Typhoon Tip

I was mentioning/thinking the other day how this summers really been about having a suppressed -AO summer/jet really collocated around our latitude much of the way... It's been making specific model performance perhaps increasingly error prone because of the 'unmanned fire hose ' metaphor. That core tropospheric conveyor shifts in the run and it yo-yos the panache into warmer(cooler) and the tide and tempo of the posting goes right along with it.. haha. It's funny how Scott and Will were poised and couldn't wait to lambaste Kevin for the impertinent jest ...and then new cycle Euro rolls out and he looks like a genius ... next run, trolling clown... and around and around we go. But it's been doing it to me, all summer.. Just when I feel confident one way or the other... I get dealt reverses and I think the real issue is that we can't seem to really favor a trough or ridged east this year... It seems we're running the summer version of the unmanned loose hose thing -

Had a feeling the NAM would do this... It's been putting up T1 ( 980 mb level ) temperatures nearly static between 20 and 23 C at every interval, day or night... in a 570 + DAM air on a S/SW trajectory. Both NYC and BOS ... now, all at once, it goes torrid. MOS may lag, but out of now where it has Logan's 980 mb temperature of 29 C at 18z Monday with a DP of about 76 ... It may in fact be too rich to allow the temp to maximize the adiabat because the 900 mb level temp is 23 C ... which is concomitant with an EML... In other words, shave 3 or 4 off that DP and you got a big heat day. The Euro's been flagging that day as a plausible nasty heat day. Anyway, 33C 2-meter T with a mid 70s DP ...that may be right up there with other HI events this season ... It's just one day - relax...

That's most probably the motivation ... yes, agreed. There's also this talk about Trump wanting to secure his legacy ... similar to the Alaskan purchase from Russia back in the 1860s. Frankly, however ? I find it difficult to believe Trump has that much historical education/awareness-based wisdom from which to formulate that kind of projection of his own future... Simply put.. .he's an idiot in charge, and what awareness there is entirely self-centered and/or labored out of duty and is utterly insincere. And so I am personally not as inclined to believe he's after that sort of epitaph .. .But, perhaps I am wrong too - There are other less likely possibilities...though, that that are ... scarier.

It seems an 89-94-91 dodgy heat wave .... okay... but Euro yesterday actually did backed-off, where the day before the runs were blazing... The Thursday/Friday trough incursion in this run is actually a subtly less amplified version of yesterday's 12z run. That one had a deeper, early autumnal vibe to it... ( call it ), where this one is one of those 18 hours of low DP 78 F before it rolls out quickly... That total run-to-run correction shoulda been expected for anyone with a modicum of awareness. The error-trend on-going behavior of the ECMWF over our quadrature of the hemisphere, does that... Oh you can bet ... this will be a shimmering gallery of day eight artistry come winter, no doubt! Digression: Folks are interested in weather it gets "hot" vs merely seasonally "warm and muggy" ...? Which, either is above normal ( btw ) ...it's important to point that silliness out, because despite being "silly" ... folks seem surprised when we get to the end of these months and we're putting up +4.5's, without any heat waves - or heat of noteworthiness... First and quite obviously so...heat waves are specifically only to afternoon phenomenon...? 11am to 4 or 5 ... 90 + . That's "for three days" ...That ending turn of phrase really does the phenomenon a misnomer. What if it's bone dry NW heat variety ... 94/50 ... might even be -1 at night to offset... However, ... having every single f'ing night be +10 while afternoons are muted by a toxic pal of theta-e choking low clouds or just sucking up thermal energy into elevated DPs in general... that is a stealthy sort of way to attack climate averages. People can get used to and tolerate 84/70 ... and not realize that a +2 afternoon and +13 overnight signifies the end of the g-damn world... It's just outside their circumstantial awareness. That's really what this summer's been about... like a head-game. I have clocked just two heat waves in this summer here in Ayer... ( though to be fair, a few times where 91-88-92 may have occurred...) Mostly, like NWS sites, we've hold up lows from falling and I'm in a valley, too.

