This summer, as parts of the country have faced extremely hot and rainy weather, it is easy to attribute these conditions to climate change. After all, these are exactly the conditions that scientists warn us to expect on a future, warmer planet.
But it would be a mistake to attribute a single hot summer to climate change, just as it is misguided for climate deniers to take comfort from a single frigid winter. That’s because patterns that indicate climate change play out over decades or even centuries.
The humorist Stephen Colbert once deadpanned, “Is not climate just made up of thousands of little weathers?” And really, he has a point.
Weather is what happens from day to day and week to week, with huge variability. There are many factors that affect weather, from El Niño to the jet stream. It takes years and years worth of records—Colbert’s “thousands of little weathers”—to detect the trends that underlie all of that variability. It is hundreds of years worth of historical data that allow scientists to assert with confidence that climate change is occurring.
Is this year’s steamy summer weather due to climate change? We can’t say for sure now. But in the coming years, scientists will be looking to this year’s weather records to see if the summer of 2013 was an anomaly or part of the detectable trend of climate change.
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Photo, taken on May 24, 2010, courtesy of JCK Photos via Flickr.
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Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. Support for Earth Wise comes from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY.