Blowing Smoke

March 9, 2017

Drizzling rain and chilly this Thursday morning on California’s north coast, another day to weather in the life of our climate.
Supposedly a break coming starting tomorrow — according to the WunderBlog‘s weather thingy, fairly-dry conditions should be in place until at least the first of next week.
We’ll see…

And of our environment, the T-Rump’s latest prick-asshole to blow pure, wet shit — EPA chief Scott Pruitt this morning:

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see…But we don’t know that yet. … We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

Such asinine-arrogance in the face of profound evidence to the contrary…

(Illustration found here).

Easily lost in the swirl of horror-shit churning, foam-like from the T-Rump presidency, is a subject of way-more importance than even of health care — climate change. And the quiet, near-orderly dismantling of the US apparatus for combating a way-swiftly-changing environment by the T-Rump and his boys.
We be fucked by global warming and all its terrifying consequences, plus aid-and-abetted by the T-Rump.

Pruitt’s bullshit examined at The Verge this morning:

Within the scientific community, however, there’s no “disagreement” about the role CO2 plays in climate change.
In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) determined that carbon dioxide is the heat-trapping gas that’s caused most of the warming compared to other greenhouse gases like methane.
The vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions in the US — 81 percent — is also made of CO2.
CO2 sticks around the atmosphere longer than other greenhouse gasses, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, and that’s why major climate change deals like the Paris Agreement target CO2 specifically.
While it takes about a decade for methane to leave the atmosphere (and convert to CO2), a part of today’s CO2 emissions will stick around for hundreds of years.
Carbon dioxide is naturally present in the atmosphere, but is also produced in large quantities when we burn fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal.
Today’s remarks by Pruitt are not that surprising if you consider that he’s awfully close to oil and gas companies, according to thousands of pages of emails he was forced to release last month.
As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt worked with these companies to bring over a dozen lawsuits against the EPA and undo environmental regulations.

Meanwhile, in the real world more debate not — we’re way-heating.
From Climate Central yesterday:

The rise in planetary heat made the freakishly warm February at least three times more likely than it was around 120 years ago, according to the analysis by scientists working on the World Weather Attribution team.
While it was a month to remember, by mid-century that type of heat could occur every three years unless carbon pollution is curtailed.
The warm spell is just the latest piece in a growing body of evidence that climate change is playing a role in almost all extreme heat events.
Winter is the fastest warming season in the U.S. and February is no exception.
February temperatures in particular have risen by 3°F since 1895, which is roughly twice as fast as the global average.
This February fits right in line with that trend.
It was the second warmest on record for the U.S., trailing only 1954, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.
The U.S. average for February was 7.3°F above normal, the fifth-most anomalously warm month ever recorded.
In all, 16 states had their warmest February on record from Texas to New York.

And so it goes…

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