“There is less clouds in the sky than before. Too much sun, which isn’t good for the plants, a lot less rain. How do you expect the plants to grow?”
…
Hundreds of thousands of people depend on the tea sector, but if climate change is responsible for the hotter weather being experienced now, it is just a matter of time before these plantations perhaps disappear altogether.

(Illustration found here).

Although Bangladesh tea picture is rosy right now — The average price of Bangladeshi tea rose 2.1 percent to 159.28 taka ($1.96) per kg from the previous sale, said an official at the National Brokers Limited, the country’s largest tea broking firm — the future isn’t so bright.

A warming world will make dust of leaves and plants.
Via Climate Progress:

The results of studies that try to quantify the effects of climate change on biodiversity loss — which include damage to the micro scale level of subspecies and genetic variation — are perhaps most shocking.
When, however, you focus on the response to climate change at the macro level, the ecosystem level, you get a better understanding of what is one of the major drivers of that biodiversity loss: forced migrations.
And even here, the numbers may be larger than one would expect, as a new assessment by NASA and Caltech published in the journal Climatic Change shows that by 2100 some 40 percent of “major ecological community types” — that is biomes like forest, grassland, tundra — will have switched to a different such state.
According to the same study most of the land on Earth that is not currently desert or under an icecap will undergo at least a 30 percent change in vegetation cover.
Based on IPCC temperature projections for 2100 [which are probably on the conservative side] of 2-4 degrees Celsius warming scientists of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology ran special computer models to calculate the most probable ecosystem responses across the planet.
This average temperature rise is of similar magnitude to the warming that occurred between the Last Glacial Maximum and the onset of the (milder) Holocene — with the big exception that the current warming is happening about 100 times faster — and for ecology that makes a huge difference, the authors stress.

Acceleration of the process is the key.
And not only has the world kicked the climate change can-of-worms on down the dusty road (via 2020), but has failed to even fund the ‘normal’ disasters, making the planet “dangerously unprepared” for future crises.

Earlier this month, the American Geophysical Union at its annual meeting in San Francisco painted a cruel picture of the can of worms.
The problem is bigger, faster and shitty-er.
Via Climate Science:

Four years ago scientists thought the Arctic would not be ice-free in summer before 2100.
Two years ago, the estimate was 2060.
This year, scientists say the ice could be gone by 2030, possibly even 2020.
As Arctic ice melts and temperatures rise, vast stores of methane frozen under the Arctic Ocean are starting to thaw and vent to the atmosphere.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, 20 to 56 times as powerful as carbon dioxide.
Researchers had seen small plumes.
But a recent survey showed, to their shock, large areas of the ocean pocked with continuous, powerful plumes stretching a half-mile or more across.
In the Andes, conventional wisdom held that residents had 20 years to 40 years to find a replacement for the dwindling glaciers serving as key dry-season water reservoirs.
That time is up, reported Michel Baraër, a researcher at McGill University in Montreal.
The era of “peak water” is past, he said, and hundreds of thousands of people living downstream face an immediate future of diminished and more variable flows.
…
“The planet is going through incredible change,” said Jonathan Foley, director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment.
“Through rapid uses of the environment, we are pushing our planet in extreme ways.”
…
“We are now on a very different planet than anyone has ever seen before,” Foley said.
“All of our predictions are going to be wrong.
We are going to be very, very surprised.”

Of course, not everybody — some can see the future in the tea leaves.

And no crap talk — President Obama’s video visit to the UN climate talks  in Durban, South Africa, citing the late Nobel peace prize winner and Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai: “Here in Durban, we can carry on her work, to … grow our economies in a way that’s sustainable and that addresses climate change. In this you have the partnership of the United States. Delegates must remember her call in which she said: ‘We must not tire. We must not give up.’”

One hundred percent, pure, prime-cut US bullshit.

Deceitful words like from this dangerous asshole: “We don’t kill our people… no government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person,” Assad said…”There was no command to kill or be brutal.”

Whom to believe — our lying eyes or a couple of bullshitters?

(Illustration found here).

One can twist eyebrows at a comparison between Obama and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, “a crazy person,” who’s trying to hold power by killing and torturing his fellow citizens, and in a literal sense there is no resemblance, but Obama’s bullshit will affect/effect way-way-more people and cause way-way-more harm.
Assad is just pushing back his own judgment day, he’ll eventually be dragged out of a drainage ditch somewhere in Syria and his long neck stretched even further.

