Sunshine bright and air that’s cold this Monday morning on California’s north coast, though, rain is forecast maybe by early evening.
Temps dropping — the NWS calls for snowfall down tonight to 2,500 feet, with 1-to-3-inches for Berry Summit on 299, 1-to-3-inches at Collier Tunnel on 199.
The season cometh, 16 days hence…
In discussing cold weather, last week an absolute-pure example of how dire our situation with our environment, not only from actual reality, but make-believe, too..
False news has become a potent piece of idiotic shit — witness the armed DC nutcase yesterday: ‘“During a post arrest interview this evening, the suspect revealed that he came to the establishment to self-investigate ‘Pizza Gate’ (a fictitious online conspiracy theory),” the police department said in a statement.’
Consequences of lying as a way of life…
Preceding that crazy, our keepers of all things science puffed the lie — via NBCNews: ‘The House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology’s Twitter account retweeted a Breitbart News article that is unscientific and steeped in opinion on Thursday. The article claims the science behind global warming is “in its final death rattle.”‘
Beyond bullshit, — among some quick responses, Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson, of Texas, a member of the committee herself, Tweeted: ‘False news & false facts put us all in danger…‘
Republican Lamar Smith of Texas, also chairman of the committee, is an asshole of the highest degree, and most-likely in the near future (if there’s any future in the future) will view him and others of his ilk guilty of crimes against humanity, mass murder, and maybe also a new word for their shit — all-species-cide.
A backlash from real professionals — details per the Guardian on Saturday:
“They’re not serious articles,” said Adam Sobel, a Columbia University climate scientist.
“They paint it as though it’s an argument between Breitbart and Buzzfeed when it’s an argument between a snarky Breitbart blogger and the entire world’s scientific community, and the overwhelming body of scientific evidence.”
Sobel said the articles “grossly misinterpret” a few accurate details, for instance that El Niño and La Niña systems play a large role in single-year fluctuations.
“The temperature goes up for a couple of years and we have the largest year on record, then it goes down and it reaches a level that’s still well above 20th-century historical averages,” he said.
“That in no way disproves anything about the causes of the long-term temperature trends.”
…
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, noted that 2016 would soon be the hottest year on record, “by a substantial margin” over 2015, which took the record from 2014.
“Three consecutive record-breaking warm years, something we’ve never seen before, and a reminder of the profound and deleterious impact that our profligate burning of fossil fuels is having on the planet,” he told the Guardian.
“For anyone, least of all the House committee on science, to at this particular moment be promoting fake news aimed at fooling the public into thinking otherwise, can only be interpreted as a deliberate effort to distract and fool the public.”
Promoting the articles, Mann said, “is beneath the dignity of anyone holding higher office”.
…
Representative Zoe Lofgren wrote: “Sign these guys up for the flat earth society.”
…
Senator Bernie Sanders, who has said he intends to fight Republicans who would dismantle climate change measures, mocked the committee by alluding to the president-elect’s defunct real estate school, which closed and was accused of fraud.
“Where’d you get your PhD?” Sanders asked.
“Trump University?”
And from real people feeling the reality — fire-ravaged Tennessee is feeling climate quickly shifting — just check the US drought map above.
From Grist last Friday:
This fall Gatlinburg, like much of the Southeast, suffered through months of severe drought, which has become more common in the last 30 years.
In the Western United States science has shown that climate change contributes to worsening fire seasons.
And as Columbia University bioclimatologist Park Williams told PBS Newshour earlier this month, eastern Tennessee looked a lot like the west this year.
“We’ve never been this dry,” said Anthony Sequoyah, 50, the public safety director for emergency management services in nearby Cherokee, North Carolina.
Sequoyah arrived in Tennessee on Monday to help fight the blaze.
It was the “biggest mass destruction I’ve ever witnessed,” he added.
“The fire bounced from ridge top to ridge top, motels, hotels.”
Neither Sequoyah nor Hensley were willing to come right out and blame climate change as an underlying cause of the drought and contributor to the fires.
But others weren’t so reluctant.
“The seasons aren’t the same,” evacuee Allysa Joyner of Gatlinburg said.
“That’s where drought comes in. That could be part of it.”
Climate change is hard to believe, she added, “until you see it.” Monday night, she did.
Today Tennessee is one of four states, along with Florida, Louisiana, and North Carolina, that allows teachers to “present alternatives” to the scientific understanding of climate change in the classroom.
Trump won the state by a 26-point margin and carried Gatlinburg’s Sevier County with 79 percent of the vote.
Hensley said he didn’t know much about climate change. “I grew up in Florida and Mississippi,” he said, “and they didn’t teach it in school there.”
But he’d like to see more instruction about drought and its causes as part of Appalachian education.
With a better understanding, he said, maybe local communities could “actually fix the problems, so this doesn’t ever happen again.”
Denial is not a river anywhere…
(Illustration above: ‘US Drought Monitor‘ from last week, found here).