Overcast this afternoon on California’s north coast, and maybe feels a bit warmer — just under 60 degrees right now, with ‘rain likely‘ later toward dark.
No breeze hardly, which appears to add heat.

A bit of environmental news this week, too, and mostly dealing also with a sense of heat — and banging the gong again (via Time): ‘2014 was the hottest year since temperature record keeping began in 1880, scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on Friday.’
Although already reports on the record heat last year, this seems to make it official.

“Humans are literally cooking their planet” — Jonathan Overpeck, an atmospheric scientist from the University of Arizona (per USAToday).

(Illustration found here).

And this, too, from Vox:

Both agencies also said the 10 hottest years have all come since 1998, a sign that the Earth is steadily getting warmer.
“If you are younger than 29 years old, you haven’t lived in a month that was cooler than the 20th-century average,” commented Marshall Shepherd, a meteorologist at the University of Georgia.

And also most-noteworthy for last year (Skeptical Science on the record heat): ‘But what’s really remarkable is that 2014 set this record without the aid of an El Niño event.’
Such ‘events‘ heat the sea surface, making temperatures climb.

The NASA/NOAA report came hard on the heels of another nasty study released yesterday, indicating we’re really in the shits — we’re consuming way-more than our only world can produce, and we’re really, really fucking-up the planet in the process.
Via the Guardian:

Humans are “eating away at our own life support systems” at a rate unseen in the past 10,000 years by degrading land and freshwater systems, emitting greenhouse gases and releasing vast amounts of agricultural chemicals into the environment, new research has found.
Two major new studies by an international team of researchers have pinpointed the key factors that ensure a livable planet for humans, with stark results.
Of nine worldwide processes that underpin life on Earth, four have exceeded “safe” levels – human-driven climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land system change and the high level of phosphorus and nitrogen flowing into the oceans due to fertiliser use.
…
They found that the changes of the last 60 years are unprecedented in the previous 10,000 years, a period in which the world has had a relatively stable climate and human civilisation has advanced significantly.
Carbon dioxide levels, at 395.5 parts per million, are at historic highs, while loss of biosphere integrity is resulting in species becoming extinct at a rate more than 100 times faster than the previous norm.
…
“These indicators have shot up since 1950 and there are no signs they are slowing down,” said Prof Will Steffen of the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Steffen is the lead author on both of the studies.
“When economic systems went into overdrive, there was a massive increase in resource use and pollution. It used to be confined to local and regional areas but we’re now seeing this occurring on a global scale. These changes are down to human activity, not natural variability.”
…
Steffen said the research showed the economic system was “fundamentally flawed” as it ignored critically important life support systems.
“It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive,” he said.
“History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.”

Meanwhile, and also yesterday, a study released on the oceans — we’re fucking them up, too.
Via CNBC:

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.
“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.
…
“Fundamentally, we’re a terrestrial predator,” he said.
“It’s hard for an ape to drive something in the ocean extinct.”

And apparently there will be more ocean to make acidified as sea levels are rising faster than was earlier supposed — a linchpin quality to climate studies it seems as shit is always worse than originally figured.
Also from the Guardian:

Sea level rise in the past two decades has accelerated faster than previously thought in a sign of climate change threatening coasts from Florida to Bangladesh, a study said on Wednesday.
The report, reassessing records from more than 600 tidal gauges, found that readings from 1901-90 had over-estimated the rise in sea levels.
Based on revised figures for those years, the acceleration since then was greater than so far assumed.
…
The new analysis “suggests that the acceleration in the past two decades is 25 percent higher than previously thought,” Carling Hay, a Canadian scientist at Harvard University and lead author of the study in the journal Nature, told Reuters.

In one of those two new studies mentioned above was human history and its influence thereof on the planet — we’re in a brand-new era.
Yesterday, from Medical Daily:

Most likely you are familiar with the terms “Jurassic” or “Pleistocene,” and maybe you even have some understanding of how they refer to specific geologic periods.
In an effort to characterize the contemporary epoch, geologists have coined the term “Anthropocene,” a name highly suggestive of human interaction.
Now, new research from the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme supports one proposal that Earth, our beautiful planet, officially entered this new geological epoch as of 1950 (give or take a few years).
“In a single lifetime humanity has become a planetary-scale geological force,” said Dr. Will Steffen, lead author of the study and a professor at Australian National University.
…
“Of all the candidates for a start date for the Anthropocene, the beginning of the Great Acceleration is by far the most convincing from an Earth System science perspective,” the researchers argue in their published paper.

The ‘Great Acceleration,’ does it most-likely have a stop?

(Illustration out front found here).