Until an outbreak of tornadoes in the past week, this year had been a relatively quiet one for twisters in the Midwest and Plains states.

The reason, weather experts said, had much to do with a weather phenomenon that also caused much of the East Coast to shiver through colder-than-normal temperatures this spring: the high-altitude winds known as the jet stream brought Arctic air farther south, and for longer, than in a typical year. In the central United States, that prevented warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico -- a key ingredient in the formation of tornadoes -- from moving north.

"The jet stream was stuck in place," said Jeffrey Masters, director of meteorology for the Web site Weather Underground. "It kept funneling cold air down."

The jet stream finally started shifting north this month. "The pattern broke, and then wham," Dr. Masters said.

Wham! is right...wow.

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years. Scientific instruments showed that the gas had reached an average daily level above 400 parts per million -- just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

It's the first time in 3 million years we've had readings above 400ppm. But there's nothing to worry about, right?

"It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem," said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. "It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds," he said.

Dr. Keeling's father, Charles David Keeling, began carbon dioxide measurements on Mauna Loa and at other locations in the late 1950s. The elder Dr. Keeling found a level in the air then of about 315 parts per million -- meaning that if a person had filled a million quart jars with air, about 315 quart jars of carbon dioxide would have been mixed in.

We can probably kiss our chances goodbye of turning this Titanic ship that we're on in time to save the near-certain devastation coming our way. Has our time passed?

"If you're looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don't believe our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in CO2 emissions have to occur right away," said Mark Pagani, a Yale geochemist who studies climates of the past. "I feel like the time to do something was yesterday."

Considering that when (only back in August 2006) we posted about this issue, we were at 380ppm, in 15 years we'll surpass the 450ppm level.

We really have no idea what we've done, have we?

They race towards a rubbish truck as it empties its load at a vast landfill on the edge of the city, hauling away bin liners that overflow with household waste. Their hands are black with dirt and their faces are hidden by headscarves that protect them from the high sun.

An estimated 500 gancheros (recyclers) work at Cateura on the outskirts of Asunción, where 1.5 tonnes of rubbish are deposited daily, separating plastic and aluminium that they sell on for as little as 15p a bag.

Among the mounds of refuse, however, are used oven trays and paint pots. Cast aside by the 2 million residents of the capital of Paraguay, they are nonetheless highly valued by Nicolas Gomez, who picks them out to make violins, guitars and cellos.

Read on!

Then watch this video to see how they sound:

Today is Earth Day! Over one billion people in 192 countries are participating from London to Sao Paolo, Seoul to Babylon City, New Delhi to New York, Rome to Cairo; people everywhere are taking action in their communities and helping depict The Face of Climate Change.

In Copenhagen, Denmark -- as well as in six other cities on five continents -- the Danish Cultural Institute is organizing its annual CO 2 Green Drive Project in honor of Earth Day. Runners, walkers, bikers, and skaters are using their cities as canvasses to spell "CO 2" with GPS devices.

In Argentina, volunteers from the Surfrider Foundation are cleaning up the local beaches and planting evergreens and Tamarisk shrubs to help prevent wind and water erosion.

In Milan, Italy, thousands of people are gathering for the Earth Day Italia Festival to learn about environmental issues and spur action on local green initiatives.

Meanwhile in Seoul, South Korea, Ecomom Korea is organizing an "Eco-style" Earth Day Flash Mob, a variation of the popular song "Gangnam Style," as well as hosting an Earth Day Walkathon and an Earth Day exhibition, which will showcase The Face of Climate Change photo display.

In Santa Barbara, California, thousands of people attended the local Earth Day Festival, which included live music, speakers, a Green Car Show, and special awards given to Van Jones and Bill Nye.

All in all, it's going to be an amazing day all around the globe!

This guys is a joke! He's probably really smart (as an astrophysicist), but he has absolutely NO legitimacy as a Climate Scientist. He's part of that 2% of scientists who don't believe (or are paid not to believe) that human's are causing Climate Change.

Puh-leeeeeze!

What does this all mean?

