Dark-thirty still this Sunday morning on California’s north coast — fog dwells deep around streetlights, and life is way-freaking quiet.

Time really flows away writing a post for my blog here — right now it’s a little after six o’clock, probably near an hour away from first light, and most-likely will be eight, or nine before before this particular literary episode feels finished.
I take a shitload of breaks, though, being at home, and now a “retiree” with extra ‘hang’ time, whatever moves me, I move — for instance, as example it’s now 6:30, which means it’s taken me 30 minutes to reach just here.

In between, a couple of smoke breaks, made the matte tea to follow my espresso coffee (I prefer the tea chilled) and squandered much time thinking, personal shit of kids, ex-wives, good/bad/shitty events/people, all kinds of weird crap — and much-thoughts, too, the world out not-so-far out yonder in the dark, still asleep.

(Illustration: Salvador Dali, ‘Alice’s Evidence,’ found here).

Yet far to the east, in London, Paris, Berlin, and in New York, reportedly hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets in a huge show of protest against continually being stupid (via Mashable):

If these numbers prove correct, then the “People’s Climate March” will likely mark the moment when global warming transitions from being a science and policy issue into a full-fledged social movement.
Perhaps it will become as large as the gay rights and civil rights movements.
But even if it doesn’t, it could play a crucial part in changing the political environment on this seemingly intractable issue.

Optimistic hope inside a dark box. (Updates on the marches can be found at many news sites, such as at the Guardian).

The ‘Peoples’ march today is to bring awareness for the suits showing up on Tuesday for the terrible-titled, UN Climate Summit, which sounds way-better that it will be: “Do not expect there to be any breakthrough on core sticking points on international climate talks. It’s more about opportunity for leaders, not just political leaders, but business, faith, and so forth, to demonstrate solidarity for taking strong climate action.”
President Obama, along with some other heads of state, are expected to attend and spew forth words of pure bullshit. And all the fanfare — just this past week, the UN named a weird-bearded Leonardo DiCaprio as its Messenger of Peace, the “new voice for climate advocacy.”
However, pomp and ceremony won’t cut it any more — unless a hard brake is put on CO2 emissions, and the term, “hard brake,” means near-about a full stop, then humanity is cruising for a bruising. People do not want to admit the looming obvious, but hedge slightly, like Al Gore: “We are behind schedule, but we still do have time — just.”

Yes. Just. Last June, a report from the Risky Business Project indicated climate change can’t be stopped, there’s going to be great, great problems, but cutting emissions hard will ease the horror, and we all need to “invest in adaptation.”
No optimism overflowing there.

This Tuesday’s UN summit will be the first of such gatherings since Copenhagen in 2009, which turned out to be a debacle. And the world climate situation has gotten worse, and worse.
Ben Adler at Grist on Friday examined environmental life five years later, via a new report out last week from Oxfam International — ‘The Summit that Snoozed?‘ which looked at the record.
First:

Consider: Carbon dioxide emissions have gone up every year since 2009.
CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has gone up too — from an average of 387 parts per million in 2009 to an average of more than 400 ppm for April, May, and June of this year.
Last month was the hottest August ever recorded, and 2014 is on track to be the hottest year ever recorded.

And the Offam report found:

Since 2009, extreme weather-related disasters have cost more than three times what they did in the whole of the 1970s.
…
“The latest OECD figures of its 34 members show that total subsidies to fossil fuels have increased since Copenhagen — from just over $60 billion in 2009 to just over $80 billion in 2011. … More recent years are not yet available but there is no reason to suggest that the trend has reversed.”
…
As a U.N. report found in 2010, the voluntary emission-reduction pledges countries made under the Copenhagen Accord were not large enough to keep the world from warming by less than 2 degrees Celsius, which is the target set in Copenhagen.
Since then, everyone has stuck to their lowest possible targets or even lowered them further, while some countries have adopted policies that will make it impossible to meet even the targets they have.

Adler also concludes optimistically: ‘But the summit is also an opportunity to right some of these wrongs.’
But what the hey?

Although maybe an optimist at heart, environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert, in her 2006 book, “Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change,” laid bare the reality: “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.”

And in light of that, and the light of morning here — and two hours of blog time, the world stirs and moans.
Chilled tea time.