This seemed appropriate:

The radar is picking up a line of thundershowers which extends from a point 9 miles NNE of Sicorgus, New Jersey, along a line and 6 miles either side of the line to a point 5 miles SSW of Fonduloch.
However, the radar is also picking up a squadron of Russian ICBMs… so I wouldn’t sweat the thundershowers.
— George Carlin as Al Sleet, the Hippy Dippy Weatherman

(Illustration: Hurricane Sandy induced flooding at NYC’s Ground Zero construction site, found here).

This past week has nearly-all been about the NSA disclosures, which is frightening in terms of freedoms, privacy’s life in America and other such assorted end-of-an-era news stories, and it’s aghast with such bullshit.
Despite denials, back-pedaling and lying, this came yesterday:

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned.
“I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Startled?
Meanwhile, also this past week and even beyond startling, the much-way-bigger problem facing mankind and not just America becoming a full-boned surveillance state, comes some shit which appears to cast a more ominous glow that it’s even-more quickly worse — climate change keeps on hard a-coming, ready or not.
Meteorologist Sleet recommends correctly.

Also last week, a geological event — climate change also affects/effects all things on earth, which includes the ground — as a second volcano in Alaska started getting violent.
Via Reuters:

Pavlof Volcano, an 8,261-foot (2,518-metre) peak located about 590 miles southwest of Anchorage, has been erupting sporadically since May 13.
On Thursday, it was joined by 8,225-foot (2,507-metre) Veniaminof Volcano when that peak, about 100 miles to the northwest of Pavlof, began to erupt, according to a geologist at the Alaska Volcano Observatory.
Veniaminof, which is 485 miles southwest of Anchorage, has been spurting steam, ash and lava on a sporadic basis, according to the observatory.
An ash plume was spotted at 12,000 feet on Thursday night, geologist Game McGimsey said on Saturday.
The eruptions of the two volcanoes are coincidental, said McGimsey.

Science is limited, as even scientists would say — what they figured was correct, might not be after all.

In another study that reveals climate change is more than accelerating, NASA reports the warmth in the deeper oceans is causing the ice shelves of Antarctica to melt at an alarming rate from underneath — knocking down the long-time view that ice way-down under (and maybe way-up yonder in the Arctic) melted via iceberg calving:

Scientists have studied the rates of basal melt, or the melting of the ice shelves from underneath, of individual ice shelves, the floating extensions of glaciers that empty into the sea.
But this is the first comprehensive survey of all Antarctic ice shelves.
The study found basal melt accounted for 55 percent of all Antarctic ice shelf mass loss from 2003 to 2008, an amount much higher than previously thought.
Antarctica holds about 60 percent of the planet’s fresh water locked into its massive ice sheet.
Ice shelves buttress the glaciers behind them, modulating the speed at which these rivers of ice flow into the ocean.
Determining how ice shelves melt will help scientists improve projections of how the Antarctic ice sheet will respond to a warming ocean and contribute to sea level rise.
It also will improve global models of ocean circulation by providing a better estimate of the amount of fresh water ice shelf melting adds to Antarctic coastal waters.
…
“The traditional view on Antarctic mass loss is it is almost entirely controlled by iceberg calving,” said Eric Rignot of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California, Irvine.
Rignot is lead author of the study to be published in the June 14 issue of the journal Science.
“Our study shows melting from below by the ocean waters is larger, and this should change our perspective on the evolution of the ice sheet in a warming climate.”
…
Basal melt can have a greater impact on ocean circulation than glacier calving.
Icebergs slowly release melt water as they drift away from the continent.
But strong melting near deep grounding lines, where glaciers lose their grip on the seafloor and start floating as ice shelves, discharges large quantities of fresher, lighter water near the Antarctic coastline.
This lower-density water does not mix and sink as readily as colder, saltier water, and may be changing the rate of bottom water renewal.
“Changes in basal melting are helping to change the properties of Antarctic bottom water, which is one component of the ocean’s overturning circulation,” said author Stan Jacobs, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.
“In some areas it also impacts ecosystems by driving coastal upwelling, which brings up micronutrients like iron that fuel persistent plankton blooms in the summer.”
…
Ice shelf melt doesn’t necessarily mean an ice shelf is decaying; it can be compensated by the ice flow from the continent,” Rignot said.
“But in a number of places around Antarctica, ice shelves are melting too fast, and a consequence of that is glaciers and the entire continent are changing as well.”

And more on this via the Christian Science Monitor:

It’s unclear if the unexpected melt rates represent a trend.
Conditions off the East Antarctic coast have been less-well studied than those off of West Antarctica, notes Stanley Jacobs, a researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., and a member of the team reporting its results in the current issue of the journal Science.
The cause also is unclear.
But a lead suspect is relatively warm water that deep currents drive up onto the continental shelf.
This water melts the ice shelves from underneath.
Still, “the numbers were a little bit larger than we were expecting – about the same as for shelves on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet,” Dr. Jacobs says.