New research into Earth's ancient climate is providing a clearer, more detailed view of how the planet's average surface temperature fluctuated over the period known as the Holocene epoch, which continues today. It's the time in which humans truly began making their mark on the planet, abandoning their hunting and gathering traditions and adopting a settled, agricultural lifestyle.

In a study published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, researchers used eight indirect temperature indicators -- such as pollen and shells from marine organisms -- to chart long-term global warming and cooling trends. The research team concluded that temperatures in the last decade had not exceeded the Holocene's steamiest periods from thousands of years ago. However, if current warming trends hold, those records will be broken by the end of the century.

"By the year 2100, we will be beyond anything human society has ever experienced," said study leader Shaun Marcott, a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University's College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences.

It's just so obvious what the human race is doing to the planet, and yet we dither as the mother Earth cooks.

It is the most humble of vessels for New York City foodstuffs, ubiquitous at Chinese takeout joints and halal street carts. In pre-Starbucks days, coffee came packaged in its puffy embrace.

But the plastic-foam container may soon be going the way of trans fats, 32-ounce Pepsis, and cigarettes in Central Park.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose regulatory lance has slain fatty foods, supersize sodas, and smoking in parks, is now targeting plastic foam, the much-derided polymer that environmentalists have long tried to restrict.

Fingers crossed that it can pass:

To become law, the ban would require approval by the City Council. The Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, suggested in an interview that she was open to a ban on plastic foam as part of a larger effort to increase recycling.

"It lives forever," Ms. Quinn said. "It's worse than cockroaches."

Yes - it IS worse than cockroaches. AND it's expensive:

Officials at City Hall said a plastic-foam ban could save millions of dollars a year. Plastic foam, which is not biodegradable, can add up to $20 per ton in recycling costs when the city processes recyclable materials. The city handles about 1.2 million tons of food waste each year; the mayor's office estimated that the city's annual waste stream included about 20,000 tons of plastic foam.

It's about time. The rest of America should join us.

For all the adorable images of cats that play the piano, flush the toilet, mew melodiously and find their way back home over hundreds of miles, scientists have identified a shocking new truth: cats are far deadlier than anyone realized.

We're talking billions of kills a year:

In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States -- both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it -- kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.

Yowza!

Or should we say, "Meowza!"

The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the Corn Belt and a huge storm that caused broad devastation in the Middle Atlantic States, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States.

How hot was it?

The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year's 55.3 degree average demolished the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.

If that does not sound sufficiently impressive, consider that 34,008 daily high records were set at weather stations across the country, compared with only 6,664 record lows, according to a count maintained by the Weather Channel meteorologist Guy Walton, using federal temperature records.

That ratio, which was roughly in balance as recently as the 1970s, has been out of whack for decades as the country has warmed, but never by as much as it was last year.

And boy, was it impressive!

"The heat was remarkable," said Jake Crouch, a scientist with the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., which released the official climate compilation on Tuesday. "It was prolonged. That we beat the record by one degree is quite a big deal."

Scientists said that natural variability almost certainly played a role in last year's extreme heat and drought. But many of them expressed doubt that such a striking new record would have been set without the backdrop of global warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. And they warned that 2012 was probably a foretaste of things to come, as continuing warming makes heat extremes more likely.

The 10 warmest years on record all fell within the past 15 years, a measure of how much the planet has warmed. Nobody who is under 28 has lived through a month of global temperatures that fell below the 20th-century average, because the last such month was February 1985.

Our world is changing before our very eyes...

Like this photo from Jerusalem recently:

And the accompanying story:

China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing -- minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting -- that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.

Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.

Look out below!

From the NY Times:

In one of the most poignant moments of the Doha climate talks, the Philippine climate change commissioner, Naderev M. Sano, appealed to his fellow negotiators at a session deciding the contours of the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.

"Please let Doha be remembered as the place where we found the political will to turn things around," he said as he choked back tears.

Just days before, Typhoon Bopha had hit the Philippines, killing hundreds of people. The typhoon, having been both unusually forceful and out of season, was deemed -- like Hurricane Sandy -- to be an extreme weather event, exacerbated by climate change.

