Overcast and foggy with a chill in the air this early Sunday on California’s north coast — but if predictions are near-about correct, and we follow the course of the past week or so, sunshine and clear skies are in the immediate future.
In an increasingly contrarian world, though, who in his-right-mind can predict shit?

Life in the nowadays, strung-together by thinly-knotted silken thread, united in a way-fragile web.

(Illustration: LS Lowry’ s ‘Canal Bridge,’ found here).

Oddly, and appropriately-ironic, the big continuing news story this morning is super-techno gadgets can’t reveal poo: “Due to the type of satellite data, we are unable to confirm the precise location of the plane when it last made contact with the satellite.”
In this NSA dominated state-of-the-world, hard for me to even fathom/imagine one can listen to Angela Merkel’s cellphone jabber, but lose complete track of a large, highly-sophisticated piece of precision-engineered hardware like a passenger jet.
Totally, dude: WTF?

Mankind so far has fooled itself into believing we’re immune. This particular piece of world history we’re living through right now, I believe, is both the most-interesting, and at the exact-moment, the most-terrifying yet known. Joined by humanity, what effects one, will eventually effect us all, yet we’re letting ourselves commit suicide by a variety of sources — the perfect storm of all the puzzle-pieced storms seem to be converging into a rabid vortex of violence, sounding similar to the last, downward suck of a recently-flushed-toilet bowl.

In the scream of the clueless. One of those storms actually includes what we call, “storms” — climate change, the greatest-worse event ever, is coming hard-directly right at us. And Americans are not paying attention.
A Gallup poll released last Wednesday showed we’re kind of ho-hum about this approaching calamity (h/t Grist):

Thirty-one percent of Americans indicate that they worry “a great deal” about the quality of the environment this year, marking the lowest level of worry about the environment more broadly since Gallup began measuring this in 2001.
Americans were most concerned about the environment in 2007, when 43 percent worried a great deal.
…
Climate change and the quality of the environment rank near the bottom of a list of concerns for Americans, who are instead far more worried about more basic economic issues such as the economy, federal spending, and the affordability of healthcare.
Concerns about the environment typically rank low among all Americans, but the current level of worry is even lower than in the past.

What, me worry?
Climate change — global warming, really the better title — touches just about everything in one form or another, and healthcare is included, if you want to include continue living. Either directly, or in-directly, our warming environment is quickly killing us. As for instance: Earthquakes.
Up here along California’s north coast last week, we had more-than-our-share of shakers — a 6.8 with a couple of dozen aftershocks on Monday (three at 4.0 or better), another 4.0 on Friday, and another 4.0 yesterday, all in about the same region. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, there was a 5.1 about 250 miles off the northern Oregon coast.
Related, or not — makes me way-apprehensive. Even if grounded in an understanding this activity is part of a warming environment as climate change isn’t just about “storms” on the planet surface, but also about “storms” underneath, rocks moving, and so forth. An alarming point, hey: The fact that it does reflects a failure of our imagination and a limited understanding of the manner in which the different physical components of our planet – the atmosphere, the oceans, and the solid Earth, or geosphere – intertwine and interact.
As natural goes…

As huge chunks of ice melts, the earth makes room. Breaks in the Arctic permafrost could become spigots for a darkening scenario — from Arctic News last Wednesday:

On March 9, 2014, Arctic sea ice area was at a record low for the time of the year, at only 12.88731 square kilometers.
…
The situation is dire, given that methane concentrations have risen strongly following an earthquake that hit the Gakkel Ridge on March 6, 2014…
Huge amounts of methane have been released from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean over the past half year, and the resulting high methane concentrations over the Arctic will contribute to local temperature rises.
The prospect of an El Niño event makes the situation even more dire.
NOAA recently issued an El Niño Watch.
This follows a conclusion by an international research team that found a 75 percent likelyhood of an El Niño event in late 2014.
The consequences of sea ice collapse would be devastating, as all the heat that previously went into transforming ice into water will be asbsorbed by even darker water, from where less sunlight will be reflected back into space.
The danger is that further warming of the Arctic Ocean will trigger massive methane releases is unacceptable and calls for comprehensive and effective action as discussed at the Climate Plan blog.