Playing funny with climate change just ain’t that funny.
From Scientific American on how these meetings have failed to keep up with the real science of what’s happening to this planet:

Most climate scientists, however, would beg to differ.
The latest science suggests that international negotiations are proceeding far too slowly to have any significant impact on global warming and may well dawdle too long to prevent catastrophic climate change.
To meet the international target of restraining the warming of global average temperatures to just 2 degrees Celsius will require greenhouse gas emissions of just 44 billion metric tons in 2020.
And even that amount might not be enough: James Hansen of NASA said this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco that the 2 degrees C target “is a prescription for disaster.”
What’s happening is that research keeps finding new trouble signs.
Thanks to a rebound in global economic activity, 2010 saw the biggest single year increase in emissions ever—5.9 percent higher to be exact, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
Another analysis, published December 4 in Nature Geoscience, found that nearly all of the nearly 1 degree C warming observed over the last century or so could be attributed to human emissions of greenhouse gases.
The U.K. Met Office stated in a December 5 report that as many as 49 million people could be at risk from increased coastal flooding because of climate change and many others from a drop in the production of staple food crops.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argues that emissions must be halved by mid-century to have any hope of restraining warming to 2 degrees C.
“After four rounds of IPCC reports, is the science not clear enough?” asked Jato Sillah, Gambia’s minister of forestry and environment during a speech on December 6.

Apparently, it’s not clear enough for American interests — the US wants to kick the horrible can of worms far, far on down the road.
Jamie Henn at Grist:

Instead, the pace of negotiations has been set by the one country the rest of the world should be turning their back on: the United States.
The U.S. never signed the Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding international agreement designed to reduce emissions, but it is allowed to take part in the negotiations in a separate track dedicated to securing a long-term climate agreement.
After President Obama’s election, the international community had high hopes the new administration would bring a new sense of ambition and commitment to talks.
Instead, the only thing the U.S. brought to the table was a wrecking ball.
Rather than standing out of the way and letting the rest of the world get on with setting up an international architecture to facilitate cutting emissions, stopping deforestation, and investing in renewable energy, the U.S. has spent the years since Copenhagen attempting to systemically dismantle the U.N. process.
Highest on the U.S. hit list is the Kyoto Protocol, an imperfect treaty (thanks in large part to U.S. recalcitrance), but currently the best instrument in the global climate toolbox.
Next on the list is the very idea of legally binding commitments — the U.S. would prefer a “pledge and review” world where countries make their own voluntary commitments and then report out on what they’ve decided.
Here in Durban, however, the U.S. has taken on an even more insidious role by pushing a proposal that the international community adopt a “mandate” to negotiate a new climate treaty that will take effect in — wait for it — 2020.
This isn’t just a delay, it’s a death sentence.
Scientists have stated over and over that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, emissions must peak by 2015 or 2020 at the absolute latest.

I don’t like bad weather — abnormal bad weather scares the shit out of me.
And climate change ain’t just about the weather — food, water, sea-level rise, drought, extinction — nothing heavy.
And one must not forget that tomorrow is just today yesterday.

The glitch in the ‘super committee?
Think Progress answers with the obvious: Time and time again, the only thing preventing an agreement on long-term deficit reduction has been the Republicans’ absolute refusal to consider any tax increases on high-income households as part of the solution.
(Illustration found here).

Republicans don’t understand the word ‘solution’ — a much-glaring case in point was a Congressional climate briefing last week in which not only were there zero GOPers in attendance, but the whole affair was smaller than a blink on the all-news, all-the-time media.
The Natural Resources Committee held a briefing called, “Undeniable Data: The Latest Research on Global Temperature and Climate Science,” chaired by two Democrats, Ed Markey and Henry Waxman, with three top climate scientists testifying, Dr. Ben Santer, an expert on climate change attribution; Dr. Bill Chameides, vice chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on America’s Climate Choices; and a former chief climate-change denier/skeptic, Dr. Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, finally now a believer.
Via Skeptical Science:

Rep. Waxman also noted that the Republican-controlled House has voted 21 times to block actions to address climate change, including a vote to deny that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.”
…
The take-home message from each presentation is:
Muller: The planet is undeniably warming. Muller is personally not convinced how much of that warming is due to humans, but believes the remaining uncertainty is not sufficient to prevent us from taking serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Santer: The scientific evidence clearly indicates that the observed global warming is predominantly caused by humans.
Chameides: The prudent path forward involves a diversified risk management approach, which must involve a comprehensive federal policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Overall it was a very interesting and informative briefing.
Unfortunately, the fact that it was attended by zero Republican congressmen suggests that contrary to the hearing subtitle, it will not be the end of climate skepticism, but perhaps it at least represents a small step in the right direction.
Maybe Congressional Republicans will find some time to listen to climate scientists when they’re finished classifying pizza as a vegetable.

Skeptical Science titled its post, “Congressional Climate Briefing – The End of Climate Skepticism?”
That question mark could also read, Republican.

