Clear, bright skies full of sunshine shortly after the noon hour Tuesday here in California’s Central Valley as summer days in the fall are maybe slacking off a bit as we make it into a real, actual autumn.
Supposedly under triple-digit temperatures today (for the first time in a goodly while) and a reported drop into the low 90s/high-80s rest of the week.
However, my weather whine is practically non-existent.

Meanwhile and as I type this post, the west coast of Florida is bracing once again for a horrible bashing from yet another quick-pouncing hurricane, with wind speeds now ostensibly up to 150 mph, and though with markedly less water, there’s still enough dangerous shit to hit the literal fan sometime tomorrow (the AP): ‘Hurricane Milton weakened slightly Tuesday but remained a ferocious storm that could land a once-in-a-century direct hit on the populous Tampa Bay region with towering storm surges and the power to turn debris from Helene’s devastation into dangerous projectiles.‘

Graphics paint a frightful, scary picture:

? Tuesday video update on Major Hurricane #Milton, expected to bring extreme impacts to portions of west-central #Florida on Wednesday/Thursday and significant impacts to much of the Florida Peninsula.

? Please be smart and safe this week and heed evacuation orders from local… pic.twitter.com/oKZboyFvg5

— Dr. Levi Cowan (@TropicalTidbits) October 8, 2024

And a picture noted to be unusual in the abnormal nowadays — via The Washington Post‘s live blog a few minutes ago:

Hurricanes that strike the Gulf Coast of the United States typically approach from the south or east. Milton, which is approaching Florida more from the southwest, is taking an unusual course.

A powerful hurricane sweeping into the coast at a perpendicular angle helps maximize the amount of ocean water it can thrust ashore. The “extremely life-threatening” surge of 10 to 15 feet predicted by the National Hurricane Center is, in part, an unfortunate consequence of this angle of approach.

In its dire warnings for Milton, the National Weather Service office in Tampa Bay mentioned that the last hurricane to directly hit Tampa Bay was more than 100 years ago in October 1921, which also approached from the southwest.

The Great Gale of 1848 took a similar track through the central and western gulf, before decimating the Tampa area with its most damaging known storm surge.

Steering currents that allow for an eastward-moving hurricane are not new, and are more common late in the season as trade winds that push storms westward migrate south.

In 1999, Hurricane Lenny reached Category 4 strength over the Caribbean. It developed southwest of Jamaica and traveled east to where it reached its peak strength near the U.S. Virgin Islands. That storm gained the moniker “Wrong Way Lenny.”

Although I haven’t been back there in more than 40 years, I grew up in Flordia (on the panhandle). I graduated from the University of Florida in Gainesville — the state used to be a really wonderful place to live. Still, between the weather and Ron ‘Shitboots‘ DeSantis (and MAGA Republicans), Flordia has gone to shit in a wire basket.
And the massive problem is that shit is going to get worse, both weather-wise and in the political/cultural/pseudo-religious-crazed situation — Florida is in a heap of trouble.

We all are in the same floundering boat:

Double punch of hurricanes could become common due to climate crisis https://t.co/q3fI1jfu7p

— Guardian Environment (@guardianeco) October 8, 2024

Background-nutshell via the Guardian this morning:

Less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene lashed the Florida coastline, an even more powerful hurricane is hurtling toward the state.

It’s the kind of double hit becoming more common as the climate crisis persists, further complicating hurricane preparation, experts say.

[…]

Storms in quick sequence can also put pressure on personnel levels, whether from local government groups or mutual aid groups, charities and other private aid organizations.

“You’ve got a limited number of people in any one place who can pick up trash, who can fix utilities, who can fix roofs and plumbing,” said Sarah Labowitz, disaster expert and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “You can deploy people from around the region to help in the recovery, especially if they are not affected as badly. But when you layer on top of that a second storm, the number of people who are out of their homes or without power or childcare goes up.”

Another challenge: managing insurance costs. Estimates show Hurricane Helene caused up to $47.5bn in losses for property owners, and some Florida residents could face additional damage due to Milton.

“Insurance markets already under siege from climate-related disasters are likely to buckle further under the weight of claims from these back-to-back storms,” said Rachel Cleetus, climate and energy policy director at the environmental non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists.

Repeat disasters can also put huge strain on local economies, healthcare systems and social networks. Hurricanes can result in thousands of additional deaths over the coming years, an analysis published in the journal Nature on Wednesday suggests.

As the planet continues to warm, primarily due to emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, back-to-back hurricanes are expected to become more common.

And it’s catching up with us.

New shit-hitting-the-climate-change fan — via NewScientist this morning on a new, frightening report:

A growing number of the planet’s “vital signs” have reached record levels due to climate change and other environmental threats, according to a stark report by a group of prominent researchers.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” write William Ripple at Oregon State University and his colleagues. “This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled.”

The report is the fifth annual State of the Climate report led by Ripple in an effort to present a clear warning of what the researchers say is a crisis given the extremes measured across key climate indicators, from greenhouse gas levels to tree cover loss.

“The climate crisis isn’t a distant threat, it’s a here-and-now crisis,” says Michael Mann at the University of Pennsylvania, one of several well-known co-authors of the report, which also includes historian Naomi Oreskes, Earth scientist Tim Lenton and oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf.

The researchers assessed 35 “planetary vital signs”, including the amount of heat in the oceans and the thickness of glaciers. The vital signs also include measures of the human factors driving many of those changes, such as meat production per capita and subsidies for fossil fuels.

Of those 35 metrics, the report finds 25 of them have reached record levels this year, most of them breaking records set in 2023. The human population rose to 8.12 billion people earlier this year, while the ruminant livestock population – a major source of methane – reached 4.22 billion animals. Greenhouse gas emissions this year have surpassed the equivalent of 40.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, driving atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide – a powerful greenhouse gas emitted from soil – to new highs.

The impacts of climate change have also reached record levels. There is more heat in the oceans and seawater is more acidic, while sea level continues to rise. Record amounts of mass were lost from Greenland’s ice sheet. Heat-related mortality in the US has also increased. It now stands at 0.62 per 100,000 person-years, a more than 30 per cent rise over 2023.

“We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo,” the researchers write.

[…]

“It is staggering that, in a world where billions of people are already suffering from the impacts of climate change, fossil fuel emissions and deforestation rates are not slowing, but they are actually increasing,” says Thomas Crowther, an ecologist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and a co-author of the report.

Some of the indicators set records in the right direction in terms of mitigating climate change. For instance, solar and wind energy consumption reached record highs, and in the world of finance there was a record level of divestment from fossil fuels. The proportion of emissions covered by carbon pricing also rose to record levels this year, and the rate of deforestation in Brazil saw a decline.

But the researchers argue this is far from sufficient. “Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage,” they write.

Such direct language is unusual for a scientific report. But the authors argue this is justified, a sentiment in line with a statement published by Ripple and his colleagues in 2020 – and now signed by more than 15,000 researchers – that said scientists have a moral obligation to warn people of the dangers of climate change.

According to the new report, “with the increasingly undeniable effects of climate change, a dire assessment is an honest assessment”.

‘Undeniable‘ except to lying-asshole Republican climate-change deniers.

Are we f*cked, or not, yet once again here we are…

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