In the midst of an age of awful anxiety, here’s more to the weight — from the Guardian this morning:

The heat in the world’s oceans reached a new record level in 2019, showing “irrefutable and accelerating” heating of the planet.
The world’s oceans are the clearest measure of the climate emergency because they absorb more than 90-percent of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel burning, forest destruction and other human activities.
The new analysis shows the past five years are the top five warmest years recorded in the ocean and the past 10 years are also the top 10 years on record.
The amount of heat being added to the oceans is equivalent to every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and all night.
Hotter oceans lead to more severe storms and disrupt the water cycle, meaning more floods, droughts and wildfires, as well as an inexorable rise in sea level.
Higher temperatures are also harming life in the seas, with the number of marine heatwaves increasing sharply.
The most common measure of global heating is the average surface air temperature, as this is where people live.
But natural climate phenomena such as El Niño events mean this can be quite variable from year to year.
“The oceans are really what tells you how fast the Earth is warming,” said Prof John Abraham at the University of St Thomas, in Minnesota, US, and one of the team behind the new analysis.
“Using the oceans, we see a continued, uninterrupted and accelerating warming rate of planet Earth.
“This is dire news.”
“We found that 2019 was not only the warmest year on record, it displayed the largest single-year increase of the entire decade, a sobering reminder that human-caused heating of our planet continues unabated,” said Prof Michael Mann, at Penn State University, US, and another team member.
…
The analysis, published in the journal Advances In Atmospheric Sciences, uses ocean data from every available source.
Most data is from the 3,800 free-drifting Argo floats dispersed across the oceans, but also from torpedo-like bathythermographs dropped from ships in the past.
The results show heat increasing at an accelerating rate as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere.
The rate from 1987 to 2019 is four and a half times faster than that from 1955 to 1986.
The vast majority of oceans regions are showing an increase in thermal energy.
This energy drives bigger storms and more extreme weather, said Abraham: “When the world and the oceans heat up, it changes the way rain falls and evaporates. There’s a general rule of thumb that drier areas are going to become drier and wetter areas are going to become wetter, and rainfall will happen in bigger downbursts.”
…
Reliable ocean heat measurements stretch back to the middle of the 20th century.
But Abraham said: “Even before that, we know the oceans were not hotter.”
“The data we have is irrefutable, but we still have hope because humans can still take action,” he said.
“We just haven’t taken meaningful action yet.”

And another view on the same subject — via CNN this afternoon:

Lijing Cheng, the paper’s lead author and an associate professor at the International Center for Climate and Environmental Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the ocean temperature was 0.075 degrees Celsius above the 1981-2010 average in 2019.
“There are no reasonable alternatives aside from the human emissions of heat trapping gases to explain this heating,” Cheng said, adding that to reach this temperature, the ocean would have taken in 228,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 — or 228 sextillion — joules of heat.
“The Hiroshima atom-bomb exploded with an energy of about 63,000,000,000,000 Joules,” Cheng said.
“I did a calculation … the amount of heat we have put in the world’s oceans in the past 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions,” he added.
That’s equivalent to dropping roughly four Hiroshima bombs into the oceans every second over the past quarter of a century.
But because the warming is speeding up, the rate at which we are dropping these imaginary bombs is getting faster than ever.
“We are now at five to six Hiroshima bombs of heat each second,” said John Abraham, one of the authors of the study and a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

And to make all this shit even worse is the T-Rump. Beyond rolling-back environmental curbs, opening public lands to gas/oil drilling, and just generally-being an environmentally-lying piece of shit, the T-Rump when confronted with the report last fall on the results of a federal interagency task force on the negative economic impact/effects of climate change, quipped like an ignorant asshole: “I don’t believe it.”
Then yesterday, the White House tweeted about the weather, though, bogus as usual — the day was a snow-less 70-degrees, the first snow of the season for the area had occurred five days ago:

First snow of the year! ?? pic.twitter.com/kgSLQX6QxK

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 13, 2020

Despite the T-Rump a climate-change denier/liar, the tweet was from obvious idiots: ‘What the White House tweet did — no doubt unintentionally — is highlight how warm it was in Washington on Sunday. The normal high in Washington on Jan. 12 is 43 degrees, putting Sunday’s temperature 27 degrees above normal. That is no more proof that the climate is warming than a cold day is proof that it isn’t, but a warmer-than-usual winter day is certainly more suggestive of something abnormal happening than a winter day that’s cold.’

The T-Rump and his toad-stools need to go, and quickly…

(Illustration found here).