Broken Bromance.

President Donald J. Trump has gone on record that Russia MUST quit the Crimea peninsula... the very place where the locals want the Russians to stay! So what does the Vladimir think about the Donald now? What's happened to the romance between the two?

I say it's become tainted -- and utterly destroyed -- by the very same Neocons that Trump vowed to purge from the Deep State a.k.a. the USA National Security Apparatus and President Vladimir V. Putin is now thinking something on the lines of this:

What if Pres. Trump Pisses off the Christian Right?

Tom Servo of Morris Berman's Dark Ages America blog says:
"Trump supporters will only turn on him if they believe that he betrayed them and did them wrong."
Let me add this about Trump supporters: they will turn on him only if they believe that he betrayed them and did them wrong.

Suppose President Donald J. Trump turns out to be the most pro-gay president from the Republican Party, EVAH.

Will the Christian Right, who have their own brand of identity politics, turn on him? You betcha!

And from that, here's a plausible South Park illustration of a Christian Right demonstration at the White House:

A YUGE mob of Christian rightists picket the White House, surrounding it on all four sides, blocking the ttraffic on four streets. They bear signs that bear the messages, "SHAME!", "TRUMP, RESIGN!", "F*****, GO PLAY WITH YOUR BOYFRIEND, PUTIN!" [I'm asterisking the last five letters of this F-word], and "QUEERLOVER!"

They are also chanting naughty little ditties such as the one after this image below, patterned after a taunting children's rhyme:

"PUTIN AND TRUMP, SITTIN' IN A TREE!

"K-I-S-S-I-N-G!

"FIRST COMES LOVE, THEN COMES MARRIAGE.

"THEN COMES THE BABY-- IN THE BAY-BEE CARRIAGE!"

Of course, it'll be Putin who would give birth.
Even in the summer of 2016 he was beginning to look pregnant!

Then shots ring out from inside the White House, and the mob hears it, turning towards the Executive Mansion expectantly.

Cut to inside the oval office. President Trump is lying on the floor and only his feet are showing; meanwhile Mike Pence, who is holding the smoking gun, hands it over to Big Gay Al, who throws up his hands to avoid incrimination.

Cut to station identification, which means a train of nine inane commercials.*

*Tip o' th' hat to Frank Jacobs(?) and Al Jaffee of MAD Magazine.

2017 Is Strange -- Part 2 January, and a callout to President Donald J. Trump.

Come on, Mr. President, look and learn! What, is, happening, to the sky???

2017 is strange. Enjoy, watch the skies, and learn, including you, Mr. President, that climate change is for real, and it's being caused by a more energetic atmosphere, itself being made more energetic by increasing amounts of Carbon Dioxide being coughed up by fossil-fuel burning by people, offices, governments and industry. Decarbonisation -- 100% Independence From Fossil Fuels -- will provide lots of jobs and counterintuitively will also consume a lot of fossil fuels to get up and running so we also will need a radical conservation program with 100% compliance to free up those fuels to achieve the decarbonisation.

How to achieve this? Slap a 35% tarriff on ALL fossil fuel imports coming into this country. Including the imported oil destined for the refineries to be reexported as refined products.

My namd is Edward Miessner, and I approve of this message, and the vid from LAST MESSAGES.

2017 Is Strange - Part 1 January

I had posted these types of videos on separate blogs for 2015 and 2016 but I've decided to incorporate the similar vids for 2017 here in this blog.

Here is the first video of the "2017 Is Strange" series by the YouTuber LAST MESSAGES.

2017 is strange. Enjoy!

2016 Is the Third Hottest Year in a Row.

The Boston Globe posted a picture touting a 60-degree January day as evidence of Global Warming. But it isn't. There were January thaws with daytime temps in the 60s in the 1970s when I was growing up in greater Boston. But it's the ocean warming and polar warming that's pushing up the annual mean temperatures, year over year over year over year.

For third straight time, Earth sets hottest year record

Justin Gillis and John Schwartz of The New York Times,  January 18, 2017

Source: The Boston Globe.

Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016 — trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row. 

.... 

The data show that politicians cannot wish the problem away. The Earth is heating up, a point long beyond serious scientific dispute, but one becoming more evident as the records keep falling. Temperatures are heading toward levels that many experts believe will pose a profound threat to both the natural world and to human civilization. 

In 2015 and 2016, the planetary warming was intensified by the weather pattern known as El Niño, in which the Pacific Ocean released a huge burst of energy and water vapor into the atmosphere. But the bigger factor in setting the records was the long-term trend of rising temperature, which scientists say is being driven by increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. 

“A single warm year is something of a curiosity,” said Deke Arndt, chief of global climate monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It’s really the trend, and the fact that we’re punching at the ceiling every year now, that is the real indicator that we’re undergoing big changes.”

For more, click here.

Five feet of Sea Level Rise by 2050? Ten feet at New Orleans in that Case.

I have recently found out that because of the destabilisation of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets in general, and the Pine Island Glacier in particular, we could see five feet of global mean sea-level rise by 2050.  Due to the gravity effects of the loss of ice at the poles, New Orleans will see twice as much seal level rise as the global mean.

