Bright, bubbly and hot here this Sunday afternoon on California’s north coast — caps a gorgeous weekend as yesterday was much the same.
In fact, in a rare instance for me in this region, I’m now weeding my little back-patio area in a T-shirt, which is a major thingy for an old-nerd’s skinny carcass. Right now, we’re supposedly in the mid-50s, but feels much-warmer than that with skies clear as a bell.

Although the little strip of earth around the concrete patio and back/side fence is ludicrously small, a thick, weed jungle had developed over the last months with strange-looking, exotic-quality shit-plants of various forms. Not as many spiders as I’d figured — did have a face-to-face with a rat I’d seen lately traipsing around the back fence, and the encounter scared him as much as me.

(Illustration found here).

Apparently, a rat can stop on a dime, perform a hard 180 on a narrow one-by-four and scamper/vanish quicker than a tail lash. An old guy takes a second or two longer for fright reaction — up off my knees like a 12-year-old, and a couple of jerky high-steps onto the patio. Sadly-comical for both man and rat.

Weather’s real peachy, but it ain’t.
Environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the recent, ‘The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,’ interviewed at the online tech magazine, Re/code, in response to a question on the future, triggered off her 2007 book, ‘Field Notes from a Catastrophe,’ and its realistic/bleak outlook on climate change, responded:

If you’re not more pessimistic you haven’t been paying attention to the events of the last decade.
I really started to write that book basically a decade ago. At that point, scientists were saying we’re just seeing now the signal of climate change emerging from the noise.
It was right at this point where the American Geophysical Union came out and said, “climate change is real and it’s happening now.”
And one group after another of eminent scientists came out and said, “this is real, this is serious, we need to do something.”
But you know as well as I do that nothing has happened since then.
The Obama Administration has made some laudable efforts to use regulatory power and those are not insignificant.
But the basic situation has not changed.
We’re still having moronic debates over the geophysics of climate change, which were actually settled over a hundred years ago.
So it’s hard to see the lack of a Kyoto Protocol, the failure of Copenhagen and the upward trajectory of emissions and come away saying, “I’m more optimistic.”

Whole interview is good — Kolbert is talking bad news coming even worse.
Meanwhile, another negative note on the peachy weather, this one from Nick Cohen at the Guardian/Observer, and how climate change deniers have apparently won the fight — we’re pretty-much toast:

All of which is a long way of saying that the global warming deniers have won.
And please, can I have no emails from bed-wetting kidults blubbing that you can’t call us “global warming deniers ” because “denier” makes us sound like “Holocaust deniers”, and that means you are comparing us to Nazis?
The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz.
No other word will do.
…
The politicians know too well that beyond the corporations and the cultish fanatics in their grass roots lies the great mass of people, whose influence matters most.
They accept at some level that manmade climate change is happening but don’t want to think about it.
I am no better than them.
I could write about the environment every week.
No editor would stop me.
But the task feels as hopeless as arguing against growing old.
Whatever you do or say, it is going to happen.
How can you persuade countries to accept huge reductions in their living standards to limit (not stop) the rise in temperatures?
How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?

Sorry to say, ‘Can’t be done.’
Peachy weather indeed — if something doesn’t happen ‘tween then and now…