Early this Tuesday, not quite 4 A.M. here on California’s northern coast, a morning of  cool, moist fog with a day ahead of most likely the same — the sun might burn it off later on, then again it might not.
A much-horrible contrast to the rest of the US.

The eastern seaboard and mid-section is finally cooling a bit, say the news folks, but the heat is gathering steam for the southwest, with this from Las Vegas and pre-season football practice: “I just feel that at 111 degrees … I don’t feel that it’s even reasonable,” a local mom told CNN affiliate KTNV. “I can’t believe the school district is even allowing this because it is so dangerous … These kids should not be playing.”

Recreate in the shade, boys.

(Illustration found here).

This has got to be the way-most-peculiar era in human history in this ability to see an unimaginable disaster looming just off time’s visible horizon, and not that far it seems, and knowing there’s not a shit-in-a-poke’s chance of stopping it.
In the past all kinds of shit stirred up people for war, or politics or whatever, but there was always seemingly been in place an ‘other side‘ to the whole mess — a sun shining through the clouds so to speak — but not this time.
Odd and way-disquieting to watch what we call our world come to end on my laptop.
And time is not what we dumb-ass humanoids have in any abundance.
If one can’t grasp what’s happening right now outside one’s own window then…

From NOAA’s recent State of the Climate report with a batch of new data that sure ain’t pretty:

The January-June period was the warmest first half of any year on record for the contiguous United States.
The national temperature of 52.9°F was 4.5°F above average.
Most of the contiguous U.S. was record and near-record warm for the six-month period, except the Pacific Northwest.
Twenty-eight states east of the Rockies were record warm and an additional 15 states were top ten warm.
The first six months of 2012 were also drier than average for much of the contiguous U.S., with a nationally-averaged precipitation total 1.62 inches below average.
Drier-than-average conditions stretched from the West, through the Central Plains, into the Ohio Valley and Mid-Atlantic.
Fourteen states in total had precipitation totals for the six-month period among their ten driest.
…
The U.S. Climate Extremes Index (USCEI), an index that tracks the highest and lowest 10 percent of extremes in temperature, precipitation, drought and tropical cyclones across the contiguous U.S., was a record-large 44 percent during the January-June period, over twice the average value.
Extremes in warm daytime temperatures (83 percent) and warm nighttime temperatures (70 percent) covered large areas of the nation, contributing to the record high value.

And for us up here:

The Northwest and coastal California remained cool this month, with average temperatures 2-4 F (1-2 C) below normal.
An active storm pattern helped to keep the Pacific Northwest temperate, while the marine stratus known as the “June Gloom” set in along the California coast for over half the month at some locations.
The airport at Santa Barbara, California, reported 19 days with fog this month.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress on the NOAA results: And since it tends to be hotter in a widespread drought, there’s every reason to believe the above average warmth will continue. Mother Nature is just getting warmed up!
And this above-mentioned drought?
According to NOAA: …56.0 percent of the contiguous U.S. experienced drought conditions, marking the largest percentage of the nation experiencing drought conditions in the 12-year record of the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Yet we still have these complete assholes whose mouth gets media play, like George Will this past weekend: “How do we explain the heat? One word: Summer…Come the winter, there will be a cold snap, lots of snow, and the same guys … will be lecturing us. We’re having some hot weather. Get over it.”

Get over it?

The whole thing makes David Roberts at Grist want to puke:

“Get over it.”
People are dying of the heat, crops are failing, houses are burning to the ground, and here’s pencil-ass pundit George Will, enveloped in a cushion of wealth and safety, telling you to get over it.
Even as the science connecting climate change with more frequent and more severe fires gets clearer and clearer.
In a sane world, the response to this kind of thing would be disgust and secondhand embarrassment — fremdschämen, as the Germans call it.
Will wouldn’t be invited back on.
But in the chummy world of D.C. punditry, that’s not how it works.
You can’t blithely deny the connection between smoking and cancer or HIV and AIDS, but you can still be blase about your climate denialism.

And Roberts notes this from Gwen Ifill of PBS (used to think she had at least a little bit of sense): I come back to my argument in favor of vacations. I believe this is what most voters are thinking about now. I don’t think they’re getting drawn into scientific or political discussions about climate change. They just want it to stop, and they want their power to stay on.
Nope.
She really doesn’t.

Get over it, people, it’s not going to stop, but in reality going to get far, far worse.

Have a nice day — depending on where you live, of course.