All this GOP bullshit comes on the heels of a couple of bad reports cards on our environment.
Yesterday, another snapshot of reality:

The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new high in 2010 since pre-industrial time and the rate of increase has accelerated, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.
It focussed special attention on rising nitrous oxide concentrations.
Between 1990 and 2010, according to the report, there was a 29 percent increase in radiative forcing — the warming effect on our climate system — from greenhouse gases.
Carbon dioxide accounted for 80 percent of this increase.
…
The atmospheric burden of nitrous oxide in 2010 was 323.2 parts per billion — 20 percent higher than in the pre-industrial era.
It has grown at an average of about 0.75 parts per billion over the past ten years, mainly as a result of the use of nitrogen containing fertilizers, including manure, which has profoundly affected the global nitrogen cycle.
Its impact on climate, over a 100 year period, is 298 times greater than equal emissions of carbon dioxide.
It also plays an important role in the destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer which protects us from the harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun.

And if that isn’t bad enough: The US Dept. of Energy earlier this month said in 2010, The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.
(Great h/t to Climate Progress).

Danger indeed, Will Robinson, but guys,  Zachary Smith should have been history long before now.

We estimate that climatic warming has increased the number of new global-mean temperature records expected in the last decade from 0.1 to 2.8.
For July temperature in Moscow, we estimate that the local warming trend has increased the number of records expected in the past decade fivefold, which implies an approximate 80 percent probability that the 2010 July heat record would not have occurred without climate warming.

(Illustration found here).

Joe Romm at Climate Progress on the study: Again, this extreme event ended Russian grain exports for year. So the increase in extremes very much threatens food security if we don’t act soon to reverse emissions trends.

In other words, gird thy loins, or learn how to re-eat foodstuffs.

Romm also notes the study from PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) is a “bombshell” because NOAA did a flawed analysis just a few months ago that found no connection between global warming and the record-smashing (heat).
Wiggle room is shrinking for deniers.

And another anti-denial nail was driven home this past week — the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which was supposed to slash holes into the very heart of climate change, released a report ‘confirming‘ the bad news the earth is indeed burning alive.
From former ‘skeptic‘ Richard Muller, the chair of the Berkeley study, in the Wall Street Journal:

We discovered that about one-third of the world’s temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming.
The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming.
The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC, much greater than the IPCC’s average of 0.64ºC.
…
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find.
Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups.
We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.
They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
Global warming is real.
Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.
How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects?
We made no independent assessment of that.

Just watch the weather reports, Richard.
Despite Muller and his study, some people are still hard-headed wrong — read a good view of fallout from the Berkeley study on the hardcore denial crowd at DeSmogBlog, and follow the links.

Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column last week, took to task another study, this one from the American Petroleum Institute (and one can guess its point of view), which is the core of the GOP’s economic proposals — pollution makes for more jobs.
Republicans, however, don’t even understand their own shit.
Money bits:

But does this oil-industry-backed study actually make a serious case for weaker environmental protection as a job-creation strategy?
No.
…
Moreover, even if you take the study’s claims at face value, it offers little reason to believe that dirtier air and water can solve our current employment crisis.
All the big numbers in the report are projections for late this decade.
The report predicts fewer than 200,000 jobs next year, and fewer than 700,000 even by 2015.
You might want to compare these numbers with a couple of other numbers: the 14 million Americans currently unemployed, and the one million to two million jobs that independent estimates suggest the Obama plan would create, not in the distant future, but in 2012.
More pollution, then, isn’t the route to full employment.
But is there a longer-term economic case for less environmental protection?
No.
Serious economic analysis actually says that we need more protection, not less.
…
As the study’s authors say, finding that an industry inflicts large environmental damage compared with its apparent economic return doesn’t necessarily mean that the industry should be shut down.
What it means, instead, is that “the regulated levels of emissions from the industry are too high.”
That is, environmental regulations aren’t strict enough.
Republicans, of course, have strong incentives to claim otherwise: the big value-destroying industries are concentrated in the energy and natural resources sector, which overwhelmingly donates to the G.O.P.
But the reality is that more pollution wouldn’t solve our jobs problem.
All it would do is make us poorer and sicker.

And the planet gets warmer and warmer while ignorant dickheads fiddle.

And amongst those GOP nit-twits debating bullshit topics Wednesday night, one aspect Republicans hate is the very mention of climate change, the very things that keep foodstuffs so high — even the US is feeling the impact in its gut — the Midwest’s so-called breadbasket of the world.

(Illustration found here).

The US has indeed been the last half century the world’s breadbasket — this year, this country planted 2,839,000 acres in oats, 3,018,000 acres of rice, 16,792,000 acres of wheat, and 92,178,000 acres of corn (amongst other major crops like soybeans, hay, barley, etc.), the vital substances for any foodstuff menu.
The US accounts for 50 percent of the world’s corn and 30 percent of wheat.
Corn is the biggest US cash crop, valued at $66.7 billion in 2010, followed by soybeans at $38.9 billion, USDA data show, and exported 46,360 metric tons of that corn so far this year — and corn production has declined: National Ag Statistics reported a U.S. average corn yield below trend value due to adverse planting and growing conditions in many parts of the country and extremely high temperatures in July…
And it’s going to get worse.

