Thick, gray clouds, hanging low this early Friday on California’s north coast — and a bit on the cold side, too, with a slight, chilled breeze.
Supposedly, though, we’re to receive heavy sunshine sometime today, and on into tomorrow, maybe rain by late Sunday. Weather forecasting, however, and like a lot of other assorted shit, is getting a bit tricky nowadays.

As climate warms, local weather can get bizarre — ‘global weirding‘ was coined a few years ago to sort of explain extreme weather events off a heating-up environment.
Of course, we know ‘weirding” ain’t the realistic word, maybe ‘devastating,’ more appropriate — is this realistic: ‘There would need be hundreds of million electric cars on the road by 2050, and the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of electricity would need to fall by at least 90 percent.’

(Illustration found here).

Such is word from the Global Calculator, a research tool created by a group of UK climate scientists to display goals humanity needs to do in averting climate change’s ultimate, catastrophic results, and soon. Yet some hard-case goals (via HuffPost):

Even though the world’s population is set to rise to 10 billion by 2050 from 7 billion today, the tool shows it is possible for everyone to eat well, travel further and live in more comfortable homes, without pushing global temperature rise above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change said.
But to achieve that, we must use energy more efficiently, shift away from fossil fuels, protect forests and make smarter use of land, it added.
“The calculator clearly highlights that we can meet our 2°C target while maintaining good lifestyles — but we need to set ambitious targets on all fronts and use innovation to address climate change,” said Mike Cherrett, director of operations at Climate-KIC, a European public-private partnership that jointly funded the tool.
…
“Making this transition to low carbon will require a massive effort across all sectors and action must start urgently,” it said.

A lot of people having been saying that shit a long time — in November 2007, UK’s environmental chief, Lady Young, complained the fight against climate change was “too little, too slowly,” and we need to go to a war footing:

“This is World War Three — this is the biggest challenge to face the globe for many, many years.
“We need the sorts of concerted, fast, integrated and above all huge efforts that went into many actions in times of war.
“We’re dealing with this as if it is peacetime, but the time for peace on climate change is gone — we need to be seeing this as a crisis and emergency,” she said.

Or ‘wartime mobilization,’ as postured a couple of years ago. However, according to some reports, bad shit will become apparent by 2020, first in the tropics, then everywhere else — and the big scream to mobilize is most-likely too late.
A panic response.

Yet, slowly the tide is turning, but will the move be enough? Politics is apparently getting ready to play a second-fiddle role in handling climate change.
From this morning’s New York Times

An overwhelming majority of the American public, including nearly half of Republicans, support government action to curb global warming, according to a poll conducted by The New York Times, Stanford University and the nonpartisan environmental research group Resources for the Future.
In a finding that could have implications for the 2016 presidential campaign, the poll also found that two-thirds of Americans say they are more likely to vote for political candidates who campaign on fighting climate change.
They are less likely to vote for candidates who question or deny the science of human-caused global warming.
Among Republicans, 48 percent said they are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports fighting climate change, a result that Jon A. Krosnick, a professor of political science at Stanford University and an author of the survey, called “the most powerful finding” in the poll.
Many Republican candidates either question the science of climate change or do not publicly address the issue.
…
Although the poll found that climate change was not a top issue in determining a person’s vote, a candidate’s position on climate change influences how a person will vote.
For example, 67 percent of respondents, including 48 percent of Republicans and 72 percent of independents, said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who said that human-caused climate change is a hoax.
…
The poll found that 83 percent of Americans, including 61 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of independents, say that if nothing is done to reduce emissions, global warming will be a very or somewhat serious problem in the future.
…
Over all, the number of Americans who believe that climate change is caused by human activity is growing.
In a 2011 Stanford University poll, 72 percent of people thought climate change was caused at least in part by human activities.
That grew to 81 percent in the latest poll.
By party, 88 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of independents and 71 percent of Republicans said that climate change was caused at least in part by human activities.
A majority of Americans – 71 percent — expect that they will be personally hurt by climate change, although to different degrees.
“Some people think they’ll be really devastated; some people think they’ll be inconvenienced,” Mr. Krosnick said.

One of the worse cases ever for being inconvenienced — still a long way from a screaming fit…

(Note: I couldn’t finish this post until now, about mid-afternoon, — had to do errands, and with no vehicle, all on foot — and indeed, the sun has sucked away those gray clouds from this morning, and with just a hint of a wind, it’s pretty warm, too. And bright).