaza, Syria, Libya, and on and on.
To what: The only optimistic point is that past extinctions always left some life on earth. The human survivors of the future will dissect the reasons that most of their species died out. Hopefully they will conclude that restarting industrial society is a bad idea which shouldn’t be repeated.
And there’s no favorable side of the coin.

Before bombs and bullets can strike, our environment will kill us first.

According to a new UN report released Tuesday, humanity has to ‘mid-century achieve deep reductions of greenhouse gas emissions of 40 to 70 percent,’ or we be fucked — and I ain’t throwing out the f-bomb for the fuck of it
Via TechTimes:

“Deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to limit warming to 2 degrees C … remain possible, yet will entail substantial technological, economic, institutional, and behavioral challenges,” the report said.

Yeah, right — what kind of changes? Everything.

Beyond the murderous assholes like ISIS, the climate will utterly destroy, and quickening the enterpise is methane — from Motherboard last Friday:

“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.
…
Box, who hails from Colorado, relocated to Denmark in part to escape the impending impacts of climate change.
“Droughts are going to be a problem for the interior states,” he said.
“I’m a bit of climate refugee.”
Because the Arctic methane plumes, of course, are just another worrying source of a global phenomenon that is rapidly approaching the brink of irreversibility.
“We’re on a trajectory to an unmanageable heating scenario, and we need to get off it,” he said.
“We’re fucked at a certain point, right? It just becomes unmanageable.
“The climate dragon is being poked, and eventually the dragon becomes pissed off enough to trash the place.”

The subject of this fuckin’ discourse was methane bubbling up from the floor of the Arctic Ocean — methane is 25 percent heavier than CO2, and will really, really fuck the environment.

And to make matters worse, those Siberian holes in the Arctic permafrost — one huge hole was discovered last month in the frozen Yamal peninsula, then two others, and it appears the worse fears of such shit were realized.
Last week in Nature:

Air near the bottom of the crater contained unusually high concentrations of methane — up to 9.6 percent — in tests conducted at the site on 16 July, says Andrei Plekhanov, an archaeologist at the Scientific Centre of Arctic Studies in Salekhard, Russia.
Plekhanov, who led an expedition to the crater, says that air normally contains just 0.000179 percent methane.

Some jump, huh?

Then, let us slip away from methane a second, and glance at another wonderful chemical, mercury.
Yesterday from Neomatica on a new, detailed study of mercury pollution in the world oceans:

Scientists have completed analysis of 12 oceanographic sampling cruises which were carried over the last 8 years.
For the first time, mercury pollution burden was calculated for the world’s oceans thus filling a major gap in our knowledge.
One major conclusion is that in the shallow, upper ocean, mercury levels have tripled since the Industrial Revolution.

Nothing heavy — don’t worry,  just enjoy your Friday.
By the way, the ‘u‘ left-out in the title was just not-you, but me, and all of us.

(Illustration out front found here).