Essential Climate Literacy

The weather-climate relationship comes down to a few key points:

• Weather is short-term and local; climate is long-term and regional to global
• A single event does not prove or disprove a climate trend
• Climate sets the boundaries of what weather is possible in a place
• Human-caused warming has now reached roughly 1.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with 2024 the first single year near 1.5 degrees
• Small average changes drive big shifts in extremes — the spread matters more than the mean