Climate Change Is Contributing To "Weather Whiplash" And Helping To Create Big Disasters

Winter, 2025. Super dry weather and extreme winds
caused mass destruction from wildfires in 
southern California. 

The California firestorms are highlighting one of many big problems climate change brings to our world: 

It's what scientists are calling hydrological variability or hydroclimate volatility.

Those are fancy words for weather whiplash involving extremes in rain and snow. With climate change. many parts of the world are increasingly whipsawing from super wet to super dry and back again. 

The current wildfire crisis in California is a classic example of this violent see-sawing related to climate.

The story really starts last winter, and the winter before that.  Winter is the wet season in southern California. Or at least it's supposed to be. The winters of 2023 and 2024 were really, really wet around Los Angeles.  

For instance, in just a single storm in early February, 2024, Los Angeles had five to seven inches of rain, nearly half their annual average total.  Climate change tends to make storms more intense, so this unusually heavy rain kinda makes sense in this age in which the world is warming. 

Then the rain stopped. Southern California went through its normal rain-free summer, and waited for the late autumn and winter rains to return. So far they haven't. The storms are still out there in the Pacific Ocean, and those storms are still very wet. 

But a stubborn weather pattern is keeping those storms away from southern California. Again, this could be, at least maybe, another climate change issue. Some scientists say weather patterns are more likely to get "stuck" so conditions on the ground don't change like they are supposed to. 

All that brush that grew thick and lush in those rainy winters dried out more and more, until, by the beginning of a rainless January, they were tinder. 

Winter, 2024: Extreme rains brought destructive
mudslides to southern California. Two photos
are an example of an increasing trend 
toward weather whiplash

All they needed was a spark, and the arid, gusty winds that sometimes blow in from the interior desert to cause the calamity. 

The rest is sad history. 

Southern California is far from the only place that has been enduring this kind of whiplash. 

We've seen this weather whiplash play out here in Vermont. We went from devastating floods in July. Those catastrophic floods extended into Connecticut and Long Island in August.

But by October and November, the whole Northeast, including Vermont and Connecticut had entered a drought.  

It can also consist of sharp variations in precipitation over relatively small geographic distances. The southern third of California has been extremely dry this winter. The northern third, at least up until recently, has been exceptionally wet.  

This whiplash is increasingly a worldwide problem. Per KQED:

"'I see the last decade as a preview of what we should expect to see more of,' said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources and UCLA. Except that 'the wettest wets and the driest dries we've seen recently are not the wettest wets and the driest dried we will see in the coming decades.'"

 There's two main drivers to this flood and drought/fire cycle. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, which means storm can gather more water and dump it as more torrential rains.

However, it storms are avoiding a particular area, a warmer atmosphere can pull more moisture from plants and soil, so droughts take hold more quickly, and potential fuel for fires becomes super dry. 

On paper, many areas won't see any major shifts in average precipitation. There will probably be an increase in extremes, but average those extremes out, and that average