Continuous rain this mid-morning Friday on California’s north coast, and cold, too.

Also been a way-quick, rabid-dog work week — time flies in a shit-storm. Impact of the T-Rump-mega-dominated news cycle — media has essentially stopped covering climate change.
A new report released yesterday: ‘The results are pretty grim: Compared to 2015, the networks collectively decreased the time devoted to climate issues by 66 percent.’

And that was 2016 — only three months into the new year, and a couple of months into a surrealistic, horror-comedy from the T-Rump (like right now in Congress, the shit-storm with passing a real-terrible health care bill, and within the bowels of the same hallowed halls, the obvious-nefarious antics of the House Intelligence Committee chairman in regards to T-Rump and the Russkies), there’s nothing out there on climate, except for news organizations reporting on horror weather stories from across the country
WTF!
Max distraction at work…

In the wake of EPA’s chief Scott Pruitt’s recent bullshit about the influence of CO2 on our environment, a milestone for a warming world — from EcoWatch last Monday:

The measurements are coming from the Mauna Loa Baseline Atmospheric Observatory in Hawaii and were confirmed by NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.
The numbers show that the rate of CO2 in the atmosphere is now at 405.1 ppm, the highest it has been in more than 10,000 years.
Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, said the findings are accurate and disturbing.
“The rate of CO2 growth over the last decade is 100 to 200 times faster than what the Earth experienced during the transition from the last Ice Age,” Tans said in a press release.
“This is a real shock to the atmosphere.”
A shock, indeed.
An atmosphere of 400 ppm is dubbed the “carbon threshold,” a point of no return.
To sum it up, levels this high throw the whole balance of the climate cycle into chaos, making it more difficult to predict climate changes and causing sea level rise, severe tropical storms, drought and flooding.
Emissions from fossil-fuel consumption have remained at historically high levels since 2011, and according to Tans, these emissions are contributing to the dramatic spike in atmospheric CO2 levels, which, up until the industrial revolution in 1760, averaged about 280 ppm.
Even if humans were to stop burning fossil fuels today, the carbon will continue to be trapped for at least the next few decades.
Back in October 2016, when levels finally reached the 400 ppm threshold, Tans said, “It’s unlikely we’ll ever see CO2 below 400 ppm during our lifetime and probably much longer.”

If you think that’s grim — related research, only worse.
From Truth-Out yesterday:

“Global warming triggered by the massive release of carbon dioxide may be catastrophic,” reads the study’s abstract.
“But the release of methane from hydrate may be apocalyptic.”
The study, titled “Methane Hydrate: Killer Cause of Earth’s Greatest Mass Extinction,” highlights the fact that the most significant variable in the Permian Mass Extinction event, which occurred 250 million years ago and annihilated 90 percent of all the species on the planet, was methane hydrate.
…
The methane hydrate situation has, for years now, been referred to as the Arctic Methane Time Bomb, and as been studied intensely.
A 2010 scientific analysis led by the UK’s Met Office, published in the journal Review of Geophysics, states clearly that the time scale for the release of methane in the Arctic would be “much shorter for hydrates below shallow waters, such as in the Arctic Ocean,” adding that “significant increases in methane emissions are likely, and catastrophic emissions cannot be ruled out.… The risk of rapid increase in [methane] emissions is real.”
A 2011 study of the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS), conducted by more than 20 Arctic experts and published in the Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences, concluded that the shelf was already a powerful supplier of methane to the atmosphere.
The conclusion of this study stated that the methane concentration in the atmosphere was at levels capable of causing “a considerable and even catastrophic warming on the Earth.”

And now back to Sean Spicer and the smut-blackest, of all black comedies…

(Illustration above found here).