Weather and Climate

Cold spells often bring climate change deniers out in force. From a scientific standpoint, these claims of disproof are absurd. Fluctuations in the weather don’t refute clear long-term trends in the climate. Yet many people believe these claims, and the political result has been reduced willingness to take action to mitigate climate change.

During El Niño, a swath of ocean stretching 6,000 miles warms for months on end, typically by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit–more than enough to completely reorganize wind, rainfall and temperature patterns all over the planet.

Meteorologists have gotten a lot better at forecasting the conditions that make tornadoes more likely. But predicting exactly which thunderstorms will produce a tornado and when is harder, and that’s where a lot of severe weather research is focused today.

The world is in deep trouble on climate change, but if we really put our shoulder to the wheel we can turn things around. Loosely, that’s the essence of today’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Atmospheric rivers, those long, powerful streams of moisture in the sky, are becoming more frequent in the Arctic, and they’re helping to drive dramatic shrinking of the Arctic’s sea ice cover. Sea ice loss contributes to global warming and to extreme storms that cause economic damage well beyond the Arctic.

U.S. weather disasters are getting costlier as more people move into vulnerable areas and climate change raises the risks of extreme heat and rainfall. Even with an average hurricane season, 2022 had the third-highest number of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. since 1980.

The year 2022 will be remembered across the U.S. for its devastating flooding, storms and hurricanes – and also for its extreme heat waves and droughts, including one so severe it briefly shut down traffic on the Mississippi River.