A most-beautiful afternoon of warm sunshine and nearly-no wind — here on California’s north coast, a rare day when all you need is just a T-shirt, or at least for my old, skinny ass.
We stand right now at a way-balmy 74 degrees, and the same is expected tomorrow.
And so warm and nice, I’ve opened up my apartment, cross-ventilating the place with fresh air — hard to fathom this is winter.
Even warmer inland, eastward over to Redding/Red Bluff.
From today’s Northern California Weather Blog: The north valley will be in the mid 70s to (can’t believe I’m putting this in a Jan. forecast) lower 80s with the foothills and mid elevations in the 60s and lower 70s.

My underline to emphasize the crazy.

(Illustration found here).

Weather is no longer an idle part of most people’s lives. In parts of the world already there’s a shitload of humanity feeling the effect/affect of the nowadays. Warm weather at unusual times is becoming the usual — weird weather is the ‘new normal.’
In this current cycle, the culprit is a high pressure that’s stalled off the California coast, which blocks rain and snow from reaching us, knocking it up into the Northwest, or some such place, other than here. And we need both rain and snow here. Warm just heats the drought.
From The Weather Channel this afternoon:

The prospects for any significant rain or mountain snow in California over the next seven to 10 days look dismal, according to the latest computer model forecast guidance.
If this type of pattern were to persist through the final week of the month, many January precipitation records could fall by the wayside.

Down in the Wine Country just north of the Bay Area, a not-so-new-normal: A year ago, 30 inches of rain fell. So far this year, less than three inches have fallen.

And so it goes…