Even with the Doha talks extending the Kyoto Protocol to 2020, many think it's too late. We are destroying our planet and it's, indeed, very sad.

More on these talks can be found here, at the RealClimate blog.

And for a fantastic "Start Here" page, where you can get up to speed on the biggest issue facing humanity - Climate Change - well...start here.

We'll start in a cornfield -- we'll call it an Iowa cornfield in late summer -- on a beautiful day. The corn is high. The air is shimmering. There's just one thing missing -- and it's a big thing...

...a very big thing, but I won't tell you what, not yet.

He then takes us on a trip around the world:

I'm going to leap halfway around the world to a public park near Cape Town, South Africa, where you will notice a cube, a metal cube, lying there in the grass.

That cube was put there by David Liittschwager, a portrait photographer, who spent a few years traveling the world, dropping one-cubic-foot metal frames into gardens, streams, parks, forests, oceans, and then photographing whatever, or whoever came through. Beetles, crickets, fish, spiders, worms, birds -- anything big enough to be seen by the naked eye he tried to capture and photograph. Here's what he found after 24 hours in his Cape Town cube:

There were 30 different plants in that one square foot of grass, and roughly 70 different insects. And the coolest part, said a researcher to the Guardian in Britain, "If we picked the cube up and walked 10 feet, we could get as much as 50 percent difference in plant species we encountered. If we moved it uphill, we might find none of the species." Populations changed drastically only a few feet away -- and that's not counting the fungi, microbes, and the itsy-bitsies that Liittschwager and his team couldn't see.

But you must finish reading Krulwich's piece to see how it ends between the rows and rows of corn in Middle America.

It ain't pretty.

Makes you wonder what Sandy would have done to Manhattan 200 years ago:

It is interesting to compare the evacuation map to a 1776 map of the island before much of the coastline was augmented by landfill. The eastern line of Zone A along the Hudson River runs along Greenwich Street, which was at the waterfront in 1776. The old slips on the East River extend inland to Queen Street, now Pearl Street, which is near where Zone A runs along the East River.

Scientists in the Arctic are warning that this summer's record-breaking melt is part of an accelerating trend with profound implications.

Norwegian researchers report that the sea ice is becoming significantly thinner and more vulnerable.

Last month, the annual thaw of the region's floating ice reached the lowest level since satellite monitoring began, more than 30 years ago.

All of the Climate Change models show a range of expectations over the next century. What happens if they are wrong and are underestimating the change?

The Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) is at the forefront of Arctic research and its international director, Kim Holmen, told the BBC that the speed of the melting was faster than expected.

"It is a greater change than we could even imagine 20 years ago, even 10 years ago," Dr Holmen said.

"And it has taken us by surprise and we must adjust our understanding of the system and we must adjust our science and we must adjust our feelings for the nature around us."

The scientists involved are indeed surprised by these findings:

During a visit to the port, one of the scientists involved, Dr Edmond Hansen, told me he was "amazed" at the size and speed of this year's melt.

"As a scientist, I know that this is unprecedented in at least as much as 1,500 years. It is truly amazing - it is a huge dramatic change in the system," Dr Hansen said.

"This is not some short-lived phenomenon - this is an ongoing trend. You lose more and more ice and it is accelerating - you can just look at the graphs, the observations, and you can see what's happening."

And the ramifications?

The most cautious forecasts say that the Arctic might become ice-free in the summer by the 2080s or 2090s. But recently many estimates for that scenario have been brought forward.

Early research investigating the implications suggests that a massive reduction in sea ice is likely to have an impact on the path of the jet stream, the high-altitude wind that guides weather systems, including storms.

Stay tuned.

Neil Armstrong, who made the "giant leap for mankind" as the first human to set foot on the moon, died on Saturday. He was 82.

How amazing is it that we're alive to bear witness to the first man in the history of evolution to step foot on a body other than Earth?

Wow...

The NY Times Obit is a must read by all humans on this planet.