Overcast-foggy this early Tuesday on California’s north coast — occasional faded-yellow sunshine blinds, but quickly fades into gray.
Chance of rain maybe on Friday, but the summer moves along…

Last night sounded like a war zone. Outside my window as I attempted sleep, the sound reminiscent of downtown Fallujah — small weapons fire meshed with continuous, booming explosions.
Realistic view of this July 4th bullshit from Charles P. Pierce at Esquire yesterday, a must read.

However, big story this morning is FBI Director James Comey removing the bite from Hillary Clinton’s yuuge e-mail scandal — although he reported Hillary and her people were “careless,” the illegalities were slim, saying “…no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Another yelp, another whine…

And another smokescreen…

(Illustration found here).

So much shit is obscuring any decent discourse on the most-horrific issue facing not only the US, but the whole of humanity — climate change. Not only science, but the environment outside our collective windows reflect a world that’s warming way-fast.
Despite that, the current presidential election has a ludicrous lack of any dialogue on climate change.

Despite, too, what most Americans want — an online survey by the UK’s Guardian of US voters, and published this morning, asked readers to identify the ‘one issue that affects your life you wish the presidential candidates were discussing more.’ The result was climate change by a big margin.
Key points:

Of the 1,385 who responded to the call-out — from all 50 states — one in five expressed discontent at the relative silence from candidates around a subject that they believed to be of supreme and epochal importance.
They noted that much of the Republican debate has either focused on blatant denial that climate change even exists or on how to unpick Barack Obama’s attempts to fight global warming, while on the Democratic side both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have raised the issue but have rarely pushed it to the top of the political agenda.
Many of the respondents vented despair at a political system that in their view allowed a matter of such overwhelming significance to be so overlooked.
“The fact that no one is really talking about climate change, to me, is indicative of just how lost we are,” said Linda Hayden, 51, from Oregon.
“Our house is on fire and we are arguing about who is more angry!”

Even as this takes place, every few days there’s new evidence of warming, from rising temperatures, to extreme weather, to all kinds of weather-shit, and new research on the subject — mostly more bad news.
The most-recent of these studies comes from the University of Copenhagen, and published in Geophysical Research Letters — seemingly, the CO2 sensitivity of our climate system may in fact increase with warming, at least compared to a similar period in the way-past.
From Bits of Science on Saturday:

Either the entire world is set to experience dramatic additional warming once we stabilise at the current (400+ ppm) CO2 concentration — or we are still dramatically underestimating the local climate sensitivity of the Arctic — a region that might in that case not warm 2 or 3 times as fast as the global average, but rather about 6 to 8 times. (Perhaps most likely it’s something in between.)
…
What was also at a similar levels though, worryingly, was the Pliocene’s CO2 concentration — about as high as it is today (400 ppm, or just over).
So you would expect temperatures in the Pliocene were also as high as they are today?
But they were not.
And that’s bad news.
We may still be looking way too much at short-term climatic responses — and therefore underestimate the magnitude of the ‘real’ thermal climate inertia, the warming you get once the atmospheric CO2 concentration is stabilised.

If hard action isn’t taken way-soon, we be way-fucked…
Yet Hillary’s e-mail will blare, and blare, and blare…