Changes in climate is already taking place and it has/will have a major impact on the breadbasket.
From Reuters:

Some scientists and agronomists are becoming increasingly concerned about the real effects they see now on growing conditions in the Midwest, the vast black-soiled region long the core region of the U.S. agricultural miracle.
They also say that not only skeptical farmers but also government authorities are trying to quietly adapt, from equipment to planting to research.
“We don’t have a long-term reserve. We have a global food supply of about 2 or 3 weeks,” said Eugene Takle, Professor of Agricultural Meteorology and Director of the Climate Science Program at Iowa State University.
“We’ve become insensitive to climate — with air conditioning, irrigation and better practices,” he said. “Well, I think we need to rethink that.
Just how vulnerable are we?”
Takle and others say the future is now.

“It’s not the long-term climate trends,” Takle says,
“It’s the variability.
It’s the extreme events that have brought the vulnerability of agriculture to climate into the forefront. We think about, and wring our hands for awhile.”
…
In June 2009, the science academies of the G8 countries, plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa, demanded action to address global climate change that “is happening even faster than previously estimated.”
Takle said Midwest farmers are already adapting.
“Farmers say they don’t believe in climate change, but you look at how they spend money and are adapting,” he said.

And from the US Global Change Research Program:

Agriculture covers 70 percent of the Great Plains.
As temperatures continue to rise, the optimal zones for growing certain crops will shift.
Pests will spread northward and milder winters and earlier springs will encourage greater numbers and earlier emergence of insects.
Projected increases in precipitation are unlikely to be sufficient to offset decreasing soil moisture and water availability due to rising temperatures and aquifer depletion.
…
Climate change is likely to combine with other human-induced stresses to further increase the vulnerability of ecosystems to pests, invasive species, and loss of native species.
Breeding patterns, water and food supply, and habitat availability will all be affected by climate change. Grassland and plains birds, already stressed by habitat fragmentation, could experience significant shifts and reductions in their ranges.

Can a hoax pull off this shit?

Flooding not necessarily from seawater is a major threat: “Water is the No. 1 killer,” retired National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield said Friday afternoon. “That’s going to cause the greatest loss of life.” Many deaths can be avoided if people leave the coast and don’t drive into flooded areas, he said.

And compounded with a new moon tide, which adds about a foot to an already high storm surge of six to 11 feet, the eastern seaboard will most indeed get some heavy flooding this weekend.

(Illustration found here).

In front of Irene is 65 million US peoples — 2.5 million under evacuation orders, 300,000 in New York City alone with a report of two deaths already in North Carolina (one guy crushed by a tree limb, the other washed away by flood waters).

Just past noon Saturday as Irene churned northward at 13 mph, four deaths have been reported now — three in North Carolina, one in Virginia — and already 670,000 electrical customers were without power.
And to even more maximize Irene, the NOAA has issued a tornado watch for Delaware, eastern Maryland, portions of Virginia and along coastal waters — a tornado was reported in eastern Virginia.

And now just after 4 p.m. Pacific time, way-slowly moved her way northward — 13 mph don’t carry far — and is about to strike Virginia Beach, about 350 miles south-southwest of New York City, which has emptied its streets and subways and waited with an eerie quiet.
Blackouts are coming, too, as now nearly a million homes and businesses are without electrical power.
One thing it appears, people are being told by everybody from local cops to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to President Obama to brace up, get your shit together and be prepared.

One wonders why all these Top Cats can’t expend the same due diligence toward what is making Irene so fluffy and dangerous — climate change.

Warm air holds more moisture — pretty much eighth-grade science.

As the globe warms, more water in the air.
From Nature last February:

Given that atmospheric water-holding capacity is expected to increase roughly exponentially with temperature—and that atmospheric water content is increasing in accord with this theoretical expectation, it has been suggested that human-influenced global warming may be partly responsible for increases in heavy precipitation.
…
Here we show that human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas.
These results are based on a comparison of observed and multi-model simulated changes in extreme precipitation over the latter half of the twentieth century analysed with an optimal fingerprinting technique.

And like a lot of other climate-change phenomenon, there’s an even worse side:

Changes in extreme precipitation projected by models, and thus the impacts of future changes in extreme precipitation, may be underestimated because models seem to underestimate the observed increase in heavy precipitation with warming.

