gloom & doom (part 2)

Finally, in a parallel report from Axios, the website cites China expert Richard McGregor who lists 5 things he believes Xi wants from Trump in order to maintain cordial relations between the two nations:

1. 1.Don't upend the status quo with North Korea: China's worst nightmare is that the regime would collapse and be subsumed by South Korea, which would make for a U.S.-ally on their border. It needs North Korea as a buffer state. Contra Washington conventional wisdom, the Chinese can't just snap their fingers and tell the North Koreans what to do. China and North Korea deeply distrust each other. So the Chinese hope Trump's tough talk is just bluster. (DJ-North Korea may already be close to collapse, from nuclear test that may go wrong to food-crises. When staying in North Korea means dying in North Korea you will see refugees)
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3. 2.Avoid a confrontation in the South China Sea: Xi will likely deliver to Trump a quiet warning on the South China Sea. During his confirmation hearing, Rex Tillerson told Senators China needed to stop its island building there. The Chinese want Trump to understand they will defend their interests if the U.S. pushes back. (See our Facts Matter on the South China Sea.)
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5. 3.Stick to "One China": Regarding Taiwan, they want Trump to stick with the "One China" policy. Xi was furious when Trump took a call from Taiwan's president, and wouldn't speak with him over the phone until Trump agreed to support the status quo. (See our Facts Matter on the One China policy.)
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7. 4.No trade war: The Chinese, like everyone else, don't know what Trump might do on trade. They are closely following the reports about the tussle within the White House between nationalists (especially Bannon and Wilbur Ross) and the Goldman Sachs wing, led by Trump's chief economic advisor, Gary Cohn. As Axios revealed: trade in automobiles is the big sleeper issue.
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9. 5.The big picture: Xi wants a stable international environment that allows China to continue to develop and accumulate wealth and power. They abhor the prospect of military disruptions and interruptions to trade, with Xi going to Davos this year to sell China as an apostle of the open international order to all the folks Bannon would call "globalists." McGregor says China's ideal state for America is "slow and steady bourgeois decline." Anything too chaotic — Trump's MO, basically — hurts China.

The jet stream, which Mann describes as a "ribbon-like air current that travels eastward … in the lower part of the atmosphere where weather happens," exists because of the difference in air temperatures between the subtropic and subarctic regions. 

The eastward-flowing air isn't one completely steady band. Slow-moving waves that travel from north to south often appear across the ribbon of air. It is those particularly large undulations, called Rossby waves, that researchers link with extreme weather, because of the intensely low or high pressure systems they bring with them.

In a warming world, these Rossby waves are getting stuck in one place for a long period of time, Mann and his colleagues say. And this means that a region under the low pressure part of these waves will experience intense, prolonged rainfall resulting in flooding. The regions under the high pressure systems will be stuck with hot, dry conditions conducive to drought and wildfires.

What's making these waves static, or at least slowing them down? Mann points to the warming Arctic. The tropics aren't warming as much as the Arctic, so the temperature gradient from north-to-south is less extreme. As the temperature differences that create the jet stream decline, the jet stream's dynamics change.