Thick fog this Saturday morning here on California’s northern coast — too dense to see anything happening skyward.
Nuts — in all the noted excitement yesterday on a close-call asteroid and the exploding, dramatic meteorite in Russia, folks just south of me also picked up some space debris last night.
First, via USAToday:

A bright flash of light was first reported in Santa Rosa, Calif., around 7:45 p.m., and was seen as far south as San Jose and Morgan Hill.
…
Astronomer Gerald McKeegan told NBC that the fireball was probably a “sporadic meteor.”

Watch the video at the link — cute.

(Illustration found here).

Although a lot of scientific types were calling the same-day appearance of fly-by asteroid and the Russkie meteor a ‘ cosmic coincidence,’ there’s something a-foot here, or maybe a coming shower from deep space.
More on last night’s California falling-rock version from NBC-Bay Area:

There were reports into the newsroom from people as far north as Fairfield and as far south as Gilroy.
It was also seen in Sacramento, Newark, Walnut Creek, and St. Helena.
It was bluish in color and appeared to be heading straight to the ground, according to one viewer in Santa Clara.
Meteors are pieces of rock and metal from space that fall to Earth.
They burn up as they go through our atmosphere.
The burning is what causes the bright flash of light.
“I saw that meteor/fireball over Solano County after spending the day reporting on asteroids and fireballs,” said NBC Bay Area reporter Jodi Hernandez.

There’s also more videos at the NBC link.

In the midst of all this space rock, comes an idea to prevent the pieces from hitting the earth, and the mechanism is “…not some far-out idea from Star Trek.”
It’s grounded in science, or something, and is another supposedly accident of time:

The two events raise questions about our preparedness for dangerous encounters with asteroids, and by sheer coincidence one group of scientists has just unveiled plans for a novel system to vaporize asteroids in space that threaten Earth.
“We have to come to grips with discussing these issues in a logical and rational way,” UC Santa Barbara physicist Philip M. Lubin said in a statement Thursday (Feb. 14), the day before the Russian meteor explosion.
…
“We need to be proactive rather than reactive in dealing with threats.
Duck and cover is not an option,” Lubin added. “We can actually do something about it, and it’s credible to do something.
So let’s begin along this path. Let’s start small and work our way up. There is no need to break the bank to start.”
…
Lubin and his colleagues have conceived of a system they call DE-STAR, or Directed Energy Solar Targeting of Asteroids and exploration.
The concept: harness power from the sun and convert it into a massive phased array of laser beams that can deflect or evaporate asteroids hazardous to Earth.
…
The scale the team has in mind is quite astounding — ranging from one system the size of a desktop device to one measuring 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter — and the capabilities would improve with each expansion.
DE-STAR 2, for example, would be about 330 feet (100 meters) in diameter, or about the size of the International Space Station, and could nudge comets or asteroids out of their orbits, the team said.
Such a system would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, as it would need to be constructed in orbit from smaller pieces, Hughes said in an email to SPACE.com.
Taking a modular approach, the orbital system would keep getting bigger.
The researchers envision DE-STAR 4 to be 100 times as big as DE-STAR 2 and say it would be capable of vaporizing a menacing 1,640-foot-wide (500-m) asteroid within a year by beaming it with 1.4 megatons of energy each day.

Mind-boggling, and stomach-upsetting.
A way-way-more dangerous and menacing problem is here on this whacked-out planet.
In the past, meteors striking earth has done great damage and killed-off a big chunk of living things, but right now we’re faced with something even more insidious — ourselves.
From Climate Central:

About 70 percent of all living species disappeared during that episode of abrupt climate change.
Now many scientists believe another mass extinction is under way — this one entirely of our own making.
A combination of pollution, habitat destruction and the global warming from greenhouse-gas emissions has already driven the species-extinction rate well above normal, and there’s every reason to believe it will continue to skyrocket as the warming starts to overwhelm these other effects during the coming century and beyond.

In other words, we need to get a real-quick move on to stave-off the horror that might come swiftly right down the highway, which means we don’t need to keep kicking that climate-change can on down that same road.
Or we be hurting.
Some understand it’s already knuckle-ball time and would require a Pearl Harbor-WWII effort to straighten the environment, or it’s curtains.
From Skeptical Science:

The scale and rate of modern climate change have been greatly underestimated.
The release to date of a total of over 560 billion ton of carbon through emissions from industrial and transport sources, land clearing and fires, has raised CO2 levels from about 280 parts per million (ppm) in pre-industrial periods to 397-400 ppm and near 470 ppm CO2-equivalent (a value which includes the CO2-equivalent effect of methane), reaching a current CO2 growth rate of about 2 ppm per year.
These developments are shifting the Earth’s climate toward Pliocene-like (5.2 – 2.6 million years-ago; mean global temperatures of +2-3oC above pre-industrial temperatures) and possibly toward mid-Miocene-like (approximately 16 million years-ago; mean global temperatures +4oC above pre-industrial temperatures) conditions within a few centuries―a geological blink of an eye.
The current CO2 level generates amplifying feedbacks, including the reduced capacity of warming water to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, CO2 released from fires, droughts, loss of vegetation cover, disintegration of methane released from bogs, permafrost and methane-bearing ice particles and methane-water molecules.
With CO2 atmospheric residence times in the order of thousands to tens of thousands years, protracted reduction in emissions, either flowing from human decision or due to reduced economic activity in an environmentally stressed world, may no longer be sufficient to arrest the feedbacks.
Four of the large mass extinction of species events in the history of Earth (end-Devonian, Permian-Triassic, end-Triassic, K-T boundary) have been associated with rapid perturbations of the carbon, oxygen and sulphur cycles, on which the biosphere depends, at rates to which species could not adapt.
Since the 18th century, and in particular since about 1975, the Earth system has been shifting away from Holocene (approximately 10,000 years to the pre-industrial time) conditions, which allowed agriculture, previously hindered by instabilities in the climate and by extreme weather events.
The shift is most clearly manifested by the loss of polar ice.
Sea level rises have been accelerating, with a total of more than 20 cm since 1880 and about 6 cm since 1990.

And in happy-face conclusion:

Such efforts will require an effective planetary defense effort on the scale currently expended on military spending (totaling more than $20 trillion since WWII).
It is likely that a species which decoded the basic laws of nature, split the atom, placed a man on the moon and ventured into outer space should also be able to develop the methodology for fast sequestration of atmospheric CO2.
The alternative, in terms of global heating, sea level rise, extreme weather events, and the destruction of the world’s food sources is unthinkable.
Good planets are hard to come by.

Whoa, whoa and whoa-whoa!