Interesting how diemetric the last 24 hours of Euro runs went from era defining heatwave… to a shot before the shot across the bow type of look

Yes of course ... the Danes actually own it, but my point was to imply the growing potential for conflict there due to their burgeoning sense of sovereignty. And also too having that in mind that regardless of geodetic recognition ... they aren't exactly keen on being bought ha I still ...I'm a little bit more than merely curious why that idea was even floated

Two comments ... then some fun paranoia... seeing as you asked me .... 1 .. Greenland passed a referendum in the mid 2000 that gives them even more autonomous separation from Denmark as a self-determining government and so forth ... so technically... it may not even be as simple as what Denmark wants/says - ...that said, Greenland wants their identity and have made that recently very clear; thus the only thing hotter than the GW ruining their ice cap is the bluster coming from Chump 2 .. Your right about the minerals... Though nothings been proven because it's beneath a mile of ice ... the land mass is thought to be rich in iron ores, gold ...even uranium. I wouldn't put it past Chump and his absurd rampart of enablers ( who are thank god beginning to erode ) to be so stupid in and because of their elitist arrogance ...to actually think because of who they are, anyone else must not realize the advantages they have. Typical failing of elitism ... where they can throw a billion at em' and walk away exploiting everything they've conned in order to make so much money that money no longer has any effective meaning at all ... I'm being sarcastically licensed there ..but you get my drift. 3 .. As the world succumbs to certain ... inexorable conclusions ... the interest of self preservation is an instinct all Human beings would tend to possess... For some, they need to see the train before removing themselves from the tracks... For others, they have wherewithal to foresee the dangers with longer, coherent foresight. And, of these latter ilk... certain very well funded "cadres" of individuals might just be jostling for the last plausible bastions of safety that may avail ...if/when there is some sort of macro-scaled Humanitarian crisis. I can't recall the professors name ... damn, I'll have to find it... But this individual is ...I wanna say a globally renowned Economist, but also cross over expertise in the natural sciences ...because his focus is more on the fundamentals of economic structure, which of course is footed in Natural resources... etc ...etc. Anyway, I read something from him where he was concerned. He was concerned because about ten years ago ... he's began receiving phone calls at odd times of the late evening/night. 3am from computer enhanced voice(s) that won't identify themselves ... but espouse, 'please don't be alarmed by affectation of the voice you are hearing.' You know... the cozy kind of shit you'd see in Clancy plot... This person(s) were asking about places that might fair the best in the event of a global holocaust... running down what those place would be, relative to the type of global holocaust... be it nuclear war, pan-systemic ecological apocalypse, pandemic horrors ... Think Mad Max dystopia. Greenland is/was one of those places... So ... not hard to connect the dots here ... Prooooobably coincidence ... but, hey... if anyone would have said 30 years ago, that we'd be enduring as a culture, massacre shootings at societal pulse rates ... truth is usually stranger than expectation.

Yeeeeah... I'm not so sure. I realize you say, "...wouldn't shock me" in jest and I get what you mean... but, the GFS has been yo-yooing ridge vs trough domination all summer long... Really been unusable along the 45th parallel in particular ... Purely for my own observations, it seems it has been more accurate within the bowls of the subtropics, or safely above the westerly mean jet ( however nebular/summer defined). Anything along that ~ midriff latitude around the girdle of the hemisphere ...it's seems it has been more variant at time range between D5 and 10... I mean ( haha ) what are we caring.... "day 5 +"? ... just sayn' I kind of give the model a pass on that seasonal behavior though? Not that you asked... a little soap-boxing: I really think the hemisphere is reeling ... well...the model is, between -AO and a summer that is, even if only in decimal equavalence, getting a bit of a positive feed-back/synergy from GW... It's almost impossible to really separate these latter ....by definition of synergy, the gestalt seems to be a greater quantity than the sum of the individual factors that create it - emergent properties of complex systems ... they'll getcha every time. Anyway, with the -AO pervasive and predominate over the higher latitude N. Hemisphere ...that's putting an unusual sort of inimicable strain on the performs of the "Global Forecast System" - I just suspect this is beyond the state of the art of the technology frankly... Anyway, we'll see how it fairs later in the fall... I do wonder though if it still has a progressive bias - in which case, it would still be too shallow with troughs in the winter... and too shallow with ridges in the summer if you can see how that be the case -

