I heard about the tornadoes on the TV in the library court yesterday afternoon. Then I drove home through a warm breeze, carrying wisps of fog from the snow banks across the road and down to the river. The same weather system that brought destruction to the South gave us a night that reached 60 degrees in January and a gentle rain.
I’m tired of listening to scientists remind people that no individual weather event can be directly attributed to climate change. This is an intellectually honest and precise description of the descriptive power of scientific knowledge regarding an immensely complex system. It also completely misses the point.
The climate is defined by the sum total of the weather on this planet. If the climate is changing, then we will see the weather changing. And we can, with every freak snow storm, warm spell, hurricane, drought, etc. As disturbing as the weather has become, at least it is reaching a point where denial is no longer a tenable response.