Bright sunshine and way-too-warm temperatures this mid-afternoon Thursday here in California’s Central Valley — a taste of what’s surely to come in a few short weeks, maybe a preview of a boiling-hot summer, which is no shock.
We’re in the mid-80s right now with reportedly a chance to pop 90 before the day is out with rolling heat set for the weekend.
Oh, that preview:
Much hotter conditions will spread across all of CA over the next few days, yielding a respectable springtime heatwave. In fact, parts of LA Basin could see some daily record highs into mid-90s, and San Joaquin Valley could see first 100+ degree day of season Fri/Sat. #CAwx
— Daniel Swain (@weatherwest.bsky.social) 2025-05-07T01:46:46.000Z
Swain is a climate scientist at UCLA.
After the scorcher, back down to livable temps, and a regular-like spring..
Some good reading on our environment and in this current history line — Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch earlier this month:
Yes, give us human beings credit. In our relatively brief history, it’s no small thing to have come up with two different ways of thoroughly devastating Planet Earth and its inhabitants. One of them, of course, is the long-term, slow-motion version of planetary destruction that we’ve come to call climate change. And yes, we can already feel it. In recent years, this planet has set record after record when it comes to heat, the last 10 years being the hottest in human history. Meanwhile, from the oceans to the continents, in heatwaves, floods, and devastating storms, this world of ours has been feeling the heat in an unprecedented fashion and, mind you, with far worse to come.
Given how obvious all of this has become, we should get full credit not just for creating such conditions but for — at least some of us — ignoring them or, in the case of Donald J. Trump, that pal of fossil-fuel billionaires, doing far worse than that. After all, my country, which has already played such a major role in intensifying climate change, thanks to its record-setting production of greenhouse-gas-producing crude oil — more than any country ever (yes, ever!) — and natural gas, has also managed to elect a climate-change-denying president for the second time. And he’s quite bluntly dismissed the phenomenon as a “scam” and a “hoax.”
Worse yet — I hate to use the word, so I’m putting it in quotation marks — “we” elected him on a platform of “drill, baby, drill!,” which was the very phrase he most wanted to be identified with in his third run for the presidency. You couldn’t be much blunter than that and still succeed, could you?
In truth, he undoubtedly should be called Apocalyptic Don, since his immediate needs and desires, his urge to be the number-one person in this country and possibly the world, have functionally been wedded to the ultimate slow-motion destruction of this planet. Consider it an irony of sorts that, in his second term in office, the president who is against immigrants — no matter that his mother was one — is already acting in a way that, by heating the planet further and driving ever more people from their increasingly devastated lands, will increase that phenomenon immeasurably.
Irony? Don’t even think it! Not with Donald Trump in the White House, not after we’ve just passed through Earth Day 2025 with a president who seems determined to un-Earth us all.
And that second way mankind has devised to end civilization? Nuclear shit:
Of course, when you think about it, humanity could save itself from the long-term destructiveness of climate change in a remarkably easy fashion. All we would have to do is bring to bear on this planet the other form of ultimate destruction that has (in)humanity — that is, us — written all over it.
After all, when it comes to self-destruction, since August 6th and 9th, 1945, when atomic bombs were dropped with devastating effect on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II, we humans have had the ability, then only potential but by the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis actual, to literally devastate this planet by creating what has come to be known as — forget global warming — a “nuclear winter.” We could by now destroy ourselves (or at least millions or even, over time, billions of us) with more or less the snap of a nuclear finger. Under the circumstances, consider it a largely unnoted and unmentioned miracle that, almost 80 years later, while such weaponry has spread far and wide, there has never been another Hiroshima- or Nagasaki-style catastrophe, no less one for Planet Earth itself (in terms of the potential destructiveness of such a nuclear winter and the large-scale global famine that would follow it).
[…]
Still, isn’t it odd that, although we don’t often think about it, at any moment we live on the edge of ultimate destruction, whether immediately via a nuclear war or in a long-term fashion via a slow-motion version of the destruction of this planet, leading not to nuclear winter but to what might be thought of as climate-change summer? And yet, while the reality of climate change has at least led to major protests in recent times, the continued nuclear arming of this country and the planet has not.
