Now we return to our regularly scheduled bad news which is already in progress

Let's get it over with and then douse ourselves with holiday spirit.

There's retrospective bad news in the sense that scientists are revising various gloomy estimates upward.  On the heels of climate scientists suggesting they've underestimated global heating since 1997 by, oh, 50%,  the EPA says they've underestimated the amount of methane emitted in the U.S., also by 50%.  Methane is perhaps the most potent of the greenhouses gases, and the EPA is preparing to regulate these gases for the first time.

The National Research Council released two studies that remind us that while the predictions of effects used by planners is based on gradual change, abrupt climate change is possible.  That's how things typically happened in the past--big sudden changes, which means over decades or years.  The reports are full of warnings that we're not addressing any phase of the climate crisis fast enough or as comprehensively as needed.  But they also rate most of the scenarios for abrupt change as not likely in this century.

Wonder why the latest UN climate report hasn't made more of a difference?  Only parts of it have been released, but the executive summary is supposed to galvanize attention.  The Real Climate site says it hasn't, possibly because it's poorly written for its purpose.

That's been an ongoing problem, from counterproductive jargon to a reluctance or inability to state the facts in a usefully actionable context--emotionally, politically, humanly.  But that's hardly the only reason.  Another may well be embedded in another very clearly stated conclusion that nevertheless didn't make any headlines, let alone go twitteringly viral: according to the Climate Accountability Institute, there are but 90 companies responsible for two-thirds of the greenhouse gas pollution in the world.

Since they include the richest corporations in the world with a huge proportion of the world's wealth, it doesn't take a communications genius to see that there's unlikely to be a lot of money advertising this fact, and a whole lot of money available to obscure it.

We can vary the old story, attributed to various Native American tribes and possibly other Indigenous cultures, and say that in the understandable struggle between an internal animal that wants to focus on addressing the climate crisis to save the future, and another internal animal who wants to deny its place in consciousness or even in reality, the one that wins is the one you feed.