Overcast with some thick-gray, angry-looking clouds this early Monday on California’s north coast and we’ve got some chilled temperatures, too, also in the mix.
Supposedly, this should be the weather picture for the next couple of days — no heavy rain until Thursday, and again, supposedly.

Although pretty quiet for the West Coast over the weekend, the mid-Atlantic seaboard got snowed — odd the weather. Also over the weekend, a new study on climate change, and humans. The odds-on chance of such extreme weather events like Winter Storm Jonas, coupled with quickly-rising global temperatures could be at this stage without the human touch is in Lottery land.
Once again, we’re the culprit. ‘“2015 is again the warmest year on record, and this can hardly be by chance,” says co-author Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.’

Another brick in the wall…

(Illustration found here).

Key arc of the research:

The newly computed odds for experiencing the recent runs of record temperatures by chance, without accounting for human-caused greenhouse gases, are greater than odds previously reported in some media — between 1 in 27 million and 1 in 650 million — but they are still incredibly slim.
In contrast, taking human-caused global warming into account makes the recent record temperatures quite likely, as the study further shows.
Rahmstorf sums up the findings: “Natural climate variations just can’t explain the observed recent global heat records, but man-made global warming can.”
What is more, the anomalous global average warmth comes with substantial impacts.
“It has led to unprecedented local heat waves across the world — sadly resulting in loss of life and aggravating droughts and wildfires,” says Rahmstorf.
“The risk of heat extremes has been multiplied due to our interference with the Earth system, as our data analysis shows.”

Lead author of the study, noted American scientist Michael Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology and director, Earth System Science Center at Penn State, explained the details at LiveScience this morning — read the whole piece for the particulars, but this the reality point:

Simply stated, we find that the various record temperatures and runs of unusually warm years since 2000 are extremely unlikely to have happened in the absence of human-caused climate change, but reasonably likely to have happened when we account for climate change.
We can, in this sense, attribute the record warmth to human-caused climate change at a high level of confidence.

Announced last week, another highly-human influenced environmental pisser-study  — via HuffPost:

That’s according to a new report from the World Economic Forum and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
“The best research currently available estimates that there are over 150 million tonnes (165 million tons) of plastics in the ocean today,” the report reads.
“In a business-as-usual scenario, the ocean is expected to contain 1 tonne (1.1 tons) of plastic for every 3 tonnes of fish by 2025, and by 2050, more plastics than fish (by weight).”
In other words, in just 34 years, plastic trash in the ocean will outweigh all the fish in the sea.

And here we go…fleeting sunshine every-once-in-a-long-while this morning — hyphenate the weather.