(Illustration: ‘Climate Change,’ acrylic and watercolor on canvas, by Mina Bedogne, and found here).

As time goes on, we’ll discover the T-Rump’s period in the Oval Office was way-worse then we even supposed, which was shitty beyond shitty, and we knew he hated climate change like he hated taking a bath. He let the clock run out on the already-effects of climate change — from The Washington Post this afternoon:

For years, President Donald Trump and his deputies played down the impact of greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and delayed the release of an Environmental Protection Agency report detailing climate-related damage. But on Wednesday, the EPA released a detailed and disturbing account of the startling changes that Earth’s warming had on parts of the United States during Trump’s presidency.

The destruction of year-round permafrost in Alaska, loss of winter ice on the Great Lakes and spike in summer heat waves in U.S. cities all signal that climate change is intensifying, the EPA said in its report. The assessment, which languished under the Trump administration for three years, marks the first time the agency has said such changes are being driven at least in part by human-caused global warming.

As it launched an updated webpage to inform the public on how climate change is upending communities throughout the country, the Biden administration gave the agency’s imprimatur to a growing body of evidence that climate effects are happening faster and becoming more extreme than when EPA last published its “Climate Indicators” data in 2016.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said he wants to make clear to the entire country the dangers of rising temperatures in the United States.

“We want to reach people in every corner of this country because there is no small town, big city or rural community that’s unaffected by the climate crisis,” Regan told reporters Wednesday.
“Americans are seeing and feeling the impacts up close with increasing regularity.”

EPA staffers said the data detail how the nation has entered unprecedented territory, in which climate effects are more visible, changing faster and becoming more extreme. Collectively, the indicators present “multiple lines of evidence that climate change is occurring now and here in the U.S., affecting public health and the environment,” the agency said.

In 2020, for example, ocean heat reached its highest level in recorded history, and it fuels marine heat waves and coral bleaching.
The extent of Arctic sea ice also was the second smallest on record dating to 1979. Wildfire and pollen seasons are starting earlier and lasting longer.
…
Heat waves are occurring about three times more often than they did in the 1960s, the agency found, averaging about six times a year.
In turn, Americans are blasting air conditioners to stay cool during the hot months, which has nearly doubled summer energy use over the past half-century and added even more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

At nearly every spot measured in Alaska, permafrost has warmed since 1978.
The biggest temperature increases were found in the northernmost reaches of the state, where the thawing of the once permanently frozen soil has made it more difficult for Native Alaskans to store wild game underground and for drillers to transport oil by pipeline.

And so forth and so on — go read the whole piece, etc., eye-popping.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan explains:

Just to add icing to the climate-shit cake, this morning the Guardian reported on a new study on how CO2 emissions are screwing with the earth’s stratosphere, which could play havoc on listening to the radio — some nasty snips:

Humanity’s enormous emissions of greenhouse gases are shrinking the stratosphere, a new study has revealed.

The thickness of the atmospheric layer has contracted by 400 metres since the 1980s, the researchers found, and will thin by about another kilometre by 2080 without major cuts in emissions. The changes have the potential to affect satellite operations, the GPS navigation system and radio communications.

The discovery is the latest to show the profound impact of humans on the planet. In April, scientists showed that the climate crisis had shifted the Earth’s axis as the massive melting of glaciers redistributes weight around the globe.

The stratosphere extends from about 20km to 60km above the Earth’s surface. Below is the troposphere, in which humans live, and here carbon dioxide heats and expands the air. This pushes up the lower boundary of the stratosphere. But, in addition, when CO2 enters the stratosphere it actually cools the air, causing it to contract.

Scary part:

Prof Paul Williams, at the University of Reading in the UK, who was not involved in the new research, said: “This study finds the first observational evidence of stratosphere contraction and shows that the cause is in fact our greenhouse gas emissions rather than ozone.”

“Some scientists have started calling the upper atmosphere the ‘ignorosphere’ because it is so poorly studied,” he said.
“This new paper will strengthen the case for better observations of this distant but critically important part of the atmosphere.”

“It is remarkable that we are still discovering new aspects of climate change after decades of research,” said Williams, whose own research has shown that the climate crisis could triple the amount of severe turbulence experienced by air travellers.
“It makes me wonder what other changes our emissions are inflicting on the atmosphere that we haven’t discovered yet.”

Most-frightening part of this global disaster is ‘new aspects of climate change‘ we don’t yet know about, which makes us go forward in scientific darkness.
For the time being, at least, the T-Rumpis out of the way.

(Illustration found here)