Overcast and a bit windy this morning up here along California’s northern coast, but who’s to know how the day will be — not I.
Yesterday, the fog didn’t burn off until mid-afternoon and the air carried a chill with not much warmth coming off the sunshine, unless one found a wind-break.
Weather’s gettin’ weird.

I left the ‘g‘ off ‘getting‘ in celebration of Bill Clinton’s speech last night at the DNC — according to all accounts Bubba’s talk was a smashing success.
Along with the usual political whacks and anti-GOP rhetoric, delivered in the Bubba style — enlisting his Arkansas roots, as many g’s were dropped, and the president referred to himself as a “county boy” at one point — Clinton touched way-briefly on the topic of climate change, though, only in reference to President Obama’s energy strategy and fuel-efficiency policies.

(Illustration found here).

Regrettably, climate change seems a taboo topic for everybody –the GOP because they’re delusional liars, and Democrats because they so scared (they still need to develop a backbone) — and even though the environment concerns everybody.
All Bubba could talk about was the ‘energy independent‘ bullshit-line: “The boom in oil and gas production, combined with greater energy efficiency, has driven oil imports to a near-20-year low and natural gas production to an all-time high. And renewable energy production has doubled.”
Pleze!

Dude, who gives a fat-rat’s ass what our freakin’ vehicles will do in a 10 years, or 20 years, and all this energy independence rat-crap is just another instance of kicking a highly-explosive can down the gutted road, all in the face of a huge-humongous problem that is apparently getting way-worse with each passing day — but no one wants to do anything about it.
Mainly because we as humans must kick the oil habit, and soon. But, alas, way-too-much money is involved to do something as silly as that, despite a way-shitload of scientists screaming, pointing, slapping the wind with warnings.
The very act each of us do in putting fuel in our cars should be considered our small part in the overall suicide of the human race.
And, of course, I contributed a couple of days ago when I put another $20 worth of gas in my Jeep at the still continuing price of $4.39 a gallon for regular — we still have the high prices here in northern California.
The state, however, is the overall worse in the nation — our own Sen. Dianne Feinstein is mad and wants federal regulators to look into “market schemes or other market distorting activities” involved with those high prices: Gas prices in California have risen 30 cents per gallon to $4.21, “the highest gas prices in the continental United States,” Feinstein wrote — more that double the national average increase.
The national average is about $3.77 a gallon right now, up 4.1 percent from last year.
And so it goes.

From Bloomberg: Brent oil for October settlement dropped as much as 82 cents to $113.36 a barrel on the ICE Futures Europe exchange. It was at $113.90 at 1:48 p.m. local time. Oil for October delivery was at $95.50 a barrel, up 20 cents, in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract decreased $1.17 yesterday to close at $95.30, the lowest level since Aug. 30.

The Texas Tea is poison.
A must-read is Bill McKibben’s piece in Rolling Stone last July about the actual numbers of climate change and fossil fuels with the real kicker being the oil still in the ground — Climate change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but it’s not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell.

And the earth continues to fry.

Noted the un-nerving Arctic ice melt from this summer, but other ice regions on our wobbly planet are thawing, too.
A look at the fading ice field in Argentina reveals the rate of defrost is quickening:

Using NASA satellite data, researchers led by Michael Willis of Cornell University compared recent thinning of the Southern Patagonian Icefield with melt rates since the early 1970s.
They found that on average, the Southern Patagonian Icefield glaciers have thinned by about 1.8 meters (5.9 feet) per year since 2000, translating to an annual increase sea level by 0.067 mm.
In the three decades prior, these glaciers contributed an average of .042 millimeters per year to sea rise, suggesting a 50 percent increase in the rate of melting.
“Patagonia is kind of a poster child for rapidly changing glacier systems,” said Willis in a statement.
“We are characterizing a region that is supplying water to sea level at a big rate, compared to its size.”
“We find some glaciers are stagnant and even that some have advanced slightly but on the whole, retreat and thinning is prevalent.
Interestingly, we see thinning occurring up to the highest elevations, where presumably it is coldest.”

Yes, interesting, and a bit terrifying.

Of course, a major-major-major obstacle is the ass-grinding denial from the GOP — they’ll end up killing us all.
Mitt Romney last week at the RNC was so, so hilarious:

“President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans,” Romney said, and paused for effect.
The crowd laughed.
“And to heal the planet,” Romney continued.
The crowd laughed again.
“My promise is to help you and your family,” he finished, to a roaring standing ovation from the audience.

My only comment is to tell everybody to bend over and kiss your fried ass good-bye.