And as far as the actual mark between climate science and global warming — climate change doesn’t necessarily make shit happen, it just makes shit even worse.
Science and environment writer Michael Lemonick says it’s all in the wording.
From a post yesterday at Climate Central:

The question: is this weather disaster caused by climate change?
Wrong question.
Here’s the right question: is climate change making this storm worse than it would have been otherwise?
Answer: Absolutely
For one thing, sea-surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean are higher now than they used to be, thanks to global warming, and ocean heat is what gives hurricanes their power.
All other things being equal, a warmer ocean means a more powerful storm.
It’s hard to say that all other things are exactly equal here, but it’s certainly plausible that Irene would have been a little weaker if precisely the same storm had come through, say, 50 years ago.
What we know for sure, however is that thanks largely to climate change, sea level is about 13 inches higher in the New York area than it was a century ago.
The greatest damage from hurricanes comes not from high winds and torrential rains — although those do cause a lot of damage.
It’s from the storm surge, the tsunami-like wall of water a hurricane pushes ahead of it to crash onto the land.
It was Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge, not the wind or rain, that destroyed New Orleans back in 2005.
With an extra foot of sea level to start with, in other words, Irene’s storm surge is going to have a head start.
And climate change is a big part of the reason why.

Lemonick also cites a study in Science, which reports less number of hurricanes in the near future, but those that do form will be wallbangers: The model projects nearly a doubling of the frequency of category 4 and 5 storms by the end of the 21st century, despite a decrease in the overall frequency of tropical cyclones, when the downscaling is based on the ensemble mean of 18 global climate-change projections.

From a paper also at Nature:

Rising concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may already be influencing the intensity of rainfall and increasing the risk of substantial damage from the associated flooding.

Hurricanes are just mega-humongous rain storms.

The problem with all this, however, people just don’t seem to understand the situation.
And apparently the deniers have the bigger mouths.
In a Gallup poll released Friday: Fifty-five percent of Americans who are aware of climate change view it as a serious personal threat, down from 64% in 2007 and 2008. They are also now less likely to attribute global warming to human causes, but half (50%) still at least partly blame humans.
And bullshit continues unabated, in the words of Rick Perry for all the nit-twit GOP presidential contenders: “I don’t think from my perspective I want America to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven, and from my perspective is more and more being put into question.”

Meanwhile, Irene keeps on a churning.

Despite climate change being way-more dangerous than a bull-on-crack in a china shop, way-more perilous than all them other horrible impending consequences boiling up from all over, the vast majority of US peoples really are in a kind of paradoxical situation.

In fact, a new study from the Yale Cultural Cognition Project revealed the more scientifically literate you are, the more certain you are that climate change is either a catastrophe or a hoax.
And that’s just absolute-plain, bat-shit crazy.

(Illustration found here).

The planet is reaching (or is already there) the ‘tipping point’ where disaster is all be certain and nothing (as in zero) can be done to avert the horror.
On top of that, there’s these positive feedback loops in nature which are not positive at all, but very, very negative — rising temperatures trigger ecological and chemical responses, such as warmer oceans giving off more carbon dioxide, or warmer soils decomposing faster, liberating ever increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and methane.
Not a pretty sight.

In another new study (these things come out a mega-regular basis), it appears the oceans and dry lands are being broken down as the globe warms, thus releasing even more dangerous shit into the air.
And the report also cites another example of climate change worse than earlier anticipated.
From AFP via Raw Story:

A study published in Nature on Thursday says a gradual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) over the last half-century has accelerated the release of methane and nitrous oxide in the soil.
These gases are respectively 25 and 300 times more effective at trapping radiation than CO2, the principal greenhouse gas by volume.
“This feedback to our changing atmosphere means that nature is not as efficient in slowing global warming as we previously thought,” said Kees Jan van Groenigen, a professor at Trinity College Dublin and the paper’s lead author.
…
More CO2 increased nitrous oxide in all soils, but soils in rice paddies and wetlands released more methane in particular.
The culprits in both cases are microscopic soil organisms that breathe in CO2 and “exhale” methane. The more carbon dioxide in the air, the more these single-cell greenhouse-gas factories thrive.
…
“By overlooking the key role of these two greenhouse gases, previous studies may have overestimated the potential of ecosystems to mitigate the greenhouse effect,” van Groenigen said.

The news report also points out another new study on weakened ocean water.

In the second study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience last Sunday, scientists in the United States highlight evidence that global warming is eroding the ability of the ocean to soak up CO2.
The world’s seas take up roughly one-third of all human carbon emissions, but how this “sponge” responds to rising CO2 levels is a tough question, mainly because data has been spotty geographically and didn’t cover long time periods.

You could most-likely bet your last half-dollar this ‘sponge‘ effect is about gone.

