Rainy and cold this early Wednesday on California’s north coast — supposedly, the drenching will taper off this afternoon, and stay dry until sometime later tomorrow.
According to the NWS, snow levels have dropped, too, adding to the wet Thanksgiving-holiday period. Weather stories are horrid all over the US.

A heating planet, especially those record temperatures in the Arctic, is shifting the ‘polar vortex‘ further south, extending winters and making them more rowdy. A mass of whirling fluid or air?

Speak of which  — just in time, NASA’s climate change research division will seemingly be stripped of its funding — as one of T-Rump’s appointed says there’s ‘…no need for NASA to do what he has previously described as “politically correct environmental monitoring.”‘

(Illustration: ‘President Trump,’ by Jonathan Bass, found here).

A vortex of dangerous shit:

Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science,” his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.
Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.
This would mean the elimination of Nasa’s world-renowned research into temperature, ice, clouds and other climate phenomena.
Nasa’s network of satellites provide a wealth of information on climate change, with the Earth science division’s budget set to grow to $2bn next year.
By comparison, space exploration has been scaled back somewhat, with a proposed budget of $2.8bn in 2017.

T-Rump is such a fucking-fuck.
Yet his asshole-arrival was forecast nearly 20 years ago, amid a flash of the nowadays. A must-read, and most-interesting piece at the Guardian from last Saturday about a T-Rump prophecy — high points:

In 1998, the late Stanford philosopher Richard Rorty published a small volume, “Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America,” that described a fracturing of the leftwing coalition that rendered the movement so dispirited and cynical that it invited its own collapse.
…
In the book, Rorty predicted that what he called the left would come to give “cultural politics preference over real politics.”
This movement would contribute to a tidal wave of resentment, he wrote, that would ricochet back as the kind of rancor that the left had tried to eradicate.
Rorty suggested that so long as “the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear.”
But as democratic institutions began to fail, workers would begin to realize that governments were “not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or jobs from being exported”, Rorty wrote.
They would also realize that the middle classes – themselves desperately afraid of being downsized – would not come to their rescue.
“At that point,” Rorty wrote, “something will crack.”
…
Rorty said “nobody can predict” what such a strongman would do in office, but painted a bleak picture for minorities and liberal causes.
“One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out,” he wrote.
“Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion.”
Intolerance and “sadism” would “come flooding back”, he continued.
“All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

(h/t Miss Cellania).

Unfortunately, pretty-much right on.
Although in his sit-down with the NY Times yesterday, T-Rump backed away from totaling ditching the Paris climate deal, and even admitted there’s “some connectivity” between humans and climate change, we shouldn’t believe the serial-liar for a second.
Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club: ‘“We’re waiting for action, and Trump is kidding nobody on climate as he simultaneously stacks his transition team and cabinet with climate science deniers and the dirtiest hacks the fossil fuel industry can offer…Prove it, President-elect. The world is watching.”‘

However, T-Rump don’t really give a shit…