When most who share in a passion for weather and climate related Sciences read or hear of 'negative arctic oscillation' ...chances are, their immediate imagination sparks images and facets of stormier, colder times ... After all, this is conditioned to do so by memory alone; -AO very much so maintains a positive correlation coefficients with mid latitude temperature anomaly distribution/tendencies... , and therefrom ....concomitant storminess tends to follow. blah blah the rest is history.... However, -AO doesn't mean the same thing for high latitudes as it does for mid latitudes ( consequentially...). Think 'what goes up ...must come down,' in a sense. Or in this case, when we go down...they ( meaning boreal regions above ~ the 60th parallel ) go up... Thru the 'what goes up(down) ... must come up(down)' yin and yang model, the atmosphere ultimately achieves mass balance - we call this process ... conservation of mass. And since mass is not lost or destroyed in any metric volume in the atmosphere.... conservation of mass is always taking place. Thus, when the heights rise over Greenland...the Alaskan sector...or ridging arms across the Polar regions in general... heights are falling somewhere outside these regions to compensate. Heights are not a measure of mass...no. However, they do give a perfect outline ...kind of like a blue print, of where/how the rail system that delivers warmth north and cool south, is orientated. That system is the conservation mechanics at work... which is all rooted back ultimately to differential heating between the poles, vs the equator, then perturbed by differential air/land/sea interface perturbation, all occurring over a rotating curved service (Earth)... and on and so on.. The reason for the primer is to point out that while we "failed" to cash in on a below normal summer from a predominately -AO summer ... ( for reasons we'll avoid for the time being eh hm) the northern latitudes of the hemisphere have NOT failed to cash in on the warmth that is typical in those regions associated with blocking. From Alaska to Greenland ... the summer has garland fantastic warm anomalies at these ~ latitudes. Whether that is physically provable as connected to the 'elephant in the room' or not... the summer temperature anomaly behavior its self ( not the magnitude ) was definitely consistent with the predominating negative Arctiv Oscillation. But here's the rub... People would argue, ... you stick your hand out the window in Utqiagvik -> Barrow -> Utqiagvik, Alaska on January 15th under an over-arcing, +3 standard deviation middle to upper tropospheric geopoential height anomaly, it feels like bone chilling cold, still air, though. And, they'd be right... But, atmospheric physics doesn't really care how you're hand feels in the cold, still air. You have to disconnect your perception of cold and hot, and how those typically are associated to atmospheric events, as being incidentally related in nature, to begin to understand this. The higher heights ... tend to be associated with downward vertical motion... This causes atmospheric surface pressure to rise... so, you get high pressure, with calm winds. Add in a very long/and/or 24-hours of darkness associated to very high latitudes during the perennial solar nadir times of the year ... radiational cooling happening ( over snow pack often too ) at all times means that the lower levels of the atmosphere do indeed get very very cold... This is the air that then gets move away and transported into a "cold loading" into the Canadian shield when the indexes signal mass disruption... that's the crude and quick model. However, in a -AO summer... there are no eternally dark, heat hemorrhage skies losing what gossamer warmth there is. In fact, rather the opposite ... with albeit modestly warming, angular sun shining almost perpetually under these ridge umbrellas ... the lower level temperatures are forced to rise. Over the Millennia ... by virtue of the fact that the poles are so cold to begin with... and the sun angle, even in high summer, tends to remain relatively low in the sky ... that means that the back ground conditioning offsets the lengthening summer day's heating potential...so these kind of biases get absorbed ...and this sort of shit doesn't happen, CNN: "After months of record temperatures, scientists say Greenland's ice sheet experienced its biggest melt of the summer on Thursday, losing 11 billion tons of surface ice to the ocean -- equivalent to 4.4 million Olympic swimming pools. Greenland's ice sheet usually melts during the summer, but the melt season typically begins around the end of May; this year it began at the start. It has been melting "persistently" over the past four months, which have recorded all time temperature highs, according to Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with Danish Meteorological Institute." Now ...there is that pesky little variable of uncertainty known as "CNN" ... a morally unscrupulous news source that would read this sentence with a stone, sociopath's expression ... unreached or undeterred by the notion that they are rarely taken seriously anymore due to their consummate aggrandizing of headline content for shock -jock ratings/revving their big media profit engine... ... But should this corroborate with other sources, ...that calculates out to ~ 9.9 billion metric tonnes of water ... and since 1 metric tonne of water makes a cubic meter... we can divide by a factor of 1,000 to get the KM cubic volume ... and, crudely, not considering temperature and salinity and so forth... that's some 9.9 cubic KM of water we've just asked the ocean's to absorb in a single day. ... spread out over a sphere the size of the the Earth's 70% oceanic area is ... The Earth is a big place... The Oceans attune some 1.3+ B cubic KM of volumetric space in water... and we also have to consider that it's not a flat - curve-relative surface... Temperature and gravity variances make it sloped by small measures from point to point at greater distance...wave/storm/atmospheric pressure variance also passsing over ...it's a tumult really... so, trying to assess how 9.9 cubic KM of wate would effect the former number is ...probably akin to negligible... This is the problem with climate deniers... That word, right there ... ' negligible' .... as in, "See, it's okay" It seems like the latest morphology of the denier mantra is that the science can't be trusted ...more so than denying the science its self... Aside from the obvious, that if you have to morph your argument...chances are, it's flawed.... The fact its negligible is a scalar truism ...that does not reflect the future state when the system is in a state of flux... But, you can't penetrate their mindsets with logic - they'll hand wave contrarian faux logic perspective as they careen off the cliff.