Not only is it the weather getting bad, but the earth is getting thinner on top and fatter at the middle — horrible age aspects.
From Skeptical Science:

Like many an aging baby boomer, the Earth is starting to bulge at the waist and is getting thinner on top. In the Earth’s case this isn’t due to a weakness for drinking beer or due to an inherited tendency towards male pattern baldness.
Rather, it is because of climate change.
As the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica thaw, the melt water is distributed throughout the world’s oceans, causing mass to move away from the poles.

Ah, ha!

And all this melting ice creates vibrating vibes all down the natural chain.
The changes in climate also greatly effects the geosphere — more earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes.

Some intuitive calculation may help understanding: A cubic yard of ice weighs nearly a ton.
The Antarctic ice sheet is a few miles thick.
Earth adjusted to that immense weight over the millennia — now, as ice caps melt, this weight is slowly lifting…

One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist.

Although US peoples have access to every conceiable communication device, our collective heads are either up our collective ass, or buried in the shifting sands of this dying planet.
Transition Voice had a recent comment on that:

Meanwhile, 300 million self-absorbed Americans watch the feel-good “news” to see which models of beer and automobile are being pimped by their favorite celebrities.
It seems the personal game of “who’s screwing whom” is more important to the typical television-addicted American than the international, imperial game of “who’s screwing whom.”
Oblivious to the carnage of industry and the lunacy of our lives, we keep praying the stock markets go up while bickering about who’s to blame for our economic misfortune.
Meanwhile, the shamans and high priests of the faith-based junk science known as neoclassical economics assure us the industrial economy is growing.
And, they say, this is a good thing.
But beyond the culture of make believe and into the realm of reality, we know otherwise.
Civilization precludes maintenance of a robust living planet capable of supporting human life for additional millennia.
There is another, better way to live.
But we can’t be bothered.
Please pass the guacamole, and don’t tell me about the horrors of globalization that allowed the delivery of its component ingredients.
After all, extinction is for lesser species.
Until it’s not.

A huge tempest in a crazed, boiling tea kettle called earth.

Report after report, study after study indicated the real mess of climate change will come in the future — somewhere down the line in 2020, 2030, or the end of this century, 2100, and so forth, but it appears the brains have undershot the reality and it’s here already.
Some times, I just hate being anywhere near right.

And mankind is the asshole ruler of the planet.
The human species is the polluter, even beyond the horror of volcanoes with their smoke and fire belching into the heavens: In fact, humans release roughly 135 times more carbon dioxide annually than volcanoes do, on average, according a new analysis. Put another way, humans emit in under three days the amount that volcanoes typically release in a year, according to the best estimates of volcanic emissions.
And with people like us in charge, we’re fried.

(Illustration found here).

From Nature Geoscience (full report behind a pay wall — synopsis below found at physorg.com):

Professor Paul Valdes of the School of Earth Sciences, discusses four examples of abrupt climate change spanning the past 55 million years that have been reconstructed from palaeoclimate data.
In two of the cases, complex climate models used in the assessments of future climate change did not adequately simulate the conditions before the onset of change.
In the other two cases, the models needed an unrealistically strong push to produce a change similar to that observed in records of past climate.
Professor Valdes concludes that state-of-the-art climate models may be systematically underestimating the potential for sudden climate change.

No shit sherlock.

And dang it, sherlock is right.
Apparently, the ocean’s currents are forcing the earth’s ice pack at its poles to melt even faster.
From Climate Progress on a new study by Columbia University’s Earth Institute:

Stronger ocean currents beneath West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf are eroding the ice from below, speeding the melting of the glacier as a whole, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience.
A growing cavity beneath the ice shelf has allowed more warm water to melt the ice, the researchers say — a process that feeds back into the ongoing rise in global sea levels.
The glacier is currently sliding into the sea at a clip of four kilometers (2.5 miles) a year, while its ice shelf is melting at about 80 cubic kilometers a year — 50 percent faster than it was in the early 1990s — the paper estimates.
…
One day, near the southern edge of Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf, the researchers directly observed the strength of the melting process as they watched frigid, seawater appear to boil on the surface like a kettle on the stove.
To Jacobs, it suggested that deep water, buoyed by added fresh glacial melt, was rising to the surface in a process called upwelling.
Jacobs had never witnessed upwelling first hand, but colleagues had described something similar in the fjords of Greenland, where summer runoff and melting glacier fronts can also drive buoyant plumes to the sea surface.
…
The warmer it gets, the more unstable WAIS (West Antarctic ice sheet) outlet glaciers will become.
Since so much of the ice sheet is grounded underwater, rising sea levels may have the effect of lifting the sheets, allowing more-and increasingly warmer-water underneath it, leading to further bottom melting, more ice shelf disintegration, accelerated glacial flow, and further sea level rise, and so on and on, another vicious cycle.
The combination of global warming and accelerating sea level rise from Greenland could be the trigger for catastrophic collapse in the WAIS…

