As of late, my posts in the afternoon seem to have more climate change news than other horror shit, from over-heating oceans to super-hot months to super-hot years, and yesterday another sweltering weather report, this one from down Argentina-way (Gizmodo):

Ground temperatures climbed above 129 degrees Fahrenheit (54 degrees Celsius) in parts of Argentina this week as the country suffers through a shockingly hot start to summer.
Air temperatures were equally suffocating, leading to widespread blackouts as the Southern Cone attempts to beat the heat.
…
But air temperatures are still pretty unbearable in Argentina.
On Tuesday, temperatures rose to 106.7 degrees Fahrenheit (41.5 degrees Celsius) in Buenos Aires, the second-highest reading in the city in more than 100 years of records.
Other parts of the country saw temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius).
The heat was so bad in Argentina on Tuesday that it was briefly the hottest place in the world, surpassing parts of Australia that usually have that honor during austral summer.

“This is a heat wave of extraordinary characteristics, with extreme temperature values ??that will even be analyzed after its completion, and it may generate some historical records for Argentina temperatures and persistence of heat,” meteorologist Lucas Berengua told Reuters.

Now standard for the times — via CBS News this morning: ‘Australia recorded one of its hottest days on record, with a coastal town reaching a temperature the nation had not seen since 1960. Onslow was 50.7 degrees Celsius (123.26 degrees Fahrenheit) on Thursday, a temperature that was last recorded in South Australia’s outback in on January 2, 1960, according to the country’s Bureau of Meteorology.‘

Maybe a heated domino effect:

Though 2021 was not a record warm year overall, it was locally a record for ~8% of the globe.

Affecting a number of major population centers, it is estimated that 1.8 billion people experienced a record warm year in 2021.@BerkeleyEarth's annual report: https://t.co/H7zgWVwEV0 pic.twitter.com/NpTalIy8Z7

— Dr. Robert Rohde (@RARohde) January 13, 2022

Also, this week data collection shows the earth is getting hot, and getting hotter faster. One ingredient unknown in climate change is the speed of actual horrible environmental shit’s appearance on the world stage — not too long ago, 2050/2070 and 2100 were the usually calculated arrival times of sea-level rise, bigger storms, dizzying heat domes, all years away, but unfortunately, all are currently on display in the now.
As an example from not-so-long-ago: Thomas Mote, a distinguished research professor of Geography and Atmospheric Science at the University of Georgia, in August 2019 on the too-soon melting of Arctic ice (The Hill):

Mass losses from Greenland this past week were already approaching levels not expected until 2070 based on the best available models. It is still too early to tell if the ice losses for the summer will exceed the losses in 2012, but it is clear that the Greenland ice sheet is rapidly responding to climate change, even faster than many scientists expected. These rapid changes point to the necessity for action on climate change and for improved observing systems to monitor the ice sheet.

Of course, that was in Before Times we were in the grip of the Mar-a-Lago orange turd, and the situation is only much worse now — the numbers show:

(2/6) #December 2021 global surface #temperature was 1.49°F (0.83°C) above average, tying with December 2016 for 5th highest on record for the month: https://t.co/y7Qo2bB2Qh @NOAANCEI #StateOfClimate pic.twitter.com/fzQc8mb32e

— NOAA (@NOAA) January 13, 2022

Further per France24 today:

The nine years spanning 2013-2021 all rank among the 10 hottest on record, according to an annual report by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published Thursday, the latest data underscoring the global climate crisis.

For 2021, the average temperature across global surfaces was 1.51 degrees Fahrenheit (0.84 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average, making the year the sixth-hottest in the overall record, which goes back to 1880.

“Of course, all this is driven by increasing concentrations of heat trapping gases like carbon dioxide,” Russell Vose, chief of climate monitoring for NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, told reporters.

“There’s probably a 99 percent chance that 2022 will rank in the top 10, a 50-50 chance, maybe a little less, it’ll rank in the top five, and a 10 percent chance it’ll rank first” barring an unforeseen event like a major volcanic eruption or a large comet hitting Earth, he said.
…
A separate analysis of global temperature released by NASA had 2021 tying with 2018 as the sixth-warmest on record.
Both data sets vary very slightly from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service in their assessment, which had 2021 as the fifth warmest in records tracking back to the mid-19th century.

But the overall convergence of trends increases scientists’ confidence in their conclusions.

I posted Monday on the Copernicus report — non-virus, non-political news! Yet climate change is most definitely both — due to asshole Republicans and the idea of what constitutes a hoax, despite a look-out-the-window would reveal the reality of our really-disturbed weather patterns caused by humans making the world hotter. Duh!

Although all this shit isn’t really hard-cracking the power elite — as in COP26 and “blah, blah, blah” — the public-at-large is starting to look at the climate crisis with concerned eyes. A big chunk of Americans are growing worried about the coming surge of bad-ass (not in a good way) weather — a new study published by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication classified Americans on climate change into groups based on their beliefs, attitudes, policy support and behavior.
Distress adds up — via the Guardian late this afternoon:

The six distinct groups are: the Alarmed, who are the most engaged and very worried about global warming; the Concerned, who think global warming is a significant threat but prioritize it less and are less likely to take action; the Cautious, who are aware of climate change but are uncertain about its causes and are not very worried; the Disengaged, who are largely unaware of global warming; the Doubtful, who doubt it is happening or human-caused and the Dismissive, who firmly reject its reality and oppose most climate change policies.

The study revealed that the largest group, Alarmed (33-percent) greatly outnumber the dismissive (9-percent) by more than three to one.
Approximately six in 10 Americans (59-percent) are either Alarmed or Concerned while only approximately two in 10 (19-percent) are Doubtful or Dismissive.

Over the last five years, the Alarmed group has nearly doubled in size, growing 15 percentage points in total. From just March 2021 to September 2021 alone, the Alarmed segment increased by 9 percentage points.
Meanwhile, the Dismissive group shrank from 11-percent to 9-percent in the past five years, with only about one in 10 Americans now firmly rejecting the reality of human-caused global warming.

When the group first began its surveys in 2008, the Concerned was the largest segment.
Two years later, the group decreased slightly while the Cautious grew and became roughly equally as large.
On the contrary, the Alarmed was the second smallest group as recently as early 2015.
The Cautious, Doubtful and Dismissive groups have all shrunk in recent years.

“The growth of the Alarmed segment … is encouraging because progress on climate change requires strong, coordinated, and sustained action, and the Alarmed are the most likely to demand and support these actions by leaders,” the study said.

What can you do, though, with the Manchin-Sinema syndrome so easily provoked into selfish insanity?
And what if this world got just 1-degree hotter (Celsius) — reality out the window, remember:

So, here we are, once again…

(Illustration out front: ‘Tower of Babel,’ 1928 woodcut by MC Escher, and found here).