Quickly-creeping overcast this Monday morning on California’s north coast — looks-likely we might be getting some ‘showers‘ anytime now as a storm front glides across the shoreline.
According to the NWS, 30 percent before noon, then ‘Partly Sunny.’
According to WXshift, our rain totals have sloped in the last 45 years — in 1970, our ‘Fall Precip Trend‘ stood at 4.8 inches, and now (2014) it’s down to 3.
Oddly, at that Trend-total since 1996.
(Illustration found here).
Abnormality coming from the subtly of climate change. Reaction to a warming planet is humanity’s most-humongous problem right now, the actual climate situation well along to a not-good end.
When I started this blog in April 2007, Compatible Creatures was more about war than anything, as of course, Iraq was in it’s precursor-meltdown point, and the biggest, ugliest shit came from America’s magnificent Global War on Terror, and I followed suit. Now eight years later, my main focus has become climate change.
Really the only subject.
The general public hasn’t yet grasped the real-scary future near at hand, though, the awakening has somewhat begun — from Climate Progress on Friday:
The finding that 70 percent of Americans support the evidence of climate change represents the second-highest level in the history of the survey, which is conducted twice annually — in the spring and fall — by the National Surveys on Energy and the Environment.
The current number is only a slight dip from the 72 percent recorded in 2008, which then likely was “a response to the perception of weather or weather experiences, and before there was a campaign to challenge proposed climate change policies,” Rabe said.
“But then it began to drop almost immediately.”
…
Of those Americans who believe in climate change, a record 65 percent said they were “very confident” of their position, according to the poll.
The real-crux to the climate change problem is the problem of change — in front of the see-the-shit-happening-out-my-front-window are science reports, sometimes something new, but usually just old stuff updated with ‘worse than previously figured’ data, which makes climate change hard to grasp in its overall nefarious form.
A couple of items, both not-new, but not old, either.
A frightening, unknown aspect of climate change is the speed-of-approach of the worse-end shit — might be quicker than supposed.
The “tipping point” agenda, where if the planet reaches a certain spot on the whatever scale, then there’s no remedy.
From Climate News Network on Sunday:
Climate change could arrive with startling speed.
New research has identified at least 37 “tipping points” that would serve as evidence that climate change has happened — and happened abruptly in one particular region.
And 18 of them could happen even before the world warms by an average of 2°C, the proposed “safe limit” for global warming.
Weather is what happens, climate is what people grow to expect from the weather.
So climate change, driven by global warming as a consequence of rising carbon dioxide levels, in response to more than a century of fossil fuel combustion, could be – for many people – gradual, imperceptible and difficult to identify immediately.
…
They report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they “screened” the massive ensemble of climate models that inform the most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and found evidence of abrupt regional changes in the ocean, the sea ice, the snow cover, the permafrost and in the terrestrial biosphere that could happen as average global temperatures reached a certain level.
The models did not all simulate the same outcomes, but most of them did predict one or more abrupt regional shifts.
But the future is not an exact science.
“Our results show that the different state-of-the-art models agree that abrupt changes are likely, but that predicting when and where they will occur remains very difficult,” said Professor Drijfhout.
“Also, our results show that no safe limit exists and that many abrupt shifts already occur for global warming levels much lower than two degrees.”
The idea of a “tipping point” for climate change has been around for decades: the hypothesis is that a climate regime endures – perhaps with an increasing frequency of heat waves or windstorms or floods – as the average temperatures rise.
However, at some point, there must be a dramatic shift to a new set of norms.
And most-likely, the ‘new normal‘ would be continually ‘abnormal.’
In the second news bit, an old story made fresh, or not. One horrible note is methane gas and the huge amount of it under the Arctic ice, which is rapidly melting — a carbon-bound asshole. So bad the problem, last year climatologist and Arctic expert Jason Box got real: ‘“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.’
And the shit is not just way-up north. Some new findings close to my ass.
From the Christian Science Monitor on Saturday:
Giant plumes of methane gas appear to be bubbling up off the Pacific Northwest coast.
This is according to a new study which suggests warming ocean temperatures a third of a mile below the surface are causing the bubbles.
The new research by the University of Washington shows that, of 168 bubble plumes monitored within the last 10 years, a large number of plumes were seen at a depth considered “critical,” for the stability of methane hydrate.
And the last paragraph: ‘The new University of Washington study claims warming oceans maybe a potential bigger source of methane released into the atmosphere than man-made releases.’
As you can see why climate change receives a lot of my attention.
Adding to the problem — from Nature early last week: ‘The climate summary findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are becoming increasingly unreadable, a linguistics analysis suggests.’
Just the major source for world governments in putting together plans.
Rain on an already-bad parade…