Yeah that IMS chart post just updated as of the 11th and looks nothing like that - interesting

There is another factor ... beyond using officiate processes against people, in order to smear their reputations and so forth. What this above describes "sounds" like using the accreditation circuitry against others? There's a different way information is being missused...and it's a bit more insidious and multiplexing ... These types are more aptly described as wrecking balls ... and can be quite reverse -psycho in the way they go about doing it - basically.. they're "moles" They plant themselves fraudulently into the ranks and spheres of climate protection, so that their voice will be respected, and at least heard if not revered ...Such that when they publish falsities ... their goal isn't necessarily even to smear the person per se - no .. that person is a pawn. They could give two shits about the person they are using... They do it...because the vitriol it creates, they know... is another reason to invalidate the issue, and that's their real goal. Not to digress too wildly ... but, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone nowadays ...that the Internet is the greatest con-game ever orchestrated by the powers of human contrivance...ever! The Russians did this kind of crap, against a whole nation - guess what? Contrary to patently moronic line-toeing nimrods ...it worked! That little sociodynamic strategy of theirs notably morphed the political zeitgeist enough to ... well, the rest is history. And, we can either be standing in line for a Darwin aware, or maybe consider.. gee, it's not a crazy or far fetched realization that the entire WWW is subjected to other special interest sources of malfeasance, and the ballast of the network traffic source comes from them. Frankly .. the Internet and wiring of Humanity exploded into being so fast, furious and pervasively, it was done so sans any "appropriating" regulatory framework ... We see it every day! I go to CNN, I read their headlines...then, I go to some other more reputable ( or ...perhaps differently reputable, put it that way...) news source such as NPR and read theirs ... clearly one is attempting to elicit a response, while the other is attempting to convey information. When it comes to news ... it should be up down, left right, black white... nothing else. Instead, the Internet reaches large masses of population that may have questionable critical thinking skills... with that same age old tactic of strategic doubt throwing lobbyist that corporations have always planted before congress ... This is the complexion, and problem of human kind, that is being/has been exposed with shimmering clarity by the immense wiring really .. I mean, these can be mutually exclusive objectives - what you say is shameful/sad and probably debilitating ... all that, to the greater need to have this particular issue, climate change, taken seriously. But yeah... it's all sowing distrust. I think it is important in the era of the WWW (and how the anonymity it provides is too irresistible for (those with lowering morality in information + a cause)/2 ... which is a shockingly large number of people in all walks of society actually ... ) that those objectives be delineated... Because that's the first step in sniffing the aroma of dung.

Heh ...these kind of statistical comparison for drama and affectation, they don't fall on me with much weight... Means nothing... The antecedent conditions in 1999 may or may not bear resemblance to this year's.. And making that determination is too complex to look at mere SAL or ENSO ... (not that you are...just in general) in quadrature. There's a lot to that integral. The AMOC is totally different... The AO dominant summer plays an indirect roll, too .. how these interact with other forcing domains and emerge different mitgators or vice versa... oy, litany of contributors. To this point in time, it is probably closer to even probability, either way, that both seasons are in a dearth ... in a sense, as in two different people entirely happening to roll the same dice combination. If it can be physically demonstrated that the governing parametric variables in bother years are say... within the 90th plus comparison-percentile, in terms of dominant influence? ( hint, not likely...) than perhaps the comparison has more momentum.