And to combat this quickly spiking rise in sea levels, a new approach has been offered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Don’t fight it as costly seawalls and dikes eventually fail because sea-level rise is unstoppable.
From the Washington Post last Sunday:

The analysis, “Rolling Easements,” published on the EPA’s Web site, hopes “to get people on the path of not expecting to hold back the sea” as the warming climate is expected to melt ice around the globe, EPA researcher James G. Titus said.
…
The EPA report said governments have three options to deal with sea-level rise: They can stay on the well-worn path of building expensive protection and raising streets and buildings.
They can beat an organized retreat from the shore, perhaps by offering financial incentives to people and organizations to move inland.
Or they can allow people to do whatever they want for their waterfront properties but tell them in no uncertain terms that they are on their own when the waters rise.

It’s all the same to every single member of the human race — in no uncertain terms, we’re all on our own as waters rise and the clock ticks away.

Of course, now we know (and not just believe) all that was just campaign trail bullshit — Obama is way-by-far the most disappointing president in US history, though, a bit right-on considering he followed the worst president in US history.
And, of course, Obama with all his faults and lies, was still a hundred-trillion-times better in 2008 than the alternative.

(Illustration found here).

Beyond the lack of transparency, beyond all the failed promises — Gitmo, Iraq, war in general, etc., etc. — the biggest let down is Obama’s seemingly nearly disregard of the entire planet’s biggest-by-far problem: Climate change.
Obama has never really seemed to have his heart in climate change.
He blew it on climate change legislation last year, and even with the BP oil spill in the gulf of Mexico, which could have been a watershed moment for global warming, Obama let the ball roll all away.
Instead, he’s out playing golf with The Boner, trying to patch together some consensus for the stupid debt ceiling bullshit, which won’t matter after a humongous F5 tornado wipes out the entire northeastern US.

Obama’s so bad, Al Gore, has lashed out at him.
In Rolling Stone magazine:

To sell their false narrative, the Polluters and Ideologues have found it essential to undermine the public’s respect for Science and Reason by attacking the integrity of the climate scientists.
That is why the scientists are regularly accused of falsifying evidence and exaggerating its implications in a greedy effort to win more research grants, or secretly pursuing a hidden political agenda to expand the power of government.
Such slanderous insults are deeply ironic: extremist ideologues — many financed or employed by carbon polluters — accusing scientists of being greedy extremist ideologues.
After World War II, a philosopher studying the impact of organized propaganda on the quality of democratic debate wrote, “The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”
…
Barack Obama’s approach to the climate crisis represents a special case that requires careful analysis.
His election was accompanied by intense hope that many things in need of change would change.
Some things have, but others have not.
Climate policy, unfortunately, is in the second category.
Why?
First of all, anyone who honestly examines the incredible challenges confronting President Obama when he took office has to feel enormous empathy for him: the Great Recession, with the high unemployment and the enormous public and private indebtedness it produced; two seemingly interminable wars; an intractable political opposition whose true leaders — entertainers masquerading as pundits — openly declared that their objective was to ensure that the new president failed; a badly broken Senate that is almost completely paralyzed by the threat of filibuster and is controlled lock, stock and barrel by the oil and coal industries; a contingent of nominal supporters in Congress who are indentured servants of the same special interests that control most of the Republican Party; and a ferocious, well-financed and dishonest campaign poised to vilify anyone who dares offer leadership for the reduction of global-warming pollution.

Despite all that still nothing.
And in a real-depressing, though, most realistic overview of the global warming problem was posted this week with Aljazeera English, detailing the plight of mankind.
A couple of snips:

Scientific research confirms that, so far, humankind has raised the Earth’s temperature, and the aforementioned events are a sign of what is to come.
“If you had a satellite view of the planet in the summer, there is about 40 per cent less ice in the Arctic than when Apollo 8 [in 1968] first sent back those photos [of Earth],” Bill McKibben, world renowned environmentalist and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences told Al Jazeera, “Oceans are 30 per cent more acidic than they were 40 years ago.
The atmosphere is four per cent more wet than 40 years ago because warm air holds more water than cold air.
That means more deluge and downpour in wet areas and more dryness in dry areas.
So we’re seeing more destructive mega floods and storms, increasing thunderstorms, and increasing lightning strikes.”
So far human greenhouse gas emissions have raised the temperature of the planet by one degree Celsius.
“Climatologists tell us unless we get off gas, coal, and oil, that number will be four to five degrees before the end of this century,” said McKibben, “If one degree is enough to melt the Arctic, we’d be best not to hit four degrees.”
…
Unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA) recently revealed that greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year to the highest carbon output in history, despite the most serious economic recession in 80 years.
This means that the aim of holding global temperatures to safe levels are now all but out of reach.
The goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than two degrees Celsius, which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” is now most likely just “a nice Utopia”, according to Fatih Birol, a chief economist of the IEA.

