Nature is declining to cooperate with the incoming Predator Elect, Demented Thugpuppet, who doesn’t believe in climate change.
(I stole the headline picture from this DK article because it was really pretty, in a scary-as-hell sort of way.)
Arctic sea ice is at an all-time low for this date.
Which means global sea ice is utterly collapsing.
These images, by the way, were taken from a denialist website, which is all creaming its pants because now that the massive 2016 El Nino is over, global temperatures are back to what they were before the El Nino in the RSS satellite dataset. Well, duh. El Ninos are temporary phenomenon which don’t affect long-term trends.
Meanwhile, in the sane world, NASA’s GISS data for October is available, and October of 2016 was the second-hottest October in world history (following only October of 2015), making the last 12 months the hottest twelve months in human history, and ensuring 2016 will be the hottest year ever—beating 2015, which used to be the hottest year ever—which beat 2014 which used to be the hottest year ever.
Predator-Elect Thugpuppet thinks climate change is a “hoax” invented by the Chinese, and plans to pull out of the Paris agreement to reduce greenhouse gasses. I’ll have more to say about that in the weeks and months ahead (I can’t commit to “years”, because there is no assurance Thugpuppet won’t start a nuclear war), but the world is already considering sanctions against the US in the form of a carbon tax on imports from Thugistan (formerly the “U.S. of A.”).