Bright sunshine and warm skies this noon Wednesday on California’s north coast, and with the first day of Autumn, a new season to worry about the weather.
At least according to the NWS, the environment is supposed to be some-type ‘sunny’ through the coming weekend, a seemingly lapse before the weirdness of winter and the crazy El Niño effect.

And those El Niño effects have long tentacles, and bolstered by climate change, this coming winter will be hard, as in rain,snow, mudslides, and all the assorted side issues — even creating an intensifying environment for Lake County’s current Valley Fire:

“The fire would throw embers a half-mile beyond where firefighters were working,” said Cal Fire spokesman Daniel Berlant.
“This is the kind of fire we would see with Santa Ana winds but in our area, this is unprecedented.”

(Illustration above found here).

A novel exception maybe not — due to the warming of the planet, the horrific fire in Lake County, now 80 percent contained at 76,067 acres with the fifth known fatality as the body of a 66-year-old guy was pulled from his destroyed home last night (another 61-year-old is still missing), will become the norm.
As the pope visits the US and pronounces the urgency of climate change, the rebuttal against the heat might be catching, though, there’s much to be said about global-warming co-conspirators.
I’ve always felt those people who not only deny climate change, but work to thwart efforts to fight it — yes, Sen. Jim Inhofe, you’re among the assholes — will eventually be charged with crimes against humanity. Trying to stop the trying to stop…

A couple major news stories this past week took on the curve of those crimes — in July 1977, well before anyone understood fully the heat arising, Exxon met the future and then fucked-it.
From Inside Climate News on Monday:

At a meeting in Exxon Corporation’s headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen.
Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world’s use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.
“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.
…
His presentations reflected uncertainty running through scientific circles about the details of climate change, such as the role the oceans played in absorbing emissions.
Still, Black estimated quick action was needed.
“Present thinking,” he wrote in the 1978 summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”
…
Then, toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon curtailed its carbon dioxide research.
In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront of climate denial.
It put its muscle behind efforts to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming its own scientists had once confirmed.
It lobbied to block federal and international action to control greenhouse gas emissions.
It helped to erect a vast edifice of misinformation that stands to this day.

Talk about a horrendous crime against humanity…Read the whole piece as it goes into detail about how this shit happened.

The second story I’m sure you’ve heard about already, and concerns our beloved VW — I have owned three VW ‘Bugs’ in my life. The first, a brand-new 1967, later a used 1956, and then a brand-new 1970, all ran great. Much-much later, I also owned a 1973 VW van — part of my initial California experience, most-likely.
The US and the world loved our Volkswagens — so a whopper of a shock in a crime against humanity.
From Scientific American this morning:

Despite any problems with the current approach to emissions testing, VW’s problems, however, clearly were not the result of an oversight.
The company surreptitiously installed additional AECDs in five types of four-cylinder diesels — the Audi A3, Beetle, Golf, Jetta and Passat — that were not specified in their application for emissions certification.
These systems included an algorithm that used the position of the steering wheel, vehicle speed, the duration of the engine’s operation and barometric pressure to determine when the vehicle was being tested and then dial back emissions to meet EPA standards.
During normal driving conditions, however, those vehicles would ramp up their engine power by reducing the effectiveness of the emission control system.
This generated up to 40 times the amount of smog-producing nitrogen oxides (NOx) permitted by the U.S. Clean Air Act.

My underline for emphasis, and adding insult to injury (via the Guardian): ‘Volkswagen has hired the US law firm that defended BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster to help it deal with a growing collection of investigations and law suits over the emissions scandal that has rocked the car maker and dragged in the German government.’
Shitty, way-shitty…

Not only do we have an actual, real and getting-worse climate-change scenario, but backstabbing in a fight against it.
In a tag I used often from the straight-on Pinball: ‘“Or as they say in Ebonics, “We be fucked.”‘