Bright-sunshine and cold air this early Thursday on California’s north coast — right now, well into the morning, and we’re at just above freezing after striking a pre-dawn low of 29-degrees earlier.
Dry and cold til Saturday, supposedly, when another rain storm comes thrashing through the area.

And of rain and our drought, there’s new research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on precipitation and California’s struggle with dry conditions — from MIT News on Tuesday:

Now MIT scientists have found that such extreme precipitation events in California should become more frequent as the Earth’s climate warms over this century…For California, they calculated that, if the world’s average temperatures rise by 4 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, the state will experience three more extreme precipitation events than the current average, per year.

How this actually effects the drought, maybe too soon to really know, as we’re in the sixth year with apparently no real end in sight. All this coupled-tightly to climate change, which is seemingly gaining a certain momentum with each passing day. The year just passed was the hottest ever — third in a row.
And a new study on how there’s been no ‘pause’ in global warming, especially in the oceans, in the past 15 years. Despite some denier hype, NOAA research published two years ago concluded no detectable slowdown detected in ocean warming, widely known as the “global warming hiatus,” and it pissed-off deniers (Read, Republicans), but now a new report: The NOA is correct, we’re fucked.

Lead author of a new study Zeke Hausfather, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group (Phys.org): ‘“Our results mean that essentially NOAA got it right, that they were not cooking the books.”‘

Climate change is really, really real — details yesterday from the Washington Post:

That controversy is likely to be stirred anew in the wake of a new study, published Wednesday in Science Advances, that finds the NOAA scientists did the right thing in adjusting their dataset.
In particular, the new research suggests that the NOAA scientists correctly adjusted their record of ocean temperatures in light of known biases in some observing systems — and indeed, that keepers of other top global temperature datasets should do likewise.
“We pretty robustly showed that NOAA got it right,” said study author Zeke Hausfather, a Ph.D. student at the University of California-Berkeley and a researcher with Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit consortium that has reanalyzed the Earth’s temperatures.
“There was no cooking of the books, there’s no politically motivated twisting of the data.”
…
The upshot, says Hausfather, is that “at least globally, it’s impossible to differentiate the rate of warming over the last say 18 years from the longer term rate of warming, over the last 30 or 50 years…I don’t think we can say any more that we have evidence that global warming has slowed down in any way.”
“There are still questions about why the rate of warming in one decade could be a little slower than the rate of warming in another, or a little faster,” he continues.
“But I don’t think we can really say that there was a discernible long-term hiatus.”

And we be cruising right along…

(Illustration above found here).