And that’s change we most-definitely don’t want to believe in.

And there’s really no end to it all.
On Tuesday, more severe weather, including tornadoes, sliced across Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma, killing at least nine and leaving chaos and disaster in its wake, even buffering Joplin, MO, where 124 died on Sunday, making it the deadliest single U.S. twister since modern record-keeping began 61 years ago.
Gird thy loins, humanity, bad shit is already hitting the fan.

(Illustration found here).

The photo above is the aftermath of the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami which struck Japan March 11 along the coast about 250 miles northeast of Tokyo — the destruction there was also movie-like, sucking up memories of the end product off the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
According to the BBC in March:

The quake was the fifth-largest in the world since 1900 and nearly 8,000 times stronger than the one which devastated Christchurch, New Zealand, last month, said scientists.

Along with the main show, there were more than 100 aftershocks, including at least a dozen of magnitude 6 or higher, creating further devastation while scaring the living shit out of anybody still alive.
The lingering major trouble with the Japanese, of course, is that damn nuclear power plant.
Just yesterday, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the facility, reported that three of the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi plant’s reactors most likely suffered fuel meltdowns in the early days of the crisis.
The Japanese have bungled the operation from the beginning, and because officials weren’t forthcoming, no one really knows how precarious the operation, which lead also on Tuesday, to the arrival of a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear oversight body of the United Nations, to investigate the situation — which ain’t pretty in any light.

(Illustration found here).

And the picture above is from Joplin, Missouri, this past weekend — the scene could have been drawn straight out of Japan.
The carnage is near-beyond comprehension, twisting and tearing houses, buildings and even leveling whole apartment complexes with all the occupants gone, vanishing into the rubble.
The experience was a rarity of nature:

The tornado Sunday in Joplin was an EF5, the National Weather Service said Tuesday, the highest rating given to twisters.
The rating is assigned based on the damage storms cause.
The weather service also announced that the tornado appeared to be a rare “multivortex” twister. Multivortex tornadoes contain two or more small and intense subvortices that orbit the center of the larger tornado circulation.
Multivortex tornadoes have been seen in massive storms.

Although the event is horrible, the destruction immense, Joplin vows to come back from it: But no matter what happens, the mayor of our small city put it this way: “We’re not going to let some little tornado kick our ass.” Even if it was an EF5.

Air and the earth — products out of whack due to a changing global climate.
No matter what the science says is coming in a few years — supposedly experts talking about bad climate shit coming in 2015, 2020, 2100, and on and on.
Wrong!
It’s already here, boys.
From Skeptical Science and a summary of horror:

April 2011 was a month defined by extreme weather conditions, particularly in the United States.
…
The month also witnessed violent storm fronts that brought record precipitation, severe wind, and hail the size of golf balls and larger.
Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and West Virginia all reported their wettest April in history. Kentucky received an average of 11.88 inches of precipitation — nearly three times its long-term average for the month — breaking the state’s previous record by more than four inches.
…
The 30-year-average for April tornadoes nationwide is 135. The monthly record was 542.
The preliminary number of tornadoes reported in April 2011 is 875.
Single day events saw Wisconsin experience its largest monthly April tornado outbreak in history on April 9, and an EF-4 twister ripped a 21-mile path across the city of St. Louis on April 22.
But it was the multi-day outbreaks that generated the most devastation.
From April 14 to April 16, there were 329 preliminary tornado reports across 16 states with the final tally expected to be around 155, making it one of the largest outbreaks of any month in history.
States of emergency were declared in Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and North Carolina.
North Carolina bore the brunt with at least 30 confirmed tornadoes destroying hundreds of homes and businesses and resulting in at least 24 deaths, marking the three days as the largest tornado outbreak to ever hit the state, and the second deadliest outbreak on record for North Carolina.
…
Under a warming climate, Antarctica is becoming greener as grasses are finding better conditions under which to take root while warming waters and declining krill populations are resulting in declining penguin populations. An analysis of glaciers in the southern half of South America finds them melting at the fastest pace in the last 350 years.
And earlier spring blooms are impacting the timing of ecological cycles while changes in rainfall patterns are influencing the migratory habits of some bird species.
…
Meanwhile a study focusing on methane releases from hydraulic fracturing, an increasingly controversial process used in the drilling extraction of natural gas, found that such releases may contribute as much or more than coal to global warming.
Natural gas has been gaining widespread favor amongst politicians in both parties in the U.S. considering its large natural stores in the country, relatively easy access, minimal regulation, and lower costs particularly when compared against rising oil prices.

Read the whole post — mind-blowing shit and that’s a run down for just the month of April.
A tsunami of climate-changing terror.