And methane release could be the “tipping point.”
Not to worry, the process is only natural.
So, the un-natural?
This comes from our suicidal fossil-fuel addiction, and current insane rush to keep civilization saturated. In the last five years, hydraulic fracturing (injecting high-pressure water and chemicals miles deep into the ground into subsurface rock, effectively “fracturing” the rock and allowing more spaces for oil and gas to come through), which has come to be known as “fracking,” has soared, and too, have earthquakes around these drilling sites.
Yesterday, a shitload of protestors turned out in Sacramento for an anti-fracking event, staged to halt the process in California.
Our Moonbeam governor is trying to straddle the fracking fence: “Governor Brown likes to think of himself as climate champion,” Jamie Henn, co-founder of 350.org, wrote in the Huffington Post. “But just like President Obama, Brown has refused to stand up to Big Oil.”
Although there’s been no indications as of yet California fracking causing earthquakes, we’re freakin’ US of A’s ground zero for quakes, so expect the expected — last Thursday, Earthworks, Clean Water Action and the Center for Biological Diversity released a report on shakers around fracking sites and concluded, “California is uniquely vulnerable to seismic events.”
No shit, sherlock. Research, though, did reveal: “No studies to date have evaluated the increased risk of induced earthquakes from California’s existing wastewater injection wells,” the report said. “There are fundamental knowledge gaps in understanding the risks of induced seismicity from these wells.”
In Ohio, fracking was was halted last week at a well in a rural eastern part of the state after only a month of operation — too many earthquakes.
Meanwhile, in Oklahoma a report indicates geologists believe the state’s increase in shakers comes from fracking: The state is on track for as many as 400 quakes this year, 20 times what was normal before a big jump in oil production five years ago.
And the insanity in the proposed Keystone pipeline. An excerpt from historian/journalist Tony Horwitz’s new book, “BOOM: Oil, Money, Cowboys, Strippers, and the Energy Rush That Could Change America Forever. A Long, Strange Journey Along the Keystone XL Pipeline,” allows the horror, again via Grist:

The Keystone XL — short for “express line” — is the last, missing artery of this transcontinental system.
If approved and built, it will trace a much more direct route from Alberta to Nebraska.
The diameter of the proposed XL is also 20 percent wider than the existing Keystone.
This means the XL will more than double the amount of oil-sands crude that TransCanada can pipe into the United States and deliver feedstock swiftly and directly to Gulf Coast refineries.
All told, the completed Keystone system will have the capacity to carry 1.3 million barrels of crude a day from Alberta to Texas — roughly the amount the United States imports via oil tankers from Saudi Arabia.
…
Conventional oil, when spilled in water, tends to stay on the surface.
But this isn’t true of diluted bitumen, called dilbit.
In 2010, a pipeline operated by TransCanada’s main competitor, Enbridge, ruptured and spilled 20,000 barrels of dilbit into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River.
The diluents quickly evaporated, leaving the heavy bitumen to sink.
The result has been the costliest and most difficult onshore oil spill ever to occur in the United States.
The cleanup is ongoing.
In 2013, another major spill, from an Exxon pipeline in Arkansas, dumped dilbit into wetlands and onto suburban lawns, forcing residents to evacuate.
The cause of the spill was a cracked seam, undetected by the smart pig that had been sent down the line just a month before to detect exactly this sort of problem.

And all this shit to keep machines running for the powers that be, while killing our only livable home.
All this is indicative of an even-bigger, more-compounded catastrophe a-coming. Well below the environment, is the crucial mass of civilization, which this fossil fuel extraction is all about, and income/wealth inequality. In a new study funded by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, focused on the thorny probability of this whole shooting match folding-up like a cheap accordion. The report suggests, as far as world history is concerned, nothing new, as “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.”
Our current age in indeed unique, having climate change as a wedge. From the Guardian last Friday on the NASA report:

Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that “with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites.”
In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most “detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners,” allowing them to “continue ‘business as usual’ despite the impending catastrophe.”
The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how “historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases).”
Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that: “While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory ‘so far’ in support of doing nothing.”

In the end, the Guardian warns: Although the study is largely theoretical, a number of other more empirically-focused studies – by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance – have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a ‘perfect storm’ within about fifteen years. But these ‘business as usual’ forecasts could be very conservative.

Meaning, shit is under-estimated, quicker-coming and worse than originally predicted.
And tomorrow’s Monday — shit on a storm-stick!