Gray skies covered by thick-looking clouds this early Saturday on California’s north coast — no indication, though, of the end results. In exactly 24 hours from exactly now, I’ll be an hour ahead of myself, so who really knows?

Yesterday, Joe Romm at Climate Progress posted the horrific e-mail of the week — from one of two authors of a 10-year-old study of climate change’s impact on California’s drought, which indicated the situation will get even more shitty.
Key words: Yes, in this case I hate that we might be correct. And in fact, I think the actual situation in the next few decades could be even more dire that our study suggested.

(Illustration found here).

In 2004, Lisa Sloan, professor of Earth sciences at UC Santa Cruz, and her graduate student Jacob Sewall published, “Disappearing Arctic sea ice reduces available water in the American west,” and via powerful computers,“…their most striking finding was a significant reduction in rain and snowfall in the American West.”
Quick jump forward to last week and Sloan’s e-mail — she explains:

Why do I say that?
(1) we did not include changes in greenhouse gases other than CO2; (2) maybe we should have melted more sea ice and see what happens; (3) these atmospheric and precipitation estimates do not include changes in land use, in the US and elsewhere.
Changing crops, or urban sprawl increases, or melting Greenland and Northern Hemisphere glaciers will surely have an impact on precipitation patterns.

Read Romm’s entire post, which has the details of how all this shit converges together to create an environmental calamity, especially in the construction of “a brick wall,” high-pressure ridge off the West Coast — nearly four miles high and 2,000 miles long — and knocks the jet stream northward, sucking along the weather, including rain.
This scientific phenomenon came to my attention in December when the hard-freeze hit our area up here — way-dry and record low temperatures. One consequence of the so-called Ridiculously Resilient Ridge.

The underlined portions of the quote at the top are mine for emphasis — in a shitload of these scientific studies/reports that are updated or whatever reveal the situation with whatever is, and to use the words above, ‘even more dire’ than previously figured.
Our environment is going to get bad, then worse, and shortly we’ll all see it coming.