As the fever-fiery, ‘mega-heat wave‘ continues here in California’s Central Valley and across a large chunk of the western US, the Friday news dump turned out in actuality to be sort an extension of my post from yesterday morning — the boiling oscillation has made an impact on living.

As you can see in my weather forecast below for this weekend:

Excessive Heat Warning for the San Joaquin Valley has been extended until Sunday 8 PM. Dangerous heat will continue through Sunday. More info can be found here: https://t.co/HuT8j5pjEs pic.twitter.com/rssjO2acw8

— NWS Hanford (@NWSHanford) June 18, 2021

Although political shit still carries on — Republicans still reality-crazy on the insurrection/riot at the US Capitol last January; ‘“It’s true some GOP members of Congress who are treating Capitol Police like shit were the most scared on the floor.”‘
And the Republican Party the ‘most dangerous threat in the world;’ just as Mike Pence booed as a “traitor” at a Christian conservative conference; Mike Pompeo’s violent PAC ad; in a GQP flip, Mississippi Republican Steven Palazzo charged unthically, though, maybe not illegally as ‘using campaign money to pay lawyers defending him in an investigation into whether he misspent campaign funds.’
So forth and so on — just Republicans being shitty, lying assholes.

Yet the heat wave still dominates my brain, maybe because I’m sitting right in the middle of it. And it’s not normal, even for a hot region known for summer buzz-burn temeratures and way-heavy-heated air — sense of a scary reckoning of future times.
A natural abnormal:

“June last year, things seemed pretty normal,” noted Park Williams, a University of California, Los Angeles, climate and fire scientist.
“The record-breaking heat waves came in August and September.”
But with such an early heat wave this year, “this could be the tip of the iceberg,” Williams said.
…
The hot weather can be tied to the drought drying out the landscape. Normally, some of the sun’s heat evaporates moisture in the soil, but scientists say the Western soil is so dry that instead that energy makes the air even warmer.

“When the soil is wet, heat waves aren’t so bad,” said Williams, who has calculated that soil in the western half of the nation is the driest it has been since 1895.
“But if it’s dry, we are under extreme risk.”
…
A growing number of scientific studies are concluding that heat waves in some cases can be directly attributed to climate change, said Kristie L. Ebi, a professor at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.
…
“Climate change is harming us now,” Ebi said.
“It’s a future problem, but it’s also a current problem.”

Now and tomorrow:

6-10 day outlook by @NOAA’s @NWSCPC

The West isn't getting a reprieve next week

Odds favor hot/dry conditions in the Northwest and the 4 Corners into NV + W TX

But the Midwest and much of the East + Gulf Coasts can expect it to be wetter than normalhttps://t.co/7HFaZBabYK pic.twitter.com/AUm9WKEchz

— NIDIS Drought.gov (@DroughtGov) June 17, 2021

Additional indications of a sharply-hot changing climate comes from experts who know their shit — via the Guardian this morning and three interviews with those in environmental science.
First, Kathleen Johnson, paleoclimatologist, associate professor of Earth system science, UCIrvine:

“I feel a little bit lucky because I’m in Orange county, relatively close to the coast – so the temperatures are not as severe here as they are in other parts of California and the west. I’m worried about this summer – this doesn’t bode well, in terms of what we can expect with wildfire and the worsening drought. This current drought is potentially on track to become the worst that we’ve seen in at least 1,200 years. And the reason is linked directly to human caused climate change.”
…
“The more we see these extreme events, piled on top of each other, and not just in the western US but globally, the more I think the reality of climate change becomes inescapable. And it feels absolutely overwhelming and sad. We are going to have less water, increased wildfires and more extreme heatwaves. But it’s also motivating. We need to continue to push for urgent action on climate change.”

Daniel Swain, climate scientist, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA:

“It does get rough sometime — talking about these things year after year.
I live in the west, and all my family, pretty much, lives in the west. Most of my friends live in the west. It’s where I grew up, and seeing the landscape-scale transformations that are happening here, and seeing how it’s affecting people is overwhelming sometimes.
But actually to me, the most distressing part is that this is very much in line with predictions. Climate scientists have been repeating essentially the same messages and warnings since before I was born.

“Climate change is a major contributor to, if not the dominant factor, in a lot of the changes that we’re seeing out west and elsewhere.
And it just is going to keep getting worse unless we do something about it.
And so far, you know, we have yet to do the kinds of things, on a large enough scale, that are actually going to make a meaningful difference.”

And Katharine Hayhoe, atmospheric scientist, climate scientist and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy:

“The extreme heat and the wildfires aren’t surprising. But it is just surreal to see what you only ever saw before in your research studies and models, actually happening in real life.
And you’re almost dumbfounded by the speed at which your projections have become reality.

“Climate change is loading the weather dice against us. We always have a chance of rolling a double six naturally, and getting an intense record breaking summer heatwave. But decade by decade as the world warms, it’s as if climate change is sneaking in and taking one of those numbers on the dice and turning it into another six, and then another six.
And maybe even a seven. So we are seeing that heatwaves are coming earlier in the year, they are longer, they are stronger.”

Heed the words, but then we have to contend with the likes of Republicans who repudiate reality, or what their eyes and ears tell them — and are official assholes:

These climate deniers comprise 52-percent of House Republicans; 60-percent of Senate Republicans; and more than one-quarter of the total number of elected officials in Congress.
Furthermore, despite the decline in total overall deniers in Congress, a new concerning trend has emerged: Of the 69 freshmen representatives and senators elected to their respective offices in 2020, one-third deny the science of climate change, including 20 new House Republicans and three-of-four new Republican senators.
Of note, no currently serving Democratic or independent elected officials have engaged in explicit climate denial by this analysis’ definition.

Now I’m going out in the backyard and finish my B&M (Wine, wood tip), as what-little brain I have left explodes into shimmering bubbles of hot gases…

(Illustration out front: Salvador Dalí’s ‘Galatea of the Spheres,’ found here).