Bright, glaring sunshine blended with a chilled, gusty wind this Friday afternoon on California’s north coast as we glide through a good-weather period — despite the breezes, we could feel temps in the high-60s by Sunday.
I’m ready for dry and extended warmth…

Heat into hot for our planet — new research indicates 2017 could be another record warm year. Yale University Professor Alexey Fedorov:  ‘“Our main conclusion is that global warming never went away, as one might imply from the term ‘global warming hiatus’… Accordingly, 2017 will remain among the hottest years of the observational record, perhaps just a notch colder than 2016 or 2015.”‘

And we’re supposedly to undergo another El Niño, a rare return so quickly after just a year in hiatus.

(Illustration found here).

Another heavy rainy season expected late this year, or earlier. The El Niño is expected to form sometime during the summer and start pushing the wet weather toward the California shoreline — although the 2015/2016 event wasn’t as strong as this past year’s rainfall totals, we experienced record rainfall just off the ‘normal-not-normal’ heating.
Even without an El Niño, 2016 was the hottest year on record, putting the planet ‘“…in truly uncharted territory.”‘

Now there’s an El Niño on the agenda. Via the Guardian this morning:

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Friday that a new El Niño was 50-60-percent likely before the end of 2017.
“Memories are still fresh of the powerful 2015-2016 El Niño which was associated with droughts, flooding and coral bleaching in different parts of the world and which, combined with long-term climate change, led to the increase of global temperatures to new record highs in both 2015 and 2016,” said Maxx Dilley, director of WMO’s climate prediction and adaptation division.
It is unusual for El Niño conditions to return so swiftly, said Tim Stockdale, principal scientist at the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), one of the leading prediction centres around the world and which contributed to the WMO forecast.
“Normally we would expect a longer interval before another warming. But, having said that, El Niño variability is really rather irregular.”

And so it goes…