Windy, darkly-overcast, and storm-awaiting this afternoon here on California’s north coast — supposedly this up-coming wet-weather front could maybe douse us with a couple of inches of rain.
And the wind is more-than brisk, gusting supposedly up to 25 mph, and really warm — winds coming out of the south, from over the Pacific, and here right on the coast, reportedly now about 77 degrees.
Freakin’ warm for these parts!

“This is the real deal. It’ll be rain. Not just the light stuff and drizzle that we’ve seen some days,” said National Weather Service forecaster Steve Anderson, noting that this could mark the start of California’s rainy season. “We typically see our first rain event at the end of October. This is a few weeks early but it’s not unheard of.”

(Illustration found here).

In the land of drought, a ‘real deal‘ rainstorm is really needed, and hopefully the dry interiors will get a good dousing off this one. And speaking of drought in California, a new study seems to indicate it was nature, and not man, that influenced our current water predicament.
Via Scientific American:

What’s been heating up the waters?
It’s tempting to blame global warming.
Sea-surface and nearby coastal air temperatures in the Pacific Northwest have warmed by 1°F or 2°F since 1900.
This September, the waters have been as much as 5°F above average.
But a study published Monday by the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, which is a project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Washington, points the climatological finger for most of the change at a different culprit.
The new analysis suggests that a little more than a century of warming in the Pacific Northwest, and in a maritime region stretching out to Hawaii and Alaska, has been the happenstance result of natural variation; a consequence of the waxing and waning of powerful oceanic and atmospheric cycles.
The researchers behind the paper, published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say anthropogenic greenhouse gas pollution could start having an effect on regional temperatures.
It might already be doing so.
But, between 1900 and 2012, they concluded that humanity’s temperature-changing influence paled in comparison with that of the intense natural fluctuations of the wild winds and waters of the world’s largest ocean.

Yet ugly man-influenced climate change bangs on the door:

The paper was described by Clifford Mass, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, as “extremely important.”
“The warming along the West Coast has been extremely modest,” Mass said.
“What warming there has been, has been almost entirely due to changes in the circulation, and not due to anthropogenic forcing.”
But, “this is not to say global warming is nonsense,” he added.
As greenhouse gas levels continue to rise, Mass expects humanity’s greenhouse gas pollution to play a growing role in fiddling with the region’s thermostats.
“In certain places, natural variability is extremely large compared to the anthropogenic signal,” he told Climate Central.
“That’s not going to necessarily be true in 50 or 100 years. The anthropogenic signal is going to amplify in time.”

And speaking of climate, today was the highly-touted UN Climate Summit in New York — 100 world leaders and other suits gathered to blubber climate change goals, principles, and other forms of hogwash. Most the reports I’ve read, prior to the meeting and today, seem to indicate this is just another in a failed series.
Climate change and the speed in which our planet is being altered is nearly incomprehensible right now.
As President Obama said in his speech at the UN this afternoon:

“The climate is changing faster than our efforts to address it,” Obama said, citing impacts such as “more frequent extreme weather events” like floods and hurricanes and record-breaking temperatures.
He cited his administration’s push to curb carbon emissions from power plants, develop non-polluting renewable power and increase the fuel efficiency of its vehicles.
“We will do our part, and we will help developing nations do theirs,” he said, announcing technological assistance to countries most at risk.
He said the U.S. and China, as the two largest emitters, have a “special responsibility” to lead.

Yeah, and this: China, the world’s biggest emitter of the planet-warming gas carbon dioxide, pledged on Tuesday to slow the rise of its emissions and reach a peak “as soon as possible.”
Say what?
And this, too: Both China and America, the world’s two biggest emitters, pledged their support for a climate deal, without offering specifics.
And in a nutshell, an analysis at Politico appeared to key the real-deal bottom line:

Perhaps the most interesting thing about President Barack Obama’s climate change speech at the United Nations is what he didn’t say.
Obama didn’t promise $1 billion to help poor countries adapt to the dire effects of climate change, like France did.
And he didn’t offer any hints about how sharply greenhouse gas emissions would be cut in the years after 2020, like the European Union and several other countries did.
Instead, the president delivered a forceful but largely detail-free speech that sought to reassure the world about the United States’ commitment to reaching a global climate change agreement at crucial talks in Paris at the end of 2015, while leaving the specifics for later.
“It was a good speech, but there was nothing revolutionary put forward,” said Heather Coleman, climate change policy manager at Oxfam America.

And a real-deal revolution, though, is was urgently needed.