Sunshine and heavy warmth this early-evening Friday here in California’s Central Valley — maybe even the first unofficial day of summer as temps climb into the 90s and officially (for me) the start of T-shirt weather.

Meanwhile, beyond the political horror of the T-Rump and in the shadow of the wonderful courtroom performance of Stormy Daniels this week is the back-burner focal point that continues unabated and its full-on rush — climate change. Although it doesn’t seem like it, the piece-of-shit T-Rump is nightmarishly linked in with global warming and a second term as president will be lights out for humanity.
Definitely far from a ‘hoax‘ as the T-Rump boasts, the climate is nasty-ass real.

And the people/experts/scientists who study climate change as humans are having a hard time with the reality of a situation that’s a planet killer. In a survey from the Guardian this past week with hundreds of these people 80 percent believe we’re fucked:

“Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken,” says the climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota. “After all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change, and after the fury of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really thought governments were ready to listen to the science, to act in the people’s best interest.”

[…]

Their overwhelming feelings were fear and frustration. “I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the global south,” said a South African scientist who chose not to be named. “The world’s response to date is reprehensible – we live in an age of fools.”

[…]

Camille Parmesan, at the CNRS ecology centre in France, was on the point of giving up 15 years ago. “I had devoted my research life to [climate science] and it had not made a damn bit of difference,” she said. “I started feeling [like], well, I love singing, maybe I’ll become a nightclub singer.”

She was inspired to continue by the dedication she saw in the young activists at the turbulent UN climate summit in Copenhagen 2009. “All these young people were so charged up, so impassioned. So I said I’ll keep doing this, not for the politicians, but for you.

“The big difference [with the most recent IPCC report] was that all of the scientists I worked with were incredibly frustrated. Everyone was at the end of their rope, asking: what the fuck do we have to do to get through to people how bad this really is?”

[…]

“It is the biggest threat humanity has faced, with the potential to wreck our social fabric and way of life. It has the potential to kill millions, if not billions, through starvation, war over resources, displacement,” said James Renwick, at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. “None of us will be unaffected by the devastation.”

“I am scared mightily – I don’t see how we are able to get out of this mess,” said Tim Benton, an expert on food security and food systems at the Chatham House thinktank. He said the cost of protecting people and recovering from climate disasters will be huge, with yet more discord and delay over who pays the bills. Numerous experts were worried over food production: “We’ve barely started to see the impacts,” said one.

And just to add salt to the wound, or pour gasoline on a fire — the climate is quickly going berserk:

April #temperature highlights from #C3S. Last month was:

?warmer than any other April on record, at 0.67°C above the 1991-2020 average;
? the 11th month in a row that is the warmest on record for the respective month of the year.

For more ?https://t.co/YGQNt8O8kY pic.twitter.com/w6TBz9pgUG

— Copernicus ECMWF (@CopernicusECMWF) May 8, 2024

Details last Wednesday from Copernicus, the EU’s environmental concern:

• April 2024 was warmer globally than any previous April in the data record, with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 15.03°C, 0.67°C above the 1991-2020 average for April and 0.14°C above the previous high set in April 2016.
• This is the eleventh month in a row that is the warmest in the ERA5 data record for the respective month of the year. While unusual, a similar streak of monthly global temperature records happened previously in 2015/2016.
• The month was 1.58°C warmer than an estimate of the April average for 1850-1900, the designated pre-industrial reference period.
• The global-average temperature for the past 12 months (May 2023 – April 2024) is the highest on record, at 0.73°C above the 1991-2020 average and 1.61°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average.
• The average European temperature for April 2024 was 1.49°C above the 1991-2020 average for April, making the month the second warmest April on record for the continent.
• Temperatures were most above average in eastern European regions. Fennoscandia and Iceland experienced below-average temperatures. The mean temperature, however, masks the contrast between warmer and colder temperatures experienced at the start and latter part of April in western Europe.
• Outside Europe, temperatures were most above average over northern and northeastern North America, Greenland, eastern Asia, northwest Middle East, parts of South America, and most of Africa.
• The El Niño in the eastern equatorial Pacific continued to weaken towards neutral conditions, but marine air temperatures in general remained at an unusually high level.
• The global sea surface temperature (SST) averaged for April 2024 over 60°S–60°N was 21.04°C, the highest value on record for the month, marginally below the 21.07°C recorded for March 2024.
• This is the thirteenth month in a row that the SST has been the warmest in the ERA5 data record for the respective month of the year.

So as the natural world explodes, we’re faced with the greed and cruelty of man, especially and directly with the T-Rump. It’s a nightmare horror for a T-Rump second term as president since he’s vowed to wipe out Joe Biden’s most-excellent record in combating global warming and working to somewhat preserve our environment in a living habitat way, and all the other good works/attempts to get a handle on climate change and gut any kind of environmental attempt in that area — genocide/mass killing ahead.

And yesterday it was revealed, via The Washington Post, that T-Rump again blabbered about his intentions if re-elected — he promised big-league, major oil executives at a dinner meeting at Mar-a-Lago last month he’d gut America’s ability to fight (and get a handle on) quickly accelerating climate change: ‘Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.‘

Charles P. Pierce at Esquire this morning:

This is not climate denialism. This is deliberate destruction for profit. As we have learned over the past several years, the executives in the extraction industry knew the nature of the damage, and the extent of it, long before the rest of us did, and they lied like tobacco experts about what they knew. That probably is still the case, despite the attention the climate crisis has drawn. They simply don’t care, and they’ve cultivated politicians who either don’t care or are too stupid to know why they should, as the small towns back home get blown across state lines by what appears to be an endless chain of tornadoes. With his predator’s instinct for quid pro quo, the former president* was simply honest enough to name his price.

We’re in a one-shitty ride if the T-Rump makes it back to the Oval Office.

T-shirt weather foreer, or not, yet here we are once again…

(Illustration out front: Salvador Dali’s ‘Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion,’ found here.)