What is the weather like? The response of climate scientists to climate change in the U.S., and how it affects the likelihood of climate events
Climate scientist Danielle Touma of the University of Texas, Austin, explains it this way. “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. In Colorado, where Touma lived, her winter wardrobe consisted of jackets and sweaters that were ready for winter. But sometimes there was a warm day when she would dig a T-shirt from the back of a drawer.
Scientists usually define the climate of a place as the 30-year average of its weather. The weird weather doesn’t mean as much to the average as more common conditions, says a climate scientist. And scientists expect the variation in day-to-day weather to persist, even as climate change evolves.
When people began burning fossil fuels in the late 19th century, Earth’s temperature rose 1.3 degrees. The pollution from that burning traps heat inside Earth’s atmosphere, slowly heating up the air, oceans, and land.
Not every weather change is caused 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.
Singh says everything is happening in a different environment. The weather is being influenced by the 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 in the U.S. has more than tripled since the 1960s.
“We’ve kind of put the climate on steroids,” says Alex Hall, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But once in a while there’ll be something really extreme that will occur that will be way outside the range of what the atmosphere was capable of before.”
In the last decade, scientists have developed detection andtribution techniques. They use climate models to model how the planet’s climate can change if humans don’t burn a lot of fossil fuels. By comparing that hypothetical situation to the one that exists, they can see if human-caused climate change affected the likelihood of weather events happening—and in many cases, how big the influence was.
They could see that the rain of Hurricane hilde was at least 40% more likely to cause death than it would have been without human-caused climate change.
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Mankin compares it to trials in medicine. “You want to compare a distribution of medical outcomes in a population that received the drug, the treatment group, to a control group that didn’t receive the drug,” Mankin says. Only fossil fuel burning is used as the drug.
2025 started off with a flurry of intense weather. Southern California experienced bursts of 100-mph winds that spread record-breaking destructive wildfires. There have been winter storms in the South and Mid-Atlantic. 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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Trump Indictment in Report, and Israel-Hamas Fire Nears: A Washington Post-Trump Breakdown About the California Wildfires
The Department of Justice released today its election interference report against President-elect Donald Trump. The report states that the evidence would have proved Trump guilty of a crime. Smith dropped the indictments against Trump after his victory.
The destruction of last week in Southern California was caused by a new fire last night. The wildfires have left more than 20 people dead and hundreds of thousands under evacuation orders. The physical element of this disaster is clear, but what isn’t is how it affects people’s mental health.
A ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas is close to being reached. If agreed to, the initial phases of the agreement would have Hamas release 33 hostages still being held in Gaza in exchange for Israel’s release of a number of Palestinian detainees. A six-week pause in fighting is also possible.
Source: Special counsel defends Trump indictment in report. And, Israel-Hamas ceasefire nears
Jimmy Carter: Music and the First Years of the Georgian Reionization & Electoral Corruptcies (The Gospel of Jimmy Carter)
When Jimmy Carter ran for president, he was barely known outside his home state of Georgia. His friendships with popular musicians like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and the Allman Brothers gave him momentum during his campaign and endeared him to the youth vote. Carter preferred to listen to music when he was young. He appreciated the power of black churches and the spirituality of the music that was played in them.