That doesn't look any different than any year I've seen it spanning the last 10 frankly... Very similar... Look at it this way.. the gunk emerging off the New England coast is as potent ... just not as areal in coverage - but you live here... It's not been a very 'dusty' summer... I dunno... I suspect that the actual concentration as a scalar value is not very anomalously higher than normal... probably for the last month or so... Just a hypothesis -

12z Euro comes back to Earth a bit on the heat ... what'dya know... Still a warm vibe out there tho. Probably more like a lot of lofty nocturnals again ... pressing dailies to exotic levels that lie. Persistent 88 to 93ers over top. The GEFs mean is warmer than it's consummate ridge-grinder happy operational, while the EPS mean was less than then 'skip the first five chapters of GW ... and go right to death in the streets heat' dystopian novel of the Euro.. But you know ... at my age... I've come to find February and Augusts share a temporal relative state in common - namely... regardless of either... if you're sick of its season... you blink twice and take a deep breath and its over. Invariably these days ... well, years actually, I find my internal monologue going, "..that was just so hot(cold) five weeks ago...?! wow" Regardless of the circadian dimming of middle-aged time awareness ... logistically, summer is over faster than it took to get this far... Just like that statement drives Steve to rage if one dares make the impertinent ( and reality based) jest the same way in February. This is like that moment around 2:12 am at a 20something party ... and two couples left, one of which had the really hot chick, even though there's still energy in the room -

Meh...conjectural... everyone's got an opinion - NASA/NOAA seemed more remarkable back in June ... I haven't seen anything from official channels lately ... Typical, people hear something early on and write bible passages over it like it's gospel-causal. We're still suffering -NAO headlines from the 1990s...

Looks like everyone's referring to different data ... The curve I'm looking at ... 2019 has more ice loss than 2012 to date.... not saying the season ends up that way - or even if that date relative measure is correct ... but

heh...Looking at the GEFs mean .. the front side of the mid range, you can see it trying for the sloshing mass field with rising height here/OV/MA regions ... but it's not quite as prophetic with it as the Euro op...or the EPS mean... but again, I think that's endemic to GEF/GFS heredity/bias envelope... I think that's enough to be confident that next week will go some distance to adjust August month means to put it nicely... Probably absurd overnight lows is concomitant more so these days (and decades going forward more so than we may as yet to be "forcibly" realized...) will return... 94/75's or something

Appears that 00z Euro run is a bit of a ridgy outlier relative to it's own ensemble/EPS mean... That was the hottest run of the summer - I don't think the July deal ( first one ...) had that longevity illustrated... D4 in this run would flirt or touch 90... and then it's 93-97 supportive through the end of the run and probably extrapoles another day ...but ... That range is also not very dependable .- just commenting on what's painted. The problem with other guidance comparisons ( particularly with ridge/'heat domes' ) is that both the GGEM and GFS ... I swear, they must be pre-parameterized NOT to allow them... They figuratively seem to want to use cumulus clouds to completely decay ridges... and the GFS. ah man this model simply will not allow polarward migration of the westerlies, period. ... Not sure why that is... or if it will be that way in the winter ( I'm guessin' it reverses ... because the model just has a progressive bias so winter troughs will be pancaked while summer ridges smear ... spit ballin' but it hates curved surfaces .. It also still looks f-up in the mixing rations in the lower troposphere too ) In any case... still looks like some sort of heat wave out there...

Free fall... The vector of the current NSIDC graph has now fallen below all curves since 1998 like I ship headed for the open sea -

Yeah... and while not a declaration of particular support ... I mentioned my self I hadn't noticed a lot in the way of SAL this year... I still suggest the real culprit to suppression is the dearth of stronger TW ...The entire length of the sub-Saharan monsoonal trough has been sparsely populated with stronger wave signatures the whole way - so far... That'... and, we haven't had very good upper tropospheric UVM profiles - ...it's actually consistent with the lowering intrusion of the westerly QBO phase... These factors can be compensated - haven't yet

