Drizzling rain and chilly just past the noon hour Wednesday here in California’s Central Valley — like the rest of mankind, we’re seemingly part of an environment going to shit in a hooped-wire basket.
Wild fact from @billmckibben.bsky.social's latest newsletter:"The last colder-than-average month on planet earth was in February of 1985, which means that no one under the age of forty has ever known one."
Due to the horror-chaos from the T-Rump and associates, climate change is no longer a vital subject matter, despite the clusterfck coming quickly upon mankind. I haven’t posted in a while, but news on the dying of the light to our only living space woke me up with a shocker — shit could be already hitting the fan!
Shitsville apparently is closer than we think — from the Guardian this morning:
The world is closer than thought to a “point of no return” after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said.
Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed.
At just 1.3C of global heating in recent years, extreme weather is already taking lives and destroying livelihoods across the globe. At 3-4C, “the economy and society will cease to function as we know it”, scientists said last week, but a hothouse Earth would be even more fiery.
The public and politicians were largely unaware of the risk of passing the point of no return, the researchers said. The group said they were issuing their warning because while rapid and immediate cuts to fossil fuel burning were challenging, reversing course was likely to be impossible once on the path to a hothouse Earth, even if emissions were eventually slashed.
It was difficult to predict when climate tipping points would be triggered, making precaution vital, said Dr Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates in the US. Wolf is a member of a study team that includes Prof Johan Rockström at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
“Crossing even some of the thresholds could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory,” said Wolf. “Policymakers and the public remain largely unaware of the risks posed by what would effectively be a point-of-no-return transition.
“It’s likely that global temperatures are [already] as warm as, or warmer than, at any point in the last 125,000 years and that climate change is advancing faster than many scientists predicted.”
[…]
The assessment, which was published in the journal One Earth, synthesised recent scientific findings on climate feedback loops and 16 tipping elements. The tipping elements include the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, mountain glaciers, polar sea ice, sub-Arctic forests and permafrost, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), a system of ocean currents that strongly influences the global climate.
Tipping may already be happening in Greenland and west Antarctica, with permafrost, mountain glaciers and the Amazon rainforest appearing to be on the verge, the scientists said.
“Research shows that several Earth system components may be closer to destabilising than once believed,” they concluded. “While the exact risk is uncertain, it is clear that current climate [action] commitments are insufficient.”
Prof William Ripple, at Oregon State University, US, who led the analysis, said: “The Amoc is already showing signs of weakening, and this could increase the risk of Amazon dieback. Carbon released by an Amazon dieback would further amplify global warming and interact with other feedback loops. We need to act quickly on our rapidly dwindling opportunities to prevent dangerous and unmanageable climate outcomes.”
Scientists warned in 2018 of the prospect of a hothouse Earth. In this scenario, global temperature stays significantly above the 4C rise of current worst-case climate scenarios for thousands of years, driving a huge rise in sea level that drowns coastal cities. The scientists said then that the “impacts of a hothouse Earth pathway on human societies would likely be massive, sometimes abrupt, and undoubtedly disruptive”.
Further ugly environmental news via The Washington Post, also this morning:
For about 40 years — from 1970 to 2010 — global warming proceeded at a fairly steady rate. As humans continued to pump massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world warmed at about 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade, or around 0.34 degrees Fahrenheit.
Then, that rate began to shift. The warming rate ticked up a notch. Temperatures over the past decade have increased by close to 0.27 degrees C per decade — about a 42 percent increase.
Those data — combined with the last few years of record heat — have convinced many researchers that the world is seeing a decisive shift in how temperatures are rising. The last 11 years have been the warmest years on record; according to an analysis by Berkeley Earth, if we assume a constant rate of warming since the 1970s, the last three years have a less than 1-in-100 chance of occurring solely due to natural variability.
“There is greater acceptance now that there is a detectable acceleration of warming,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the research lead at the payments company Stripe.
Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth, wrote last month: ‘“We’re not continuing on the same path we had before … Something has changed … The past warming rate is no longer a reliable predictor of the future.”‘
And, of course, mankind’s horror of the T-Rump:
A reminder that, while some of the damage that Trump & GOP are doing might seems temporary, the damage they're doing to the planet is permanent:www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/c…
— Michael E. Mann (@michaelemann.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T13:48:45.386Z
The horrific-atrocious foursome upon whom to exactly blame for the possible deaths of billions and the end of history — per the Times:
Two of them, Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, were high-profile allies of Donald Trump. Mr. Vought, who has railed against “climate alarmism,” and Mr. Clark, who has called climate rules a “Leninistic” plot to seize control of the economy, drafted executive orders for the next Republican president to dismantle climate initiatives.
The other two, Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, were lesser-known conservative attorneys with long histories of fighting climate initiatives. Ms. Gunasekara, a onetime aide to the most vocal global warming denialist in the Senate, and Mr. Brightbill, who had argued in court against Obama-era climate regulations, collected an “arsenal of information” to chip away at the scientific consensus that the planet is warming, documents show.
Shock from the awful — from Inside Climate News earlier today:
Following three of the warmest years on record, as scientists reckon with climate tipping points and states and cities grapple with the escalating cost of extreme weather and more intense wildfires, the Trump administration this week is expected to formally eliminate the U.S. government’s role in controlling greenhouse gas pollution.
By revoking its 17-year-old scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, the Environmental Protection Agency will demolish the legal underpinning of its authority to act on climate change under the Clean Air Act.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will be alongside President Donald Trump for an event Wednesday focused on boosting U.S. use of coal, as mercury and air toxics standards are repealed. That is expected to be a prelude to Zeldin finalizing the endangerment finding repeal, an assignment the president handed him in an executive order signed on the first day of his second term in office
[…]
“Communities across the country will bear the brunt of this decision—through dirtier air, higher health costs, and increased climate harm,” said Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former EPA employees, in a statement. “The Trump EPA is surrendering its responsibility, turning its back on families and communities already facing the highest pollution and health risks, and dismantling decades of science and progress.”
Said Joseph Goffman, EPA’s top air official during the Biden administration, “This move is a fundamental betrayal of EPA’s responsibility to protect human health. It is legally indefensible, morally bankrupt, and completely untethered from the scientific record.”
Humanity’s extinction, or not, yet once again here we are …
(Illustration out front found here.)