Sunny and cool this late-afternoon Thursday on California’s north coast — high, sparse clouds shining through a smooth, crisp ocean breeze makes life along the shoreline more-than fairly nice.

Anti-nice and horrifying was the scene earlier today in the White House Rose Garden — the T-Rump announced he was pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, blathering heartless bullshit: ‘“We’re getting out. And we will start to renegotiate and we’ll see if there’s a better deal. If we can, great. If we can’t, that’s fine.”‘

One of the great-all-time shit moves — maybe a hate-crime against humanity…

(Illustration: Donald Trump, ‘Basic Shapes,‘ by caricaturist/illustrator Chong Jit Leong, found here).

Although the Paris accord is voluntary, seemingly the whole-wide world is aboard — 195 countries have signed on, Nicaragua and Syria, the only non-signers. Now the US,too.
In brief, the agreement called for keeping the global average temperature to well below 2?°C above pre-industrial levels, and work to limit the temperature increase to 1.5?°C above pre-industrial levels — in reality, the compact is a quick fix, sort of a feel-good attempt to navigate the rush of climate change.
The phenomenon is rapidly spreading — hotter temperatures, weird, bad weather, species extinction, and so-forth. Clues in research, and clues in the outside world. The Paris agreement is a small, belated step in the right direction (Vox): ‘Avoiding drastic global warming would likely require a complete overhaul of our energy system. Fossil fuels currently provide 87 percent of the world’s energy. To zero out emissions this century, we’d have to replace most of that with low-carbon sources like wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, or carbon capture.
That’s a staggering task, and there are huge technological and political hurdles standing in the way. As such, the world’s nations have been slow to act on global warming — it’s a genuinely difficult issue to tackle, and efforts to revamp the energy system often encounter heavy opposition.’

One reaction to the T-Rump’s action worldwide hit the nail (Science Magazine): ‘“A sad day for evidence-based policy,” said Piers Forster, director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate, University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, in a statement. “My hope is that he is ignored by his own country and that the individual citizens, businesses and states that make up the U.S.A will increase their ambition to decarbonize.”‘

Fact-checking the T-Rump is a constant pain-in-the-ass as he’s lying with every breath, this performance no exception — most found old lies to support brand-new lying. A sample via the Washington Post: ‘Announcing that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, President Donald Trump misplaced the blame for what ails the coal industry and laid a shaky factual foundation for his decision.’
The Post then laid-out the details; another decent fact-checking piece from PolitiFact.

In American life, T-Rump is a low-ass life — astute view per Charles P. Pierce at Esquire this afternoon and our nasty national scene:

I didn’t think he could top his ghastly American Carnage inaugural address for sheer fact-free and paranoiac mendacity, but he managed to do it on Thursday.
By announcing that the United States was withdrawing from the groundbreaking Paris Accords regarding the world climate crisis, the president* wallowed in rank, xenophobic victimhood while basking in the scattered applause of the otherwise unemployable yahoos whose self-respect is sufficiently low that they still work for him.
Any doubt that Steve Bannon is running this White House now, either personally or through his finger-puppet, obvious anagram Reince Priebus, now has evaporated.
The transformation of the American government into a Breitbart comments thread is complete.
It was appalling.
It was condescending.
It was awful content delivered by a dolt who wouldn’t know the Paris Accords from a baguette without the shoddy talking points that someone put in front of him.
For example, he read off a fanciful list of “consequences” for adhering to the Paris Accords down through the next decades.
Afterwards, Ali Velshi, a welcome addition to the MSNBC cast of regulars, pointed out that the president* was reading from a debunked report that presumed in its analysis that the U.S. would fulfill every one of its agreed-upon conditions while no other participating country would fulfill any of theirs.
This is not surprising.
The president* would have read a commercial for hair-replacement if someone had put it in front of him.
The least objectionable element of the speech was its utter internal incoherence.
…
It was a speech written by an angry child, to be delivered by an angry child, with the assumption that its targeted audience was made up of angry children, too.
And it was of a piece with that lunatic Wall Street Journal op-ed from Tuesday in which H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn pretty much decided that international diplomacy is nothing more than a larger-than-usual barrel of cannibalistic crabs.

Words I quote often from Pinball: ‘I don’t know how to tell ya this, Cyrus, but we are three white guys short. Or as they say in Ebonics, “We be fucked.”‘