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Follow @Uncle_Ernie We're Going Away! By Ernest Stewart "The planet isn't going anywhere. WE are! We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam ... The planet'll be here; and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. ~~~ George Carlin Meanwhile, 100 square miles of Washington State burned to the ground in a single day! Could there be a connection between the two, do you suppose? According to NOAA's latest figures, the July average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.46 F (0.81 C) above the 20th century average. As July consistently marks the warmest month of the year, NOAA said, "...this most recent one now registers as having the all time highest monthly temperature since records began in 1880, with an average global thermometer reading of 61.86 F (16.61 C)!" NOAA's temperature analysis follows on the heels of similar findings by both NASA and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) published earlier this week which also said July was a record-breaker in terms of heat. "The world is warming. It is continuing to warm. That is being shown time and time again in our data," said Jake Crouch, scientist at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, continued. "Now that we are fairly certain that 2015 will be the warmest year on record. It is time to start looking at what are the impacts of that? What does that mean for people on the ground?" Over 10,000 dead and 100,000 near death in the last two months in Pakistan, India, Iran, and Egypt from the current worldwide heat waves. Climate scientists have spent much of the year gathering data for an upcoming UN climate talks in Paris. They are warning that the collective impacts of increased temperatures, both on land and in the oceans, are resulting in severe consequences for human civilization and the natural world. Can you imagine how the Rethuglican spokes-weasels will spin this for their carbon-spewing corpo-rat puppet masters? I can hear the Donald now blaming it on women and Mexicans! You may recall that 13 out of the last 14 years have been record temperature years. As Andrea Thompson at Climate Central reports: "After 2014 was declared the warmest year on record, a Climate Central analysis showed that 13 of the 15 warmest years in the books have occurred since 2000 and that the odds of that happening randomly without the boost of global warming was 1 in 27 million. Even during recent years, when a La Nina (the cold water counterpart to El Nino) has been in place, the year turned out warmer than El Nino years of earlier decades. Global carbon dioxide levels have risen from a pre-industrial level of about 280 parts per million to nearly 400 ppm today. In recent years, CO2 levels - the primary greenhouse gas - have spent longer and longer above the 400 ppm benchmark. They stayed above this point for about six months this year, twice the three months of last year. It's expected that within a few years, they'll be permanently above 400 ppm. The continued rise of CO2 levels will raise the planet's temperature by another 3 F to 9 F by the end of this century, depending on when and if greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, scientists have calculated. That means that some, future years are likely to continue to set records, even if there will still be year-to-year variations." And according to climate writer, Eric Holthaus, we're facing a mounting disaster: All this warmth on land is being driven by record-setting heat across large sections of the world's oceans. The NOAA report notes that the warmest 10 months of ocean temperatures on record have occurred in the last 16 months. This is mostly due to a near-record strength El Nino; but the current state of the global oceans has little historical precedent. Since it takes several months for the oceanic warmth of an El Nino to fully reach the atmosphere, 2016 will likely be warmer --perhaps much warmer --than 2015. We've recently entered a new point in the Earth's climate history. According to reconstructions using tree rings, corals, and ice cores, global temperatures are currently approaching --if not already past --the maximum temperatures commonly observed over the past 11,000 years (i.e., the time period in which humans developed agriculture), and flirting with levels not seen in more than 100,000 years. But this is the scary part: the current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any point since humans first evolved millions of years ago. Since carbon dioxide emissions lead to warming, the fact that emissions are increasing means there's much more warming yet to come. What's more, carbon dioxide levels are increasing really quickly. The rate of change is faster than at any point in Earth's entire 4.5 billion year history, likely 10 times faster than during Earth's worst mass extinction --the "Great Dying" --in which more than 90 percent of ocean species perished. Our planet has simply never undergone the kind of stress we're currently putting on it. That stunning rate of change is one reason why surprising studies like the recent worse-than-the-worst-case-scenario study on sea level rise doesn't seem so far-fetched." I'm going to repeat that again for those of you on drugs: Do you think we should do something about this before it's too late for mankind? Or, should we continue to deny and ignore it? The choice is yours to make! Thanks, *****  04-16-1949 ~ 08-20-2015 Thanks for the laughs!  09-30-1934 ~ 08-21-2015 Thanks for the film!  08-18-1911 ~ 08-28-2015 Thanks for fighting the good fight! ***** We get by with a little help from our friends! So please help us if you can...? Donations ***** So how do you like Bush Lite so far? And more importantly, what are you planning on doing about it? Until the next time, Peace! (c) 2015 Ernest Stewart a.k.a. Uncle Ernie is an unabashed radical, author, stand-up comic, DJ, actor, political pundit and for 13 years was the managing editor and publisher of Issues & Alibis magazine. Visit me on Facebook. Follow me on Twitter. Email:uncle-ernie@issuesandalibis.org
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