Sunshine shocker this early Friday on California’s north coast — overcast-gray just an hour ago, but at least for a little while we’re going to enjoy maybe the last of the sun for a few days.
Rain expected pretty-much until near-about middle of next week, a big supposed big storm Sunday/Monday — the NWS says 50-percent chance of showers later tonight, so the season is at hand.

Also about 5 this afternoon, a somewhat-rare sky phenomenon, and one you can’t witness — coming on of the “black moon,” which really is just a second new moon in a single calendar month.
Since the side of the moon lighted by sunlight is facing away from us, it can’t be seen with the naked eye.
Most-likely up here, fog/rain clouds will blind us to any kind of moon…

(Illustration found here).

Although the ‘black moon’ motif is medieval, I guess we seem to live in similar times — as explained by National Geographic this week:

In this sense, a black moon is like the evil twin of a blue moon, conventionally understood as the second full moon in a month.
But let’s be clear: This new moon — like any astronomical event — doesn’t bring ill tidings or herald the end of days, despite the astrological fear-mongering that has been seeping through the web.

Ian O’Neill, an astrophysicist and the senior producer for space at Discovery News and Seeker.com (the LA Times yesterday): ‘‘“I was very disappointed to find out black moon doesn’t mean an awful lot…It doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s not particularly rare.”‘
The most recent one was in March 2014.

Yet an unheeded warning of a true ‘black moon’ rising rapidly.
Yesterday, seven noted climate scientists reported the chance of holding warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels “has almost certainly already been missed.”
And we need to get the shit moving…
Via the Washington Post yesterday:

A new scientific statement released Thursday — underscoring the urgency of grappling with global warming — presented a sharp contrast with the state of public discussion of the subject in the United States.
Here, in the wake of the first presidential debate, the media skewered Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for denying his prior Twitter claim that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese” — even as Trump’s surrogates continued to bluntly advance positions contrary to modern scientific understanding on the subject.
His campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, for instance, asserted on CNN that Trump believes the current climate swing is “naturally occurring,” contradicting the view of mainstream climate researchers that it is mainly human-caused.
…
“When you read the Paris agreement, it is absolutely inadequate, with the current pledges, to get on a pathway to 2 degrees Celsius, let alone a pathway to 1.5,” said Watson in an interview with the Post.
To be clear: The researchers are happy with the agreement itself, but not with the steps that countries are currently committing to take under it.
Watson said that as of now, on our current emissions trajectory, the world could be at 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels in 2030 — less than 15 years — and at 2 degrees by 2050.
But because of time lags in the climate system, the actual emissions that would result in those outcomes, and that would have to be averted in order to avoid them, would occur sooner than that.

Main black-ass moon:

The significance of 2 degrees is this: Up until relatively recently, scientists have generally asserted that this level of planetary warming is a kind of red line, beyond which increasingly devastating impacts — such as extensive ice sheet loss and sea level rise, and reduced yields of food crops — would begin to occur.
However, as warming has already reached 1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and we begin to already see sharp impacts all around us — major ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, growing devastation of coral reefs, and much more — it is starting to look more and more as if even 2 degrees would be way too much.

Fog on the coast…moonbeam.