There's also a question of instrumentation and/or measurement standards and techniques there in ... I'm sure they were diligently intended back whence - that's not the point... But, we're talking about decimal increases in many cases... and decimals can certainly be accounted for in snow fall - particularly, in snow fall at varying temperatures... For that matter, it should be melted equivalency and then denote precipitation in keeping with best empirical method. Seeing as the precipitation increases have been noted globally ...that does foist a bit of a yellow flag not to be dismissive of the notion - not that anyone is...just be cautious... I've heard that snow increase bandied about but I haven't actually read any peer reviewed/accredited metrical sciences on that subject matter... It certainly more than seems plausibly true just existentially ... but my own experience doesn't stem back to the middle part of last Century either. We toiled and clawed for 6" snow falls throughout my childhood in the 1980s ...which can certainly be noise. We had bone chilling cold of the 1970s ... but really not as much snow as one might think - save for the obvious banner years there... Then the 1990s came along and as the decade aged ... Pez dispensing began... And despite some truly rancid bad snow production seasons, since 2000 ... it's really been staggering how we've actually grown sort of Stockholm Syndrome accustomed to twice that much... or bust. We get 12" snow out of instability/WAA burst ahead of CCB's that failed to develop/too late because lows are moving to dam fast now more than anything else... Although... 2015 was just an outlier for more reasons than one... we just end up so anomalously deep on the polarward side of the jet storms behaved like a planetary storm event. Anyway I agree that it's tough question... might come down to, 'sounds like duck; looks like duck; chances are ... it's a duck' The all over the world thing strikes me -

I bet they finish above normal though - It's tough to get back to back record "months" - if that was seriously floated... I mean that amount a time would probably be 50 years over the GW threshold from now -haha I'd see getting a July what it was... then, recovering a -1 to -2 august 12 to above normal - should that occur - is another in a myriad of ..well

Funny you mentioned him ... I'm familiar with him by name, and because of one key relevancy ( to me .. ). Shortly after having finished writing a science-fiction novel... and it was already contracted and is presently still in pre-press ... I come to find that the fictional science that is so much a part of the thematic framework of the story... might actually be real - and it was his research into ...well, don't wanna give it away... The creepy aspect is... I penned that exact same duplicate concept for the story some ten years prior to Penrose et al's paper, the title of which almost to the exact letter is a turn of phrase in the novel... In a way ...it should offer the novel some 'special' relevance perhaps? We'll see... but upon reading his name there I was like...hey - ...or not.. we'll see. You know... fire was controlled all over the world at almost precisely the same evolutionary time in history - which means, it was not transmitted ( the knowledge ) by migratory information. It was literally coincidentally discovered - a fascinating aspect of archeology .. I think humanity is just like that... we're all privately postulating aspects that one or two people get to take all the credit for - ha

Yeah I'm sure you are in part also noticing that though struggled, what development there has been has been home grown - so to speak. I'm not so sure about the SAL... Is there a source that really calculates that SAL parameter ...as an integral/mitigation ...then compares it to years past? or are we just assuming so ...? It's not a knock.. I mean, in the absence of such a source, we work with what we have. I don't know - I do know that the SAL I've seen has not "looked" very severely pervasive or all that inhibitory. I have seen seasons with worse, ...and frequency out there still abounds ...albeit.. coughing and stuggling as they trundle westward down the CV rail service... Going nuts nearing PR.. Anyway, I think therein is also a problem... I recall when in Met school years ago... TW frequency and vitality were both factorable in TC assessments and theh... there also seems to be a dearth in both frequency and wave robustness ... TW are born do to perturbations over the Alps ( ...according to those academic years...) believe it or not... They then dive S and end up absorbed/rotate around the ambient sub-tropical Saharan ridge, and then move back west underneath within the sub-Saharan monsoonal trough... This leads me to ponder whether the pattern over Europe/Eurasia ( believe it or not...) is indirectly related to why there is that apparent dearth. interesting

Do you have any literature ... preferably links to accredited source work of veracious/reputable form ( to put it nicely...), those that might elucidate/expand more about the bold ( abv) ? I've heard of this longer scaled "hidden" curve elsewhere ... but that, including the [apparent] 11, 22 and 300 year resonant solar min and max temporal/causal hypothesis for climate modulation ...all of it, it's harder to just "google" than one would think it should be. ... man. You know how that goes... heh... , go anywhere close to a search-engine that is accessible to the hoi polloi...and you get this tomb of links to doom's day prophets in a trailer park with a satellite dish and every penny ever possessed put into to a lap-top networked with a fully operational Web-server/os... Oh, they've poached various pieces of out-of-context this and that to cobble together support for the end of the world... replete with illustrations of solar storms so powerful ... flesh incinerates off skeletons right before they crumble to piles of bone where the marrow inside isn't even aware the governing body is dead... Ugh... there shit out there about neutron stars careening through the solar-system ... really? And of course, asteroids boring tunnels clear through the lithosphere and several hundred miles of upper mantle... I mean, yeah - the probability isn't 0... I guess...