As we’re pelted with cold, way-wet gusty winds here on the North Coast, the way-outside world is getting warmer, still.

Just this morning at Scott Pruitt’s Senate confirmation hearing came this from T-Rump’s choice to the head the EPA: ‘“My personal opinion in immaterial.”‘

Near-about at the same time, the NASA and NOAA ‘jointly declared 2016 the hottest year on record,’ the third such event in a row.

(Illustration found here).

Odd climate change right now, a situation caused by humans emitting huge-amounts of greenhouse gases in a relatively-short period of history, while at the exact-same time, some humans want to stop, or at least hinder, some other humans from trying to figure out how to get a handle on the greatest threat facing ‘all humans.’
What the fuck is wrong with this scenario…

And the science has arrived outside our window. No longer just observational-patterns, ‘hockey sticks,’ and research-studies, climate change is blistering the world, and with all the ingredients, coming fairly rapidly.
Temperatures are ballooning — last year the culmination of similar times.
Further on the NOAA/NASA report from the Washington Post this morning:

The average temperature across the world’s land and ocean surfaces was 58.69 Fahrenheit, or 1.69 degrees above the 20th century average of 57 degrees, NOAA declared.
The agency also noted that the record for the global temperature has now successively been broken five times since the year 2000.
The years 2005 and 2010 were also record warm years, according to the agency’s dataset.
NASA concurred with NOAA, also declaring 2016 the warmest year on record in its own dataset that tracks the temperatures at the surface of the planet’s land and oceans, and expressing “greater than 95 percent certainty” in that conclusion.
(In contrast, NOAA gave a 62 percent confidence in the broken record.)
NASA actually found a bigger leap upward of temperatures in 2016, measuring the year as .22 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the prior record year of 2015.
The agency also noted that just since the year 2001 the planet has seen “16 of the 17 warmest years on record.”
Last year “is remarkably the third record year in a row in this series,” said Gavin Schmidt, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a statement.
“We don’t expect record years every year, but the ongoing long-term warming trend is clear.”

Pretty much the bottom line: ‘Scientists have been far less guarded. ‘“2016 is a wake-up call in many ways,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona, of the year’s temperatures. “Climate change is real, it is caused by humans, and it is serious.”‘

And this little bit of reality from Sen. Ed Markey in today’s Senate hearing for Pruitt: ‘“Otherwise, honestly, people are going to think it’s not just the fox guarding the hen house. It’s the fox destroying the hen house.”‘

Two days now from the start of a cluster-fuck, shit-storm…