Go read the whole piece — it doesn’t include the Pakistan/India possible-nuclear dust-up, of an end too gosh-awful terrible to think about. I’m a big fan of Engelhardt, going back nearly 20 years, and he quickly draws the lines, connects the dots here. We’re in some shitty times.
For an instance:
Breaking News!Code Yikes!The annualized rate of rise of global CO2 hit yet another record high in the latest data just released by NOAA for Feb., 2025 at 3.52 ppm per year, breaking the record set just a month earlier.Information overload summary: f&%king f&%ked.gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/…
— Prof. Eliot Jacobson (@climatecasino.net) 2025-05-07T15:16:53.588Z
And getting worse (The Conversation):
Last year, the atmosphere’s concentration of CO? rose at the fastest rate on record. Over the last decade, atmospheric CO? increased an average of 2.4 parts per million (ppm) a year. But last year, concentrations jumped by 3.5 ppm, reaching 424 ppm in the atmosphere. These concentrations are more than 50% higher than the pre-industrial period.
While we’re burning more fossil fuels than ever, recent emissions growth has been offset by falling rates of deforestation and other land use emissions.
Why are CO? concentrations still rapidly increasing? We’re still pumping massive amounts of long-buried CO? into our atmosphere. The only way for this carbon to leave the atmosphere is through natural carbon sinks – and they’re struggling to keep up.
Meanwhile, in the grip of the Orange Turd:
The Trump administration has been canceling FEMA grants and trying to make it harder for states to get disaster relief. Congressional Democrats warn the changes tell local governments: “You’re on your own.”
— Inside Climate News (@insideclimatenews.org) 2025-05-08T01:22:13.293Z
And a big plus (the Guardian):
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer track the cost of climate crisis-fueled weather disasters, including floods, heatwaves, wildfires and more. It is the latest example of changes to the agency and the Trump administration limiting federal government resources on climate change.
Noaa falls under the US Department of Commerce and is tasked with daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings and climate monitoring. It is also parent to the National Weather Service.
The agency said its National Centers for Environmental Information would no longer update its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database beyond 2024, and that its information – going as far back as 1980 – would be archived.
For decades, it has tracked hundreds of major events across the country, including destructive hurricanes, hailstorms, droughts and freezes that have totaled trillions of dollars in damage.
[…]
Jeff Masters, a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections, pointed to substitutes from insurance brokers and the international disaster database as alternative sources of information.
Still, “the Noaa database is the gold standard we use to evaluate the costs of extreme weather,” Masters said, “and it’s a major loss, since it comes at a time when we need to better understand how much climate change is increasing disaster losses.”
These moves also do not “change the fact that these disasters are escalating year over year”, Kristina Dahl, the vice-president of science at non-profit climate organization Climate Central. “Extreme weather events that cause a lot of damage are one of the primary ways that the public sees that climate change is happening and is affecting people.
“It’s critical that we highlight those events when they’re happening,” she added. “All of these changes will make Americans less safe in the face of climate change.”
Further (CNN):
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday its well-known “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” database “will be retired,” a move that will make it next to impossible for the public to track the cost of extreme weather and climate events.
The weather, climate and oceans agency is also ending other products, it has recently announced, due in large part to staffing reductions. NOAA is narrowing the array of services it provides, with climate-related programs scrutinized especially closely.
The disasters database, which will be archived but no longer updated beyond 2024, has allowed taxpayers, media and researchers to track the cost of natural disasters — spanning extreme events from hurricanes to hailstorms — since 1980. Its discontinuation is another Trump-administration blow to the public’s view into how fossil fuel pollution is changing the world around them and making extreme weather more costly.
The state of the us being fucked (NYT):
But during his first 100 days, Trump’s efforts to roll back regulations and stop climate action have shocked even those who were raising the alarm in the months before the election. “Full-on fight club” is how one environmental lawyer described it to us last month.
Some of the moves coming out of the White House were well telegraphed. Yet, in several other cases, they have gone far beyond what was expected. For example, we reported on Monday that the Trump administration has dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country.
Just the end to just another stroll down Nowadays Lane, coupled hard with a flashback:
Hot times ahead, or not, yet here we are once again …
(Illustration out front by Handoko Tjung, found here.)