“So much for global warming” said my local pub landlord looking pointedly at me. Ah yes, it’s snowing outside so climate change isn’t real. I’ve been subjected to many such unsolicited comments over the years, ever since I had the temerity to get involved with environmental issues. Such scepticism primarily stems from the common misunderstanding that ‘global warming’ means that the climate is getting warmer everywhere, and so every instance of bad weather is used as proof that it isn’t real. Wrong.
As of today, 194 countries, plus the European Union, have signed the Paris Climate Change Agreement, which represents a commitment to addressing climate change and keeping global warming below an average of two degrees. Only two degrees? But why does that matter? So what if it is 22 degrees today, but 24 degrees tomorrow?
No that’s not how it works.
Rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing the planet to warm*. The crisis we face as a result, is that this temperature increase is changing the climate around the world, and it is this changing climate that will have a devastating effect. Global warming of two degrees does not mean that everywhere will get two degrees warmer – there will be massive variation, and not just in temperature. A location could get hotter or colder, wetter or drier, windier or less windy. Severe events such as hurricanes, floods and droughts will increase, and sea levels will rise.
But is this really happening? The short answer is yes, but to expand:
It is first important to understand how climate differs from weather. Whilst weather happens every day, climate is the long-term average of daily weather, typically calculated by convention over 30 years or longer. Ever heard on the radio or TV that temperatures today are a couple of degrees higher than normal for this time of year, or that rainfall is below the seasonal average? This comes from climate data. The day’s weather is being compared to the 30-year average for that month or season in that specific location.
In terms of whether the climate is changing, the answer is unequivocally yes. FACT. We have measured weather for hundreds of years at thousands of locations across the globe. Accurate measurements are taken daily of wind strength, temperature, air pressure, rainfall, and so forth, in carefully controlled conditions. (Unlike a certain publicly accessible rain gauge in the Lake District in North-West England used to solidify the local legend that it is the wettest place in England, a fact which when relayed to my brother made him laugh as he said it was custom for hikers to pee in it. But I digress.)
The scientific measurements are used to calculate climate. Periodically they are updated to the latest 30-year period, typically every 10 years. Analysis of this data shows clearly that the climate is changing at an unprecedented rate. There can be no dispute. A decreasing minority may disagree why the climate is changing but it is quite simply fact that it is.
It follows that it is utter nonsense to use any one day to evaluate whether climate change is happening. A typical question, when climate scientists are interviewed about some freak weather occurrence such as a hurricane or flood, might be ‘Is today’s [insert event – hurricane, storm, flood etc.] due to climate change?’. This evokes a response along the lines of ‘well we can’t say but it’s indicative of what we would expect under climate change’. ‘Aha!!’ shout the climate deniers, ‘so they can’t say if climate change is happening or not?’ Sigh. Yes they can. The scientist is merely stating that you can’t draw a conclusion on climate from one day’s weather. The question was daft, essentially: ‘is today’s weather a 30-year average?’ Well how can it be?
It’s all about the probabilities. Unlikely and rare extreme events happen, just not very often by definition. We have always had drought, flood, extreme temperatures and so on, and sometimes these events cluster together. But over a short time-period this could just be due to normal fluctuations in weather, which is precisely why we calculate climate over 30 years.
Let’s compare with throwing dice. The odds of throwing a six are 1 in 6. But your brother can still throw two double sixes in a row when you’re playing him at backgammon. It doesn’t mean the dice have been tampered with (although I wouldn’t put it past my brother). Derren Brown a British illusionist once flipped a coin on TV and got 10 heads in a row. He went on to explain this was no trick, he had been filmed tossing a coin for around nine hours before he achieved this outcome. The ‘trick’ was in editing to show just this clip. Under normal circumstances it is possible for extremely unlikely events to happen in the short term. However, if you averaged the number of heads Derren threw over nine hours it would still be close to 50%, or 1 in every 2 tosses.
So extreme climate events have always occurred, but climate change means that the rate that these events are happening will increase over the long term, and measurement of these extremes continues to prove the trend. But it’s not just the extremes, it is the changes to daily averages that will also be significant.
How global warming is changing the climate will be the subject of a future blog. But for now, let’s just say that a possible scenario leads to the climate of the United Kingdom (UK) switching to that of the East cost of the United States (US) which is on the same latitude. The UK rarely sees winter temperatures fall below minus 10 degrees, but our transatlantic cousins regularly see temperatures fall below minus 20 and worse. The problem is that our native plants and animals simply could not survive these temperatures on a regular basis. As part of my PhD, I found that the type of drought event that might kill broadleaf trees in South East England could shift from a 1 in a 100-year event, to an 8 in every 10 years event by the 2050s.
Climate shifts elsewhere could see deserts experiencing higher rainfall but tropical rainforests experiencing lower, critical areas of food crop production being subject to drought and fire, monsoon rains not arriving. If you think mass migration is a problem now, wait until whole swathes of Africa and Southern Europe are on the move due to drought, fire, and failure of food crops. As river systems dry up, be prepared for water wars. Increasing fires across the Mediterranean region and areas of the US are only the start. It’s a grim picture.
Two degrees is the current target for policy but our current trajectory could put us on course for over 5 degrees or more. Do you know how much difference there is between the average temperature of the planet today and the average temperature during the last Ice Age? At this time around a quarter of the land surface – including huge areas of North America, Europe and Asia – was covered in glaciers, typically 3-4 kilometres deep. The answer is about 5-6oc . Small shifts in global average temperatures mask massive changes in local climates.
So in summary. Climate change is real and is happening, and unless we take action it will have a truly devastating impact on our world.
© waterlilly.blog, August 2025
*for an explanation of how greenhouse gases cause global warming see my previous blog: https://waterlilly.blog/2025/07/30/put-simply-what-are-greenhouse-gases-and-how-do-they-cause-global-warming/
Waterlilly 
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