Crystal-clear, blue skies, and sharp, clean sunshine this late-afternoon Tuesday here in California’s Central Valley. And warm temps, too — highs in the mid-to-upper 70s with a cool, nice-feeling breeze. Of itself a gorgeous time. A day, however, most-likely an undercurrent preview for a hot, shitty summer to come.
Yet right now enjoy while it’s enjoyable.

In the continuing context of our outside habitat, and although it would be nice to leave the horrid world of the T-Rump for just a short space, the reality of our nowadays is that the asshole is connected to many important facets of our lives, the shitheel cannot be ignored, especially regarding the climate crisis. We’re facing a black hole in climate change and T-Rump has contributed to a back-burner approach to battling this dangerously important problem with making lies/lying a stay of the art planet killer.
So much lying and so many lies, “flood the zone with shit” (in the words of Steve Bannon), more Americans have come to believe climate change is a natural, orderly event, no big deal.
Lying lies work — via The Washington Post this morning and T-Rump’s bullshit:

Even more significant, Americans appear to have diverged on the meaning of honesty itself. Among Republicans, fewer now say that Trump regularly makes misleading statements. Slightly more view him as more honest than they did in 2018, despite an extraordinarily large amount of evidence that Trump often does not tell the truth. During Trump’s presidency, The Fact Checker documented more than 30,000 misleading or outright false claims, and since he began his second campaign for the White House against Joe Biden, he’s introduced new falsehoods to his catalogue: Inflation is “almost 50 percent” under President Biden; “nearly 1 million jobs held by native-born Americans” have been lost to immigrants. In a single December interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump made 24 false or misleading claims in five minutes — one every 12.5 seconds.

And bleeds off into climate denial:

False claims about election integrity are not the only ones that have taken hold.

While Biden has pushed forward with significant investment in green energy to combat climate change, the poll finds that Trump’s argument that global temperatures are rising mainly because of natural causes has gained traction with Republicans. Whereas one-third believed this in 2018, now nearly half (46 percent) think this is the case. As a result, the share of Americans overall saying human activity had little to do with climate change has climbed to 26 percent, from 19 percent in 2018.

How do you combat such crazy-ass shit? Lies carry weight, and the weight of climate change is horrendous — probably the greatest threat to humanity since forever. However, with cruel, ignorant assholes the problem is made far worse, and maybe unbeatable.

And is continuing to worsen:

March 2024 is the tenth month in a row to be the hottest on record globally.https://t.co/UZ37vDJacR pic.twitter.com/mVarSD7P83

— Reto Knutti (@Knutti_ETH) April 9, 2024

This morning some more news/report on how shitty our climate is getting, and quickly, too. Last month was hotter than the norm, and the 10th month in a row of record global temperatures, according to data released by the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The new data makes a chilling study — details via Reuters:

Each of the last 10 months ranked as the world’s hottest on record, compared with the corresponding month in previous years, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.

The 12 months ending with March also ranked as the planet’s hottest ever recorded 12-month period, C3S said. From April 2023 to March 2024, the global average temperature was 1.58 degrees Celsius above the average in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period.
“It’s the long-term trend with exceptional records that has us very concerned,” C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess told Reuters.
“Seeing records like this – month in, month out – really shows us that our climate is changing, is changing rapidly,” she added.

C3S’ dataset goes back to 1940, which the scientists cross-checked with other data to confirm that last month was the hottest March since the pre-industrial period.
Already, 2023 was the planet’s hottest year in global records going back to 1850.

[…]

The primary cause of the exceptional heat were human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, C3S said. Other factors pushing up temperatures include El Nino, the weather pattern that warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
El Nino peaked in December-January and is now weakening, which may help to break the hot streak toward the end of the year.
But despite El Nino easing in March, the world’s average sea surface temperature hit a record high, for any month on record, and marine air temperatures remained unusually high, C3S said.
“The main driver of the warming is fossil fuel emissions,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute.
Failure to reduce these emissions will continue to drive the warming of the planet, resulting in more intense droughts, fires, heatwaves and heavy rainfall, Otto said.

Further note from Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies: ‘“It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has … If the anomaly does not stabilise by August – a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events – then the world will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.”‘

One of the characteristics of climate-related studies and reports I’ve encountered over the last decade is the mantra attatched to these publications that shit is worse than previously recorded or understood. In the science of this overwhelming, ominous phenomenon, it appears to be getting worse and worse with no end in sight — at least for saving our asses and our children/grandchildren’s asses.

And to add insult to already-horrid fright — from the Guardian last Saturday:

On 18 March, 2022, scientists at the Concordia research station on the east Antarctic plateau documented a remarkable event. They recorded the largest jump in temperature ever measured at a meteorological centre on Earth. According to their instruments, the region that day experienced a rise of 38.5C above its seasonal average: a world record.

This startling leap – in the coldest place on the planet – left polar researchers struggling for words to describe it. “It is simply mind-boggling,” said Prof Michael Meredith, science leader at the British Antarctic Survey. “In sub-zero temperatures such a massive leap is tolerable but if we had a 40C rise in the UK now that would take temperatures for a spring day to over 50C – and that would be deadly for the population.”

This amazement was shared by glaciologist Prof Martin Siegert, of the University of Exeter. “No one in our community thought that anything like this could ever happen. It is extraordinary and a real concern,” he told the Observer. “We are now having to wrestle with something that is completely unprecedented.”

Just nature taking its course, huh?

I haven’t used this in a while — CGI of a possible reality:

Climate hot or just a natural thing, or not, yet once again here we are…

(Illustration out front by Handoko Tjung, found here.)