Hot but so far bearable this Tuesday mid-day here in California’s Central Valley — we’re at or maybe just below 100 degrees, but sweetly assisted by a cool-feeling breeze, which however will most-likely simmer down before late afternoon into quiet, motionless, though well-heated air, thus allowing sunshine to straight-away bake all our brains, if of course, we had any.
And if the action of humankind is any indication, and horribly sad it is, our cerebrum is empty — we’re that brainless, idiotic frog floating happily in a pot of water starting to boil on that proverbial stove, a moronic creature seemingly unaware of the asshole, horrible shit about to take place, creating an uninhabitable earth (though the only one we have).
Yet we are aware and have known about our catastrophic situation for a goodly while.

Dr. Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at the London School of Economics (BBC News): ‘“I’m not aware of a similar period when all parts of the climate system were in record-breaking or abnormal territory … If I’m surprised by anything, it’s that we’re seeing the records broken in June, so earlier in the year. El Niño normally doesn’t have a global impact until five or six months into the phase … Models from the 1990s pretty much put us where we are today. But to have an idea about what the next 10 years would look like exactly would be very difficult … Things aren’t going to cool down.”‘

An excellent, but horrid elucidation of our predicament in a bit more than three minutes:

In the environmental scheme of things, we’ve known about this shit happening for decades, even longer, maybe back to the early 1800s. Still, we enjoyed the rich-textured fruit from burning fossil fuels — the continual rising standard of living coupled with upper-class wealth-influencing capitalism driving our look-the-other-way regarding a throbbing horror of climate change. Although there have been shout-outs about global warming’s approach over the years with scientific reports/studies/etc, we’re now no longer in academia, and the crisis real — it’s hot as shit outside everywhere and it’s plain as Phoenix, Arizona, boiling for the last three weeks, generating an ER run of third-degree burns due to people falling on the sidewalk, or even on someone’s new-mowed lawn.

Climate change already impacts our weather, adding ‘heat dome‘ to the growing, popular vocabulary of expressions of unscientific exclamation of WTF!
The consequences of putting off doing anything about burning fossil fuels is here, climate change is to fully-ass ‘undeniably to blame’ for our current boiling-frog situation — from the Guardian this morning:

“Such heatwaves are no longer rare and the most important thing is, these extremes kill people, particularly destroying the lives and livelihoods of the most vulnerable,” said Dr Friederike Otto at Imperial College London, UK, who was part of the analysis team.

“Politicians often claim that they care about normal people and poor people,” she said. “If we did value people, it’s pretty obvious what we need to do. I don’t think stronger evidence has ever been presented for a scientific question.”

Otto said it was “absolutely critical” that governments agree to phase out fossil fuels at the UN climate summit Cop28, which opens on 30 November. The summit president, Sultan Al Jaber, is also the CEO of the state-run oil and gas company of the host nation, the United Arab Emirates. “We still have time to secure a safe and healthy future,” said Otto. “If we do not, tens of thousands of people will keep dying from heat-related causes each year.”

[…]

The new analysis by the World Weather Attribution group used peer-reviewed methods to quantify the impact of the climate crisis on the recent heatwaves. They used weather data up to 18 July and computer models to compare today’s climate, with 1.2C of global heating, with the cooler climate of the late 1800s.

The study found the heatwaves in Europe and the US were, as an absolute minimum, made 950 and 4,400 times more likely by global heating – making it virtually certain that they were the result of human-caused emissions. In China, the heatwave was made 50 times more likely.

In today’s hotter climate, these heatwaves are expected about every five years in China, every 10 years in Europe and 15 years in the US, but will happen ever more frequently as emissions continue to rise. The growing El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon, probably added a little heat to the heatwaves, the scientists said, but global heating from burning fossil fuels was the main reason for their severity.

Gareth Redmond-King, at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit in the UK, said: “As we keep burning fossil fuels, we fuel ever worse climate impacts. It won’t stop until we cut emissions to net zero. Politicians who attempt to delay [climate] measures are locking in more of these extremes.”

Another bad dose of climate news today (The Washington Post): ‘The Atlantic Ocean’s sensitive circulation system has become slower and less resilient, according to a new analysis of 150 years of temperature data — raising the possibility that this crucial element of the climate system could collapse within the next few decades.‘
Although this is on-its-face shitty, some scientists believe the situation with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is not yet  that bad and the new study’s ‘conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt.’
Yeah, right.

Some further noteworthy climate situations, unprecedented shit — via ABC News (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) from Sunday, and record low levels of sea ice in the Antarctic, bringing on worsening heat along with sea-level rise:

Physical oceanographer Edward Doddridge has been communicating with scientists and the community about the drastic changes happening around Antarctica.

He said vast regions of the Antarctic coastline were ice free for the first time in the observational record.

“To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough,” Dr Doddridge said.

“For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it’s five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we’d expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years. It’s gobsmacking.”

Really? The big scream from all this is what will happen? We need to end the burning of fossil fuels, completely end. And for many economic and political reasons, we’re in a scenario of up shit creek with a paddle.
It’s what next.

One real hard block as noted by MediaMatters last week:

As the climate crisis becomes more evident and destructive, even exceeding climate scientists’ earlier predictions, Fox News and other influential right-wing outlets and figures are downplaying the severity of climate-fueled events and pushing dangerous climate denial.

This summer has been marked by a series of record-breaking extreme weather events, illustrative of the rapidly intensifying effects of global warming. Unprecedented heat waves, wildfires, and floods have wreaked havoc across North America. Meanwhile, global sea surface temperatures have reached alarming levels, and the world just experienced its hottest day on record — four days in a row. These events align with scientists’ warnings, but the acceleration of warming and the intensity of this summer’s extreme heat suggest that the climate crisis is unfolding faster than expected.

Last month, when smoke from hundreds of wildfires raging across Canada polluted the air over major population centers in the U.S., Fox News dismissed the link between the fires and climate change; meanwhile conspiracy theories seeking alternative explanations for Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season flourished online. In response to news that Earth had reached its hottest temperatures ever recorded, bad actors attempted to distract from the unsettling milestone by focusing on CNN’s use of the phrase “hottest day ever.” As deadly heat continues to scorch parts of the U.S., Asia, and Europe with no end in sight, and with a 1,000-year flood event having left parts of Vermont and New York state underwater, right-wing media cling to talking points that deny climate science.

By flooding the zone with climate denial right when the climate crisis is most evident, right-wing media run cover for Republican decision-makers who are actively obstructing climate action, ward off accountability for the fossil fuel industry, and pollute information systems for those attempting to understand the link between extreme weather and our dependence on fossil fuels. This tactic, like the extreme heat, has no end in sight.

Yeah, as evidenced by an alarming list presented (24 separate incidents) of shitty right-wing media lies, disinformation and bullshit against the realities of climate change just in the month of July, so far. Not only have we the naturally decaying environment, but there are also decaying MAGA/Republican assholes trying to bring on the end.

WTF!

We should be in regret, do-what-we-can mode:

Heat-dome Republicans, or not, but once again here we are…

(Illustration out front found here.)