Is our Donald learning?

Remember how much fun it used to be to laugh at Donald Trump's bizarre Presidential campaign? He couldn't possibly actually win. In fact we were pretty sure he didn't even want to be President. Just elect him and make him actually have to do the job, we smirked. That'll show him.  Yeah well...

Strange things happen all the time so here we all are. Still, it isn't exactly clear Trump wants the job even now.  Much was made this week of his seeming desire to live part time in the White House . Then, he took the afternoon off the other day to go eat steak or something. Also there's all sorts of speculation going over how soon he might resign or via which constitutional procedures he might be removed.  Shit is getting weird.

Of course it's also possible Trump went through this whole business just to meet new people and learn interesting things. He's getting the Presidential level briefings now so we'll be watching his Twitter feed to see if he learns the truth about Roswell or the Kennedy assassination.  Or maybe they don't actually tell the President about that stuff. In any case, we do know he is having certain conspiracy theories cleared up for him.

To President-elect Donald Trump’s assertion that climate change is a hoax created by and for the Chinese,” China offers this: Wrong!

As Bloomberg reports, China’s Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said Wednesday that it was Republican U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush ― not the Chinese ― who started the conversation about global warming.

“If you look at the history of climate change negotiations, actually it was initiated by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] with the support of the Republicans during the Reagan and senior Bush administration during the late 1980s,” Zhenmin reportedly told reporters gathered at United Nations talks in Morocco.

As it turns out, this revelation comes not a moment too soon. Because uh oh.

This is the second year in a row that temperatures near the North Pole have risen to freakishly warm levels. During 2015’s final days, the temperature near the Pole spiked to the melting point thanks to a massive storm that pumped warm air into the region.

So what’s going on here?

“It’s about 20C [36 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer than normal over most of the Arctic Ocean, along with cold anomalies of about the same magnitude over north-central Asia,” Jennifer Francis, an Arctic specialist at Rutgers University, said by email Wednesday.

I hope somebody tells Trump about this now. Otherwise, in another month or so we can expect him to tweet another round of "Global warming? But it’s cold outside!"

Francis has published research suggesting that the jet stream, which travels from west to east across the Northern Hemisphere in the mid-latitudes, is becoming more wavy and elongated as the Arctic warms faster than the equator does.

“It will be fascinating to see if the stratospheric polar vortex continues to be as weak as it is now, which favors a negative Arctic Oscillation and probably a cold mid/late winter to continue over central and eastern Asia and eastern North America. The extreme behavior of the Arctic in 2016 seems to be in no hurry to quit,” Francis continued.