And the end result of runaway, constantly-morphing climate change?
Eventual extinction, of course.
Last Thursday at Climate News Network (h/t truthdig):

Climate change doesn’t just threaten species that are already vulnerable — it could have alarming consequences for a huge range of birds, corals and amphibians that no-one had considered in danger of extinction before, according to a new study.
Wendy Foden of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s global species programme and colleagues examined the findings of 100 scientists over the last five years and looked for the biological and ecological characteristics that might make an animal more or less sensitive or adaptable to climate change.
Many of the planet’s birds, corals and amphibians are already threatened with extinction, often because of unsustainable logging, the growth of agriculture and so on, and climate change is likely to make their plight even more precarious.
But unexpectedly, the authors report in the journal PLOS One — the Public Library of Science — that they also found that 83 percent of the birds, 66 percent of the amphibians and 70 percent of the corals highly vulnerable to climate change, are not, right now, considered to be in need of conservation measures.
…
“The findings reveal alarming surprises,” said Foden.
“We hadn’t expected that so many species and areas that were not previously considered to be of concern would emerge as highly vulnerable to climate change.
“Clearly, if we simply carry on with conservation as usual, without taking climate change into account, we’ll fail to help many of the species and areas that need it most.”

Mankind is a species, right?
A good companion to that report above is an essay posted last week at The Atlantic by Annalee Newitz, a writer covering the cultural impact of science and technology, and author of ‘Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction,’ on how bad shit long, long ago does have an influence in the nowadays.
In a discussion on “…one of the most mysterious disasters in geological history…” some 375 million years ago when the number of species on the planet dropped off by 75 percent. Although this was the so-called “age of the fishes,” and mankind was supposedly not around, extinction can be in mass — and currently that covers not only humans, but dogs, cats, birds, frogs (which are already disappearing), even plant life, among a shitload of other species.
Interesting, but despite displaying more ‘pragmatic optimism,’ Newitz does conclude:

There are a lot of parallels between the world of 375 million years ago and the world of today.
Humans have moved many invasive species around, from rats to kudzu, and made it hard for specialist species to survive.
Our food webs are unraveling.
And a world of homogenous ecosystems is primed for disaster, Stigall (paleobiologist Alycia Stigall) warns.
Without biodiversity, a healthy mix of specialist and generalist species, a single plant disease could wipe out all the grass in a vast region.
Plant loss would be intense.
That would kill off grass-eating animals, and in turn kill off the predators that feed on them.
We’d be looking at a future scarred by famines, all across the planet’s ecosystems.
For scientists like Stigall, problems with invasive species today could be a harbinger of planetary demise on the scale of a mass extinction.
Of course, eventually Earth’s biodiversity recovered.
We know that it’s possible to restore ecosystems from near-collapse.
The question is whether humans can prevent a Devonian-style depression from hitting again.

And while that shit is going on, and quickly, too, the world is still playing games with the coming horror — or the horror already here.
In case of fire, first argue about who calls the fire department:

U.N. climate talks have hit a stumbling block that some delegates say poses a serious challenge to their already slow-moving attempt to craft a global response to climate change.
As the latest negotiation session ended Friday in the German city of Bonn, one track of the talks was paralyzed by a request by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to review the decision-making procedure in the two-decade-long U.N. process.
…
Decisions in the U.N. climate discussions are supposed to be taken by consensus — but it’s not totally clear what that means in practice.
While many agree the decision-making procedure needs to be clarified, they worry that the issue could deadlock the talks at a time when urgent action is needed to tackle climate change.
“If we’re not careful, it could collapse the whole system,” said Ronald Jumeau, a delegate from the Seychelles.
…
U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said Friday that she found it ironic that even though all governments agreed that the decision-making procedure needs to be discussed, they “couldn’t figure out, how do they get to what they want to do?”

Seems Russia had her feelings hurt during last year’s conference in Qatar, so she acted the bitch this week.
And irony is indeed the cornerstone of the entire debacle. One of the most-potent examples and my personal favorite, if you can actually have such a thing as a ‘favorite‘ calamity quote, comes from climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, who ends her 2006 book, ‘Field Notes from a Catastrophe,’ as such: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

Sitting just now outside on my apartment’s little back patio smoking a cigarette, I wondered about it all and how close we are to the precipice — the weather up here on California’s north coast this Sunday morning is right-now pretty gorgeous. Warm sunshine with a clouds slowly puffing across the sky, twisting, flowing it looks like westward toward the Pacific, less than a couple of miles away, has created for me, and for just this moment, a most-agreeable environment.
Despite the wonder, though, phoney as a three-dollar bill.

So don’t sweat the thundershowers…