everything on track

A new climate events post is at blisterdata.  All the warnings and predictions, dismissed by the American oligarchs and their Republican puppets, are in hindsight perfectly on track.  Climate change is unfolding ever faster.  I imagine we'll have less of a decade, maybe six, seven years on the outside, to initiate the revolutionary transition to a post-carbon civilization.  If we let this window of opportunity slam shut, we'll find ourselves in what could be called "the reactive mode".

Most event-related news concern the spring weather in the US, no surprise there; but it is unsettling to put this in context: super tornadoes plus record droughts plus historic floods plus massive wildfires -- everything is qualitatively rather extreme.  Add to this the quantitative dimension (and I'm not talking about the details, such as four times as many tornadoes as average), but about the big picture: more than half of the contiguous U.S. has been affected by the freak weather; and the damage, merely from the most recent tornado outbreak, is assessed at $ 5 billion.  As the weather amplitude widens, swinging from lashing rains to deep drought to massive storms, farmers take a hit.  The main trend, of course, will be crop loss.

Speaking of trends: all the bad stuff is continuing.  CO2 goes up, Arctic sea ice goes down.  Sea levels go up, aquifer levels go down.  Human consumption, especially in Asia, goes up, and green forest expanse, especially in Latin America, goes down.  And as the icing on the cake, with cherry on top, the carbon culprits already announced there is no hope for a climate deal at the South Africa summit later this year.  The plot thickens.

The last item worth noting is that the freak weather inexorably prompts public questions about the link to climate change.  So the contentious issue of attribution is not going away.

Sixty-seven months left.