Overcast with some low, patchy fog this early Wednesday on California’s north coast, and chilly, too.
And on the weather agenda, maybe our first real rain for the season coming this weekend, with the NWS predicting ‘Rain Likely’ for Sunday and supposedly into the middle of next week.
Yesterday, California nabbed the hottest spot in the whole US of A — my old hometown, San Luis Obispo, down on the Central Coast. SLO hit 108-degrees.
Always warm, but whoa!

Beyond even T-Rump, the biggest loser in the presidential debate on Monday was climate change — not a word.
Lost in the political ugliness of the moment was news earth had most-likely topped the 400 ppm of atmospheric CO2 on a permanent basis, never to return.

Last time was 3 million years ago…

(Illustration above found here).

Although not of serious, scientific significance right now, other than a portend to bad, immediate-future shit.
Prior to the industrial revolution, natural climate variations caused atmospheric CO2 to vary between about 200 ppm during ice ages and 300 ppm during the warmer periods between ice ages.

Yesterday afternoon via Climate Central:

In the centuries to come, history books will likely look back on September 2016 as a major milestone for the world’s climate.
At a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide is usually at its minimum, the monthly value failed to drop below 400 parts per million.
That all but ensures that 2016 will be the year that carbon dioxide officially passed the symbolic 400 ppm mark, never to return below it in our lifetimes, according to scientists.
Because carbon pollution has been increasing since the start of the Industrial Revolution and has shown no signs of abating, it was more a question of “when” rather than “if” we would cross this threshold.
The inevitability doesn’t make it any less significant, though.
September is usually the month when carbon dioxide is at its lowest after a summer of plants growing and sucking it up in the northern hemisphere.
As fall wears on, those plants lose their leaves, which in turn decompose, releasing the stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
At Mauna Loa Observatory, the world’s marquee site for monitoring carbon dioxide, there are signs that the process has begun but levels have remained above 400 ppm.
…
“Is it possible that October 2016 will yield a lower monthly value than September and dip below 400 ppm? Almost impossible,” Ralph Keeling, the scientist who runs the Scripps Institute for Oceanography’s carbon dioxide monitoring program, wrote in a blog post.
“Brief excursions toward lower values are still possible, but it already seems safe to conclude that we won’t be seeing a monthly value below 400 ppm this year – or ever again for the indefinite future.”
…
“At best (in that scenario), one might expect a balance in the near term and so CO2 levels probably wouldn’t change much — but would start to fall off in a decade or so,” Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s chief climate scientist, said in an email.
“In my opinion, we won’t ever see a month below 400 ppm.”

Can humanity trump runaway climate…?