Even as this debt ceiling fiasco flails about, slapping everybody in the face with its immature, self-centered, politically-charged dramatics, the planet earth itself is rapidly reaching its own ceiling, which once breached will make every-fuckin’-body forget all that fiscal brouhaha.

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.