Meltwater from the east end of the East Antarctica ice sheet.
As if Greenland and West Antarctica ice melt weren't bad enough.

This is six feet rise in sea level at New Orleans.
This is from a global mean of three feet.
Source: New Orleans Advocate 

From The Huffington Post, 18 November 2016, U.S. Climate Envoy Jonathan Pershing: Five Feet Of Sea Level Rise By 2050 Possible.

The mood in Marrakech was somber when top climate envoy for President Barack Obama Jonathan Pershing dropped a bombshell on observers gathered there: The rapid warming in polar regions the world is now witnessing may result in five feet—or 1.5 meters— of sea level rise by 2050. 

Pershing had met earlier with State Department Secretary John Kerry in Morocco at the 22nd UN Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP22. Kerry had just returned from a trip to Antarctica. According to Pershing, Kerry told him that the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica “is moving very fast and when it goes, we will see 1.5 meters of sea level rise by 2050.” 

“Five feet of sea level rise in less than 35 years — that is really soon,” said Pershing. “There are 65 million people now living in a state of conflict and 140 million who live less than 3 feet above sea level.

I had reported on the effects of gravity influences on the effect on sea level rise at New Orleans here, based on information reported in the New Orleans Advocate, which has come out with a new article November 23rd on local sea level rise this century: Study hands New Orleans bleak sea rise outlook, with some of highest projections in the world.

Just when you think the news about sea level rise couldn’t get much worse for New Orleans, it has. 

According to a study released this month, the city will experience one of the highest increases in sea level among 138 coastal cities around the planet because of its location on the northern Gulf of Mexico. 

New Orleans could see as much as 14.5 inches of sea level rise by 2040, and 6.5 feet by 2100 if the world doesn’t act quickly to lower greenhouse gas emissions, the main driver of global warming. 

The populated parts of the city, of course, are protected by levees rising to about 22 feet. The increase would be most evident outside the levees

Of course the study that predicts a 14.5 inches' rise by 2040 and 6.5 feet by 2100 does not take into account the above information about the increasingly rapid disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctica ice caps that Pershing dropped on the climate change conference in Marrakesh.

And the ice melt has started on East Antarctica as well, at its east end, reported by Robertscribbler on November xx: Did Föhn Winds Just Melt Two Miles of East Antarctic Surface Ice in One Day?

Supraglacial lake is just another word for a surface glacial melt lake. And these new lakes pose a big issue for ice sheet stability. Surface melt lakes are darker than white glacier surfaces. They act as lenses that focus sunlight. And the comparatively warm waters of these lakes can flood into the glacier itself — increasing the overall heat energy of the ice mass.

But water at the glacier surface doesn’t just sit there. It often bores down into the ice sheet — producing impacts for months and years after the surface lake’s formation. Sub surface lakes can form in the shadow of surface ponds. Transferring heat into the glacier year after year. In other cases, water from these lakes punches all the way to the glacier’s base. There the added lubrication of water speeds the glacier’s flow. All of these processes generate stresses and make glaciers less stable. And it is the presence of surface melt ponds that has been responsible for so much of Greenland’s speeding melt during recent years.

Now, a similar process is impacting the largest concentration of land ice on the planet. And while Greenland holds enough ice to raise sea levels by around 21 feet, East Antarctica contains enough to lift the world’s oceans by about 195 feet. Surface melt there, as a result, produces considerably more risk to the coastal cities of the world.

In other words, it looks like even Pershing's dire warning at Marrakesh recently is now outdated. Oh, crap.

For more info click here, here, here, here, here [scroll down to EXTINCTION (Yes, it is real)], and here. 

Game. Over. Near Term Extinction by 2100.

Scientists state climate is more sensitive to increased carbon than previously thought and predict 7-1/2 degrees Celsius temperature rise by 2100.

From The Independent: Climate change may be escalating so fast it could be 'game over', scientists warn.

Mark Lynas laid out what would happen as the temperature rises in his award-winning book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet.

He was shocked by the researchers’ results.

“It sounds on the apocalyptic side of bad and, in some ways, it is realistic because ‘business as usual’ just got more likely as Trump wants to rebuild the pipelines … the complete ‘fossilisation’ of the US,” he said.

“It was game over at six [degrees] to be honest. I don’t think there was much more to add, other than turning the planet into Venus.”

That's what it looks like for the climate and the ability for the planet to sustain life, thanks to Obama's "Drill, Baby Drill" policies (after stating on election night 2008 that global warming and oceanic warming will have stopped that night according to his prediction of what History will write about his administration). Now we have Donald Trump's team promising to bring back oil, gas, clean coal and promising to defund climate science at all agegencies in the US government. I guess that includes the National Weather Service -- weather is just the day-to-day variability of climate and therefore meterology is a climate science. So I guess AccuWeather or the Weather Channel will get the concession to do the government weather forecasts, huh? At the very least, we're going in for business as usual and probably going for it blindly into the future, to boot.

And do you know who I blame the most? Not Trump. Not the GOP. But Obama, Slick Willie, Hillary, and the DNC for ruining the Dems' political capital on Obamacare and for running a supremely lousy campaign that never positively hooked up to the White Working Class and their values like it needed to.

THANKS, DNC Liberals!