Overcast and some ground fog this early Tuesday on California’s north coast — a day seemingly typical for the region of thick mist for awhile, then bright sunshine and warmth.
Yesterday was the example — heavy fog at first light, then sun up real time!

Weather is the final boney finger of climate change touching everybody — the trip for us, the man-made heat “is rapidly turning America the beautiful into America the stormy, sneezy and dangerous,” and it’s going to get worse. And with more sea water.
Yesterday, reports from the University of California, Irvine, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory revealed the glaciers on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is melting, and rapidly, and the “retreat of this ice seems to be unstoppable.”

(Illustration found here).

The big take-away is the water in these glaciers will raise sea level for at least four feet or more — which in layman’s terms means a shitload of populated land is gonna fucking disappear. Other than that…
Climate writer, Chris Mooney, at Mother Jones (title of the article, “This Is What a Holy Shit Moment for Global Warming Looks Like“):

The first study, by researchers at NASA and the University of California-Irvine, uses satellite radar to examine an array of large glaciers along the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica, which collectively contain the equivalent of four feet of sea level rise.
The result is the documentation of a “continuous and rapid retreat” — for instance, the Smith and Kohler glaciers have retreated 35 kilometers since 1992 — and the researchers say that there is “no [major] obstacle that would prevent the glaciers from further retreat.”
In the NASA press release, the researchers are still more vocal, with one of them noting that these glaciers “have passed the point of no return.”
The other group of researchers, based at the University of Washington, reach similar conclusions with their paper in Science.
But they do so by using an computer model to study one of these glaciers in particular: The Thwaites Glacier, pictured above, which contains about two feet of sea level rise and is retreating rapidly.
“The simulations indicate that early-stage collapse has begun,” notes their paper.
What’s more, the Thwaites Glacier is a “linchpin” for the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet; its rapid collapse would “probably spill over to adjacent catchments, undermining much of West Antarctica.”
And considering that the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough water to raise sea levels by 10 to 13 feet, that’s a really big deal.
It is, again, important to emphasize that just because these glaciers may have passed the “point of no return” does not mean that dramatic sea level rise happens tomorrow.
There is a limit to how fast glaciers and ice sheets can move, and the Science paper emphasizes that the entire process may take several hundred years and possibly as much as a millennium.
In the grand scheme of things, though, the consequence would be a very different planet.
And West Antarctica is just the beginning.
According to glaciologist and Greenland expert Jason Box, when you compare where we are now to where atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and ocean levels stood in past warm periods of Earth’s history, you can infer that human beings have already set in motion 69 feet of sea level rise.

Good grief!
Yet the biggest canker here is the time element — 100 years, 200 years, 500 years. Bullshit.
I didn’t really pay much attention to climate change until 2007 — year of the watershed IPCC report — and the biggest charge out of all the science papers, research and studies is the time factor.
Subsequent scientific papers since all seem to have a tagline attached, in similar wording — whatever ‘seems faster than previously figured,’ or ‘quicker that first thought,’ or language to that end. In other other words — this shit is coming quicker than anybody thought just a few years ago.
Hence, the National Climate Assessment released this week points to the now, and not tomorrow.

From the Guardian in September 2007: Professor Martin Parry, a climate scientist with the Met Office, said destructive changes in temperature, rainfall and agriculture were now forecast to occur several decades earlier than thought.
Similar studies have come via all kinds of brainiac groups, from the IPCC itself, from NASA, and even the US EPA.

Not the end of the week, not the day after tomorrow, or even tomorrow — maybe this afternoon.