Breezy and cool this near-mid-day Wednesday here in California’s Central Valley — weather just about out of sync with normal reality. Reportedly, we’ll see a 30-degree rise in temperatures by Saturday as the ‘whiplash,’ lopsided shape of our meteorology continues unabated.
A circumstance already predicted.

And going beyond cruel-ass SCOTUS, cruel-ass Republicans, cruel-ass Vlad Putin, and a full collection of other cruel-ass assholes, one major item which should be on the front burner and not generally off the stove is climate change — another red-flag warning to most-likely be dismissed or pushed aside for more immediate and shiny subjects, which even in the short term is secondary to the total horror of global warming.
However, climate change is the big brute of the future and no matter the cry, will eventually fucking kill us all.

Just a short space left:

“When we talk about the need to avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming in a climate change context, we’re talking about the long-term trend, not the values for individual years” @MichaelEMann #NewClimateWar https://t.co/ADHNwiA5es

— Henrik Sotnedal (@Sotnedal) May 11, 2022

This is no joke and should be on every human being’s radar right now. Instead, time is clicking away. Via Inside Climate News yesterday:

As likely as not, the Earth’s average annual temperature will soon have its first spike above the 1.5 degree Celsius cap set for post-Industrial Revolution warming by the 2015 Paris Agreement, according to a new five-year climate outlook from the World Meteorological Organization.
Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase since the pact was signed, and the WMO found there is now a 50-50 chance that the world will temporarily cross the 1.5-degree threshold sometime in the next five years.

The WMO projection is the latest in a grim drumbeat of climate science reports showing that the world is still failing to hold warming to a level that could avoid even more catastrophic climate impacts than the increasing heat waves, droughts, wildfires and tropical storms that the current level of warming, about 1.1 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level, has spawned.
A single year of warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) doesn’t mean that the threshold of the Paris agreement has been breached for good, said Leon Hermanson, a climate scientist with the Met Office in the United Kingdom who led the report.
But the report shows the world is “edging ever closer to a situation where 1.5 degrees could be exceeded for an extended period,” he said.

Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, who was not involved in the report, said it’s important to understand the difference between the short-term WMO projection and the planet’s long-term climate future.

“There is huge potential for misunderstanding here, particularly when it comes to avoiding dangerous planetary warming thresholds,” he said.
“When we talk about the need to avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming in a climate change context, we’re talking about the long-term trend, not the values for individual years.”

Annual readings will cross the threshold well before the trend line crosses it, he said.

“What we’re concerned about, when it comes to climate change impacts, is when the trend line crosses 1.5 degrees Celsius, and that likely won’t happen for decades,” he said.
That circumstance could be avoided completely, he added, if carbon emissions drop fast enough, even if some short-term spikes cross the 1.5-degree threshold.
…
The 1.5-degree Celsius figure is not just a random statistic, said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, but an indicator of the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and the planet.

“For as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise,” he said.
“And alongside that, our oceans will continue to become warmer and more acidic, sea ice and glaciers will continue to melt, sea level will continue to rise and our weather will become more extreme.”

Yet climate change is a brutal upcoming massive reality that is a blow-off to the rich. Despite Joe Biden’s claim of difference, the US is set to give the earth a big-old ‘fuck you!’ Money and oil mix as a cemetery plot.
Shitty anti-climate news this morning from the Guardian:

Planned drilling projects across US land and waters will release 140bn metric tons of planet-heating gases if fully realised, an analysis shared with the Guardian has found.

The study, to be published in the Energy Policy journal this month, found emissions from these oil and gas “carbon bomb” projects were four times larger than all of the planet-heating gases expelled globally each year, placing the world on track for disastrous climate change.

The plans include conventional drilling and fracking spanning the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the foothills of the Front Range in Colorado and the mountainous Appalachian region. But the heart is the Permian basin, a geological formation 250 miles wide that sits under the mostly flat terrain of west Texas and New Mexico.

One lobe of this formation, known as the Delaware basin, is predicted to emit 27.8bn metric tons of carbon during the lifetime of planned drilling, while another, known as the Midland basin, will potentially unleash 16.6bn tons of emissions.

It means the US, the centre of the world’s addiction to oil and gas, will play an outsized role in the heatwaves, droughts and floods that will impact people around the planet.
…
In March, a record 904 drilling permits were issued for companies operating in the Permian basin, according to the consultancy Rystad Energy.
Typically, about 400-500 permits are approved each month but elevated oil prices and strong demand have caused an “unprecedented” and “extreme” increase, Rystad says.

“The Permian is one of the hottest hotspots in the world for energy production — and it’s only going to grow,” said Michael Webber, an energy policy expert at the University of Texas.

And the oil-wash of filthy lucre:

“It’s been like the wild west. There’s so much money behind the industry, it’s impossible to win,” said Therese Gilbert, a middle-school teacher and activist who says she was frequently harassed during her eight-year crusade for better regulation. Now she fears another boom.
“[The Russian war in Ukraine] is going to set climate change initiatives back under the cloak of patriotism when weaning ourselves off oil dictatorships and pivoting to renewables would be the patriotic choice,” she said.

All this is like spitting into the wind — nothing but nasty-bad is to come of it.
If nothing is done — the most-likely of actions — we’ll see shit like this without allowing for CGI:

Weather or not is not the question, though — here we are once again…

(Illustration out front found here).