Quiet and still this early Friday on California’s north coast, with the normal patchy fog and a slighty-chilled breeze for our late summer — weather up here is really consistent, and if it’s not, it will be in just a second.
And the weekend is near-about on top of us.

The news cycle — beyond Robin Williams — has seemingly shifted from Iraq and the ISIS, to Ferguson, Missouri, and hard-shelled, war-geared police. If you blinked, the two could be inseparable.
Except yesterday, the whole Ferguson police force was pulled out of the continuing unrest scenario, and replaced with Missouri Highway Patrol — and calm ensued.
Now, only if Iraq…

In that terrible news cycle, the environment continues going to shit in a handbasket.

(Illustration found here).

Some bad news from the climate front — first, if nothing else, Arctic ice is melting faster.
Via TechTimes:

A new study that will be published in Journal of Geophysical Research has confirmed some bad news: the layer of snow in the Arctic region is most definitely thinning, and at a very fast fast.
Scientists used data tracking the depth of snow that sits atop Arctic ice from almost a hundred years ago, and found that the snow is melting rapidly as the region warms.
Thinning is worst on the ice in western Arctic waters, close to Alaska.
…
The research team looked at Soviet measurements dating all the way back to 1937, and a period of Soviet data from 1954 to 1991.
They compared that data to NASA data collected by air from 2009 to 2013, as well as data from ice buoys collected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
They found that the snow levels have gone down from 14 inches to 9 inches in the west of the Arctic region, near Alaska.
Further north and west of Alaska, near the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, the snow had thinned from 13 inches to 6 inches.
About a third of the snow near Alaska has declined, and almost half of the snow near the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.
“Knowing exactly the error between the airborne and the ground measurements, we’re able to say with confidence, Yes, the snow is decreasing in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas,” said Ignatius Rigor, an oceanographer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory, who co-authored the paper.
The team suggested that the snow may be getting thinner because, as the oceans warm from climate change, they don’t freeze until later in the year.
That means that most of the region’s heaviest snowfalls, which happen in the early fall, fall into the sea and melt.

In a similar vein, Tibet’s glaciers are at their warmest in 2,000 years — from Scientific American:

The Tibetan plateau, whose glaciers supply water to hundreds of millions of people in Asia, were warmer over the past 50 years than at any stage in the past two millennia, a Chinese newspaper said, citing an academic report.
Temperatures and humidity are likely to continue to rise throughout this century, causing glaciers to retreat and desertification to spread, according to the report published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research.
“Over the past 50 years, the rate of temperature rise has been double the average global level,” it said, according to the report on the website of Science and Technology Daily, a state-run newspaper.
Glacier retreat could disrupt water supply to several of Asia’s main rivers that originate from the plateau, including China’s Yellow and Yangtze, India’s Brahmaputra, and the Mekong and Salween in Southeast Asia.

Add all the current upheaval, does history reveal a repeat — this time with high-tech meddling.
From Climate News Network:

Scientists looking at what is known as the “Fertile Crescent” of ancient Mesopotamia have found new evidence that drought caused by climate change brings an end to civilisations.
It is the latest study that confirms the threat posed to present civilisations in Africa, Asia and parts of the United States by changes in rainfall pattern that could lead to the abandonment of once-fertile areas ? and the cities that once were fed by them.
The focus of research by a team from Tübingen University, Germany, is the area currently part of Iraq and the Persian Gulf where the development of ancient agriculture led to the rise of large cities.
Evidence from grain samples up to 12,000 years old shows that while the weather was good, the soil fertile and the irrigation system well managed, civilisation grew and prospered. When the climate changed and rainfall became intermittent, agriculture collapsed and the cities were abandoned.

Our current model, however, is way-way-worse — we can’t just pick up our shit and move, abandon the whole earth.
If you think so, you’re out of your tree, which might be the last one.

(Illustration out front found here).