Sometimes weird weather is because of change in climate
Climate Change Has Changed in the Past, but It’s Not What We’ve Learned From Touma’s Closed World
Danielle Touma is a climate scientist at the University of Texas, Austin. “The climate is basically the clothes you have in your closet,” but what you pick out to wear every day tells you about the weather. When Touma lived in Colorado, her winter wardrobe was complete with coats and sweaters that were ready for winter. She would dig a T-shirt from the drawer on warm days.
The 30-year average of weather is how scientists define the climate of a place. So weird weather does factor in, but isn’t as important to the average as more common conditions, says Deepti Singh, a climate scientist at Washington State University. The variation in day-to-day weather will continue even as climate change progresses.
Earth’s temperature has risen since the mid 1800s when people started burning fossil fuels. The pollution from that burning traps heat inside Earth’s atmosphere, slowly heating up the air, oceans, and land.
Not every weather fluctuation is demonstrably affected by climate change. But the impact of the steady increase in global temperature is now detectable in many extreme weather events—and likely many of the more normal ones, too, says Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth College.
“Everything we’re experiencing, it is occurring in a different environment,” Singh says. So the weather itself, “to some extent, is being influenced by these changes.”
There are fewer days below freezing in many parts of the U.S. and beyond: states like Michigan and Ohio experience more than a week fewer freezing days now than they would in a world without climate change. And heat extremes have also increased. The number of heat waves has gone up since the 1960s.
Alex Hall, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that we have put the climate on steroids. “But once a while there will be something that is so extreme, that it’s outside the range of what the atmosphere was capable of before.”
Scientists have developed two techniques in the past ten years. They use climate models that represent Earth’s physics to simulate how the planet’s climate and weather events would behave if humans had not burned vast quantities of fossil fuels. They can see how climate change affects weather events if they compare it to the one that exists.
They could see that Hurricane Helene was 10% more intense than it would have been without human-caused climate change and at least 40% more likely.
Forecasting the Future of the Universe: What’s Happening When the World Gets So Hot? A Comparison to Clinical Trials in Medicine
Mankin compares the technique to clinical trials in medicine. Mankin wants to compare the distribution of medical outcomes between people who received a drug and those who didn’t. Only in this case, the drug is fossil fuel burning.
2025 started off with a flurry of intense weather. Southern California experienced bursts of 100-mph winds that spread record-breaking destructive wildfires. The South has been hit with cold weather and snow this winter. And in the midst of the weather news, scientists from major meteorological associations around the world reported that human-caused climate change drove 2024 to be the hottest year in human history.
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Special Counsel defends Donald Trump indictment in report. And, Israel-Hamas ceasefire nears: A California wildfire caused by a new fire
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