The future cooks while humanity cries through the looking glass:

As the climate warms, we expect heat waves to become more frequent (Ganguly et al., 2009).
Now there is still considerable uncertainty on where the heat waves will occur, that seems to depend on the climate model used.
However, the physics of heat waves do not change.
Heat waves in climate simulations are still associated with upper-level ridges (Meehl and Tebauldi, 2004).
This suggests that we will likely see more heat waves like the Muscovite heat wave of 2010 in the future.

(Illustration found here).

The Russians have been feeling the gosh-awful blowback of one reality aspect in the environment’s “new normal” — great waterless heat.
Watch here a fascinating, though highly-disturbing report by CNN iReporter Percy von Lipinski in Moscow, a three-minute clip aptly described as a walk through a “cauldron of hell.” (and the word, ‘cauldron‘ — A large vessel, such as a kettle or vat, used for boiling; a state or situation of great distress or unrest felt to resemble a boiling kettle or vat).
Percy described the sun as a “barely visible dot of orange trying to light the sky.”
The Russian capitol has been consumed by smoke from more than 560 forest/brush/wood-of-any-type-fires burning across the central belly of the country, end results of a heatwave/drought never before seen there; and for the Muscovites, they’re also dealing with peat bog fires — there’s 39 such horrors right now with 27 of them around Moscow — and temperatures near 104F, something also beyond any alive or dead memories.
Check out a dangerous-looking view from the NASA MODIS satellite of the Russian fires at Climate Central.
And although officials downplayed the peril, those fires are also threatening nuclear contamination from the Chernobyl disaster found in forests throughout certain areas of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
According to AFP, Philippe Renaud, head of the environmental radiation laboratory at France’s IRSN nuclear safety institute, said “If these trees burn, the cesium would be released into the air where they could be breathed in by people and with the wind even end up in France,” and then reportedly muttered some all-time famous last words: “This isn’t dangerous at all.”

Global climate mutation at work.
According to Dr. Jeff Masters, the Moscow mess is a combo of weather events, creating one of those heinous positive feedback loops:  “As a result, soil moisture in some portions of European Russia has dropped to levels one would expect only once every 500 years.”

And from the soil comes food.
The current inferno has already destroyed 20 percent of Russia’s wheat crop, causing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to ban all grain exports for the rest of the year, a good, judicious move for Russkies, but shit for the rest of the world.
Weather-induced shortages in the international grain market had already driven the price of wheat up by more than 80 percent since early June, but Russia, fourth-largest grain exporter, in its move immediately forced another eight percent jump.
Gwynne Dyer, the historian/journalist, notes the Russian wheat ban won’t raise much alarm to most of the world this particular time, but the event does reveal an early glimpse of climate change impact:

This means that food prices will also rise, but that is a minor nuisance for most consumers in the developed countries, since they spend only about 10 percent of their income on food.
In poor countries, where people spend up to half their income on food, the higher prices will mean that the poorest of the poor cannot afford to feed their children properly.
As a result, some will die — probably a hundred or a thousand times as many as the 30-odd Russians who have been killed by the flames and the smoke.
But they will die quietly, one by one, in under-reported parts of the world, so nobody will notice.
Not this time.
But when food exports are severely reduced or banned by several major producers at once and the international grain market freezes up, everybody will notice.
…
The world grain reserve, which was 150 days of eating for everybody on the planet 10 years ago, has fallen to little more than a third of that.
(The “world grain reserve” is not a mountain of grain somewhere, but the sum of all the grain from previous harvests that is still stored in various places just before the next big Northern Hemisphere harvest comes in.)
We now have a smaller grain reserve globally than a prudent civilization in Mesopotamia or Egypt would have aimed for 3,000 years ago.
Demand is growing not just because there are more people, but because there are more people rich enough to put more meat into their diet. So things are very tight even before climate change hits hard.
The second problem is, of course, global warming.
The rule of thumb is that with every one-degree C rise in average global temperature, we lose 10 percent of global food production.
In some places, the crops will be damaged by drought; in others by much hotter temperatures.
Or, as in Russia’s case today, by both.

And then again, maybe not-so-early a glimpse: As one can see, the Russkies ain’t alone in the wide, wide world.

(Illustration found here).

Summer in the US this year isn’t exactly another from Russia with hot-love, but records have been snapped across the eastern/southern part of the country as peoples sweated, sweltered and then stank in a heat wave where there’s no real relief.
Last month, evening TV newscasts seemingly always led with clips depicting all kinds of different peoples in big eastern US cities, playing in hydrants, wiping brows, boiling — followed by shots of the BP disaster, of course — and after some weather-related details, gushered forth with tons of human-interest stories, which got real-old, real-quick.
Read some stats on broken temp records across the US at CapitalClimate, and note the personal insert by the writer: “It’s still 90° in Washington at 7 pm.”
After a weekend of somewhat a respite from the heat, temperatures across the south are expected back to the brutal level by this week.

Here on California’s north coast, this has been a very-cool, and very-sun-less summer — ain’t weather odd.

Via Google Earth, it appears that directly straight-east (2,286 miles and nearly five hours by air) from Moscow is Islamabad, Pakistan, the capital of a country awash literally in a direct-opposite disaster — heavy rains and massive flooding on an unprecedented scale, even where bad shit happens apparently all the time.
Via CNN: “Pakistan has been hit by the worst flood of its history,” Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said in a televised speech Friday. “As I speak, the flood is still engulfing new areas and adding to the scale of devastation.”

The regional to national disaster has killed 1,600 and more heavy rain is currently falling, creating bad-case scenarios for millions of people — waters have reached the tip of the “food basket of Pakistan” 1.4 million acres of agricultural land has already been flooded.

(Illustration found here).

And east of acid-smoked Moscow there’s plenty of water.
Massive rain created flashing flooding the last few days in Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic, killing at least 15 people: A Polish firefighter said the scene in Bogatynia, in southwestern Poland, was “apocalyptic.” Much of the town of 20,000 was flooded when the Miedzianka River crested, killing one victim, he said.
The damage done already will be counted in millions and millions of dollars, and although rains eased over the weekend, peoples will be digging out for weeks — worse flooding in a hundreds of years.

Meanwhile, back on Red Square, Alexander Frolov, head of the Russian Meteorological Center, waxed dramatic on Monday:

“We have an ‘archive’ of abnormal weather situations stretching over a thousand years.
It is possible to say there was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat.”

Dramatic, indeed.

Climate change is most-likely the big one, the ultimate game changer, and from all the indicators already here and might be a-coming faster than originally anticipated –  sequence of  “the actual trajectory” of global warming is quicker, faster.
A perfect storm of mad, dangerous shit, going off at linked hyper-irregular intervals — what science people call “extreme weather events.”
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice president of the UN’s IPCC, on these remarkable occurrences and how these disasters are consistent with what’s happening with mankind-caused climate change: “These are events which reproduce and intensify in a climate disturbed by greenhouse gas pollution,” he said. “Extreme events are one of the ways in which climatic changes become dramatically visible.”

And it’s going to get worse and worse, quicker and quicker.
What’s a body to do?

Actually fly away.
One of the earth’s supposedly great brainiacs, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, says if humanity hopes to survive we must leave the earth or face extinction: “It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million,” Hawking said. “Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.”

Not until it stops raining.

New book out Tuesday on weather and climate change.
Heidi Cullen, The Weather Channel‘s on-air climate specialist, is the author of The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet, in which local conditions are the up-close and personal of what is occurring with the planet.
AP has a review/look-see.
Money quote:

“Most Americans believe that we will not take steps to fix climate change until after it has begun to harm us personally,” she writes.
“Unfortunately, by that point it will be too late. The climate system has time lags. … So, by the time you see it in the weather on a daily basis, it’s too late to fix …”

Yes…as right now the Russians, the Chinese, the Pakistanis, along with other peoples in other parts of the globe are experiencing first-hand, a hands-on primer for climate change.

(h/t: theoildrum)

Read an asshole version/review of Cullen’s book here and see a good example of why the good, green earth and all its peoples are screwed.

As this summer carves its way through the year, any dumb-ass can see something fishy is going on with the planet’s weather systems, like an old, old radiator busting its seams — heat and more heat.
Global warming might be beyond the “tipping point.”

(Illustration found here).

Climate change has always been a serious subject here at Compatible Creatures, a topic seemingly even more horrifying, and scarer, than even stuff like war, the Great Depression, rectal cancer, or John McCain, and carrying with it this unfurling scenario which now can be readily seen by anyone with any kind of walking-around sense — unless you’re in the ilk of Jim Inhofe or any of his kin.
Just in the last three years, from all indications, the environment in which humanity dwells appears to be accelerating much-quicker than anticipated toward some type of near-unlivable condition as witnessed this past week with a report, titled “State of the Climate 2009,” from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: “When we follow decade-to-decade trends using multiple data sets and independent analyses from around the world, we see clear and unmistakable signs of a warming world,” says Peter Stott, a climate scientists with the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.

Less than a year ago, The Climate Change Science Compendium 2009 reported blowbacks within climate change were moving faster, and quicker than anticipated:

In addition, increased absorption of the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide by oceans is leading to acidification of seawater faster than expected.
For example, water that can corrode a seashell-making substance is “already welling up along the California coast — decades earlier than existing models predict,” the report said.

Climate change is not THE can to kick further down the road for future generations to deal with, like oil, for instance, which apparently will keep the planet machined-in up for a little while longer, or maybe peak oil is another worm in the apple in the eye of mankind — President Obama was in Detroit on Friday to relish in the financial uptick of US auto makers, never mind the coming years; instead of bailing out the car makers last year, Obama should have started the process to “phase” them out, but that’s too much to ask, huh?

Well, the assholes in the US Congress couldn’t get a climate bill passed this year, despite everything.
The problem, though, was priority — it was either health care or climate change.
And one must remember this about climate change: The situation will soon become horrifyingly and depressingly mega-obvious.
Two years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark:

Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised.
For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived.
These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events.
There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.

Now, financial and health care reform are indeed needed, but next to climate change, neither can hold a waxing candle.

Climate-change study and an ultimate understanding of future global weather appears fickle at best, and way off the mark at worst — in the last two years the big global-warming news is negative factors “have been significantly underestimated…”
In this particular case it’s methane gas, which is not only produced by landfill sites, fossil fuel energy and agriculture, particularly rice and livestock farming, but has been found to be ‘burping’ up from ‘methane chimneys’ due to thawing of the perma-frost in the Arctic.
(Illustration found here).

This morning from the UK’s timesonline:

Methane’s impact on global temperatures is about a third higher than generally thought because previous estimates have not accounted for its interaction with airborne particles called aerosols, NASA scientists found.
When this indirect effect of the potent greenhouse gas is included one tonne of methane has about 33 times as much effect on the climate over 100 years as a tonne of carbon dioxide, rather than 25 times as in standard estimates.
…
As methane breaks down much more quickly than carbon dioxide, the impact of cuts on climate would also be faster.
“For long-term climate change there’s no way around dealing with CO2 — it’s the biggest thing and it lasts hundreds of years,” Dr Shindell told The Times.
“But if we were to have a concerted effort to deal with non-CO2 we could have a very large impact on the near term.
“Substantial reductions in methane, carbon monoxide and black carbon: that’s the way to make a big difference. I think it should be more of a priority [for Copenhagen].”

In a few weeks — Dec. 7-18 to be exact — will be the UN’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in which the world will attempt once again to reach some kind of consensus on one of the most-crucial events facing mankind most-likely in all of history.
Previews of the gathering ain’t too optimistic.
Even from Connie Hedegaard, Danish Minister for Climate and Energy and president of this year’s conference, the Copenhagen meeting is the last stand for climate change reversal.
She says, in part:

“If the whole world comes to Copenhagen and leaves without making the needed political agreement, then I think it’s a failure that is not just about climate.
Then it’s the whole global democratic system not being able to deliver results in one of the defining challenges of our century. And that is and should not be a possibility.
It’s not an option.”

The US, however, might be right now too preoccupied with the ‘public option’ of the health-care debate.

Economic considerations are also front and center in hampering the US from passing a decent climate-change bill along with millions and millions of lobbying dollars spent by coal pushers and others in attempt to hijack any kind of decent work on global warming.
The noxious smoke screen appears to be working.
A shitload of US peoples — 35 percent vs 44 percent just 18 months ago — believe global warming is not as serious as been shown, and humans are responsible — 36 percent, down from 47 percent last year.

According to McClatchy:

The legislation before the Senate, like a bill that passed the House of Representatives in June, would cap emissions and provide funding for climate assistance.
It would set a limit on emissions that ratchets down each year until it reaches an 83 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2050.
It also would require power plants and other large sources of emissions to buy pollution permits. Most of the money would go to subsidize consumers and industries for increased fuel costs, and to encourage the development of clean energy. Some also would go to help poor nations adapt to climate change.
…
U.S. negotiator Todd Stern, speaking to members of Congress in September, urged the Senate to act, saying, “Nothing the United States can do is more important for the international negotiation process than passing robust, comprehensive clean-energy legislation as soon as possible.”
However, it appears unlikely that the full Senate will vote on the measure this year because lawmakers want to finish overhauling health care first.
The Bush administration opposed mandatory cuts in emissions.
Joseph Romm, who was an acting assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration, said the Obama administration couldn’t turn everything around in less than a year.
“Given the last eight years, anybody thinking there was going to be a deal in Copenhagen wasn’t paying attention,” Romm said.

Romm runs the most-excellent site, Climate Progress, and he should know.