In a world getting used to extreme weather, 2023 is starting out more bonkers than ever and meteorologists are saying it's natural weather weirdness with a bit of help from human-caused climate change.

Much of what's causing problems worldwide is coming out of a roiling Pacific Ocean, transported by a wavy jet stream, experts said.

Officials in California ordered evacuations in a high-risk coastal area where mudslides killed 23 people in 2018 as a huge storm barreled into the state Wednesday, bringing high winds and rain that threatened widespread flooding and knocked out power to more than 100,000 people.

The storm was expected to dump up to 6 inches (152.4 millimeters) of rain in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area where most of the region would remain under flood warnings into late Thursday night. In Southern California, the storm was expected to peak in intensity overnight into early Thursday morning with Santa Barbara and Ventura counties likely to see the most rain, forecasters said.

A Tunisian former environment minister has been sentenced to three years in prison for his role in the illegal import of 280 containers of waste from Italy, local media reported Wednesday.

Mustapha Aroui and several ministry officials had been sacked and arrested in December 2020 as public anger mounted and authorities investigated how the waste had been imported.

Germany used more renewable energy than ever in 2022 but again failed to reach its CO2-reduction goal as Russia's war in Ukraine prompted a return to more coal and oil use, a think tank reported Wednesday.

Europe's biggest economy emitted 761 million tonnes of greenhouse gases last year, just one tonne fewer than in 2021 and overshooting the target of 756 million tonnes, the energy think tank Agora Energiewende said in a statement.

Fish that have lost food due to mass coral bleaching are getting into more unnecessary fights, causing them to expend precious energy and potentially threatening their survival, new research said Wednesday.

With the future of the world's coral reefs threatened by climate change, a team of researchers studied how a mass bleaching event affected 38 species of butterflyfish.

Much of the Alps just don't look right for this time of year. Sparse snowfall and unseasonably warm winter weather in Europe's central mountains are allowing grass to blanket hillsides across the region, causing headaches for ski slope operators and aficionados of Alpine white.

Patches of grass, rock and dirt were visible Monday in some of Europe's skiing meccas — like Innsbruck in Austria, Villars-sur-Ollon and Crans-Montana in Switzerland, and Germany's Lenggries and far beyond. The dearth of snow has revived concerns about temperature upheaval linked to climate change.

President Joe Biden's administration has finalized regulations that protect hundreds of thousands of small streams, wetlands and other waterways, repealing a Trump-era rule that federal courts had thrown out and that environmentalists said left waterways vulnerable to pollution.

The rule defines which "waters of the United States" are protected by the Clean Water Act. For decades, the term has been a flashpoint between environmental groups that want to broaden limits on pollution entering the nation's waters and farmers, builders and industry groups that say extending regulations too far is onerous for business.

Kiara, a six-month-old black panther born in war-torn Ukraine and victim of exotic animal trafficking, has found a new home at a wildlife refuge in France.  

The world is getting warmer, winters included. The United States, however, has experienced severe winter storms in recent years, and experts are taking a closer look at the link between these extreme cold events and climate change.

Catastrophic floods, crop-wilting droughts and record heatwaves this year have shown that climate change warnings are increasingly becoming reality and this is "just the beginning," experts say, as international efforts to cut planet-heating emissions founder.