Clear and kind of warm this Tuesday morning on California’s north coast, the near-half moon hanging like a bright closet-orb seen from far away.
Day-to-day life viewed from the stars.

In a world gone bat-shit crazy, focal points are seemingly on everything except the way-most important — the earth that moon is still-shining happily down upon. Sooner than we figure, all that wonder will cease.

Climate change, really, is a result of ‘myriad dysfunctional relationships‘ — a bad romance gone violent.

(Illustration found here).

The nefarious love for fossil fuels has engineered our world. First coal, then oil and then came civilization, or so we think, and we’re so wrong. We just might be ending the romance, but on a way-nasty note. The Industrial Revolution is actually humanity’s drawn-out necktie party.
Sobering news yesterday via the UK’s Guardian:

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 399.72 parts per million (ppm) and is likely to pass the symbolically important 400ppm level for the first time in the next few days.
Readings at the US government’s Earth Systems Research laboratory in Hawaii, are not expected to reach their 2013 peak until mid May, but were recorded at a daily average of 399.72ppm on 25 April.
The weekly average stood at 398.5 on Monday.
Hourly readings above 400ppm have been recorded six times in the last week, and on occasion, at observatories in the high Arctic.
But the Mauna Loa station, sited at 3,400m and far away from major pollution sources in the Pacific Ocean, has been monitoring levels for more than 50 years and is considered the gold standard.
“I wish it weren’t true but it looks like the world is going to blow through the 400ppm level without losing a beat. At this pace we’ll hit 450ppm within a few decades,” said Ralph Keeling, a geologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography which operates the Hawaiian observatory.
…
“The 400ppm threshold is a sobering milestone, and should serve as a wake up call for all of us to support clean energy technology and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, before it’s too late for our children and grandchildren,” said Tim Lueker, an oceanographer and carbon cycle researcher with Scripps CO2 Group.
The last time CO2 levels were so high was probably in the Pliocene epoch, between 3.2m and 5m years ago, when Earth’s climate was much warmer than today.

In 1780, well prior to the start of the so-called Industrial Revolution, the ppm level was about 280 — it’s never been over the 300 mark for millions of years — and it’s climbed steadily upward since humanity began constructing machines fueled by first chunks of coal, and then barrels of oil. And we partied on. Reportedly, 350 ppm is the ‘safe‘ upper limit of CO2 for us humans to live a ‘normal‘ life.
But the party is quickly coming to an end. Just recently, a new development in that a big part of the heat is going into the oceans.
Via LiveScience:

Global warming hasn’t paused, it’s accelerating, especially in the oceans, according to a new study published online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).
In fact, only about 2 percent of global warming from the increased greenhouse effect is used in heating the air, while about 90 percent heats the world’s oceans, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
…
The scientists found that over the past decade, while surface air temperatures have not risen very much, there has been a warming of the deep oceans that is unprecedented over the past 50 years.
They also found acceleration in the overall warming of the Earth.
Consistent with previous research, they concluded, “In the last decade, about 30 percent of the warming has occurred below 700  meters, contributing significantly to an acceleration of the warming trend.”
…
Contrary to claims that global warming has paused, the overall warming of the Earth has accelerated over the past decade.
While we have experienced a respite in warming at the surface, it is a temporary one which will eventually be replaced by a rapid warming of surface air temperatures.

Indeed, which led to this: A new “Ecosystem Advisory” from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) reports, “Sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem during 2012 were the highest recorded in 150 years.”
And, therefore: The temperature increase in 2012 was the highest jump in temperature seen in the time series and one of only five times temperature has changed by more than 1 C (1.8 F).

The huge, humongous problem in facing climate change is mankind itself. We have built a staggering civilization through the use of fossil fuel, and even as all these new-fangled technologies can scratch out energy from methane hydrate, shale gas, or tar sands oil, the environment suffers, and badly.
And we’ll never, ever get rid of the way we live — unless it’s physically taken away.
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, chief executive officer of Green For All, says it’s not whether we run out of oil or not, it’s whether we run out of being alive — via The Atlantic:

Take a look at the tar sands.
Producing tar sands oil devours staggering quantities of energy and water.
And the process leaves behind a legacy of toxic lakes, dead wildlife, and cancer-stricken communities.
In terms of our oil addiction, tar sands is the hard stuff.
And pursuing it is an unmistakably desperate move.
We’ve already gone to great lengths to feed our addiction to oil.
We’ve seen too many disasters unfold — from the Exxon Valdez spill, to more recent examples like the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, or just this month, the pipeline spill that spewed 10,000 gallons of oil into an Arkansas community.
Over the years, we’ve watched as companies and governments repeatedly violate human rights in their pursuit of oil.
We’ve seen them put more and more communities at risk — from Richmond, California, to Nigeria, Ecuador, and just about everywhere they operate.
And then, of course, there is climate change.
…
The calculation that really matters is this: Do we want our kids and grandkids to have a chance live healthy, peaceful lives?
Do we want to preserve ourselves?
Or do we want to keep extracting and burning all the oil we can get to?
Many of the experts Mann talks to say, effectively, it’s too late to do anything about it.
That’s a dangerous attitude.
When your car is speeding towards a brick wall, are you going to swerve, or are you going to argue about whether or not it’s too late to swerve?
We are heading toward a brick wall — that wall may not be the end of oil, as we once thought.
It may be the end of us.
And I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to turn the wheel now, while we still can.

The wheel is stuck, however, I think.

Which brings us to the the age-old question: Does money buy happiness?
Yeah, if you’re poor.
In a new study, economists Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan found folks in upper-income nations get more out of life with all kinds of graphs revealing “people with higher incomes are more satisfied with their lives than their less affluent compatriots.”
But the bottom dwellers enjoy it more — via US News and World Report:

First, it is important to point out they did not plot income dollar-for-dollar against happiness measures in the above graphs.
Rather, they used a logarithmic scale, with income doubling at each interval.
In other words, with that horizontal axis stretched out, the graphs would show happiness increasing more quickly for poorer countries and poorer people than for those on the richer end of the spectrum.
Or, put even more simply, an extra dollar improves well-being for someone in poverty far more than it will help a Fortune 500 CEO.
That supports the political argument for promoting income redistribution — more money appears to do more good for people who are poor.

One point of reality in why the so-called ‘austerity’ rage that’s cold-cocked much of Europe and is attempting to pop Americans has finally been seen in its proper setting — it’s bullshit.
The rich fiddle while the planet burns — ppm to you, too.