Rain and more rain this Wednesday morning on California’s north coast, but we get breaks between downpours, sometimes even with sunshine, but nothing like down in LA County — Meteorologist Curt Kaplan: ‘“Yesterday, we had six straight hours of rain.”‘
So much so, records shattered dating to 1961.
And with all that wet, the inevitable mudslides, evacuations and freeway shutdowns.

Up here on the Lost Coast, we’re forecast for rain through next week, maybe even some thunderstorms.

Despite the storm drama, the drought still ain’t going away — we need 150 percent of normal seasonal rainfall to even make a dent in the dry: ‘How much is that? If you live in California, you would have do endure a storm every 3 to 5 days for the next three months, according to Michael Anderson, a climatologist with the California Department of Water Resources.’

(Illustration found here).

Although the gaining warmth of the earth didn’t directly make this drought California’s worse ever, but it didn’t help either.
From National Geographic this morning:

The drought has been driven by an unusual weather system over the ocean, likely exacerbated by climate change.
Contributing to the dryness, this year is also shaping up to be the hottest on record in California, Swain says.
A key cause of the drought and heat, he says, has been a high pressure system, or “ridge,” that was parked over the Pacific off the California coast.
That system blocked storms from coming onshore. (Swain’s Stanford colleagues published a study in September concluding that human-induced climate change has made that ridge much more likely.)
The ridge dissipated by late November and has been replaced by a low-pressure system, which has allowed rains to sweep in from the ocean, says Swain.
The water off California has been warmer than usual, which is adding to the moisture available.

Warm being the root-word, this century the warmest since records started, maybe in thousands of years, or ever — via Mashable:

The WMO report, which includes data on increasing heat content in the oceans, rising greenhouse gases, and melting Arctic sea ice and land-based ice sheets around the world, rebuts claims that global warming has stalled, which is known in the climate science community as the warming “hiatus.”
…
The report details “exceptional” heat and precipitation extremes around the world during the year, which the WMO and other scientific organizations say will only worsen as the climate warms and more moisture is added to the atmosphere.
…
“The provisional information for 2014 means that fourteen of the fifteen warmest years on record have all occurred in the 21st century,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud in a press release.
“There is no standstill in global warming,” he said.
It’s noteworthy that this year’s record, or near record, is likely to take place without a full-blown El Nino event.
Such events tend to warm the oceans, thereby boosting global average temperatures, and although the Pacific Ocean flirted with an El Nino event for much of the late summer and fall, none has been declared yet.
To have a record warm year without an El Nino would be unusual in the context of the other most recent record warm years.
…
Although instrument records only date back to 1880, there are many ways for scientists to discern temperatures for centuries before that.
A study published last year found that global temperatures are warmer now than anytime in at least 4,000 years, and it’s no coincidence that carbon dioxide levels are the highest they’ve been in at least 800,000 years.
Carbon dioxide is the main long-lived greenhouse gas.

Oh yeah. If that last paragraph doesn’t curdle the water, nothing will.
And warm, too, in the polar regions, like the Antarctica:

Over the last decade, the rate at which Antarctic glaciers are melting have tripled, which amounts to the weight of Mount Everest worth of ice melting and flowing into the ocean.
Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica have glaciers that are melting faster than any other part of the Antarctic.
The findings are to be published in American Geophysical Union’s journal.
…
Isabella Velicogna, one of the paper’s authors said today in a phone interview that the most of the mass was lost in previous ten years, which means the rate is increasing lately.

And that last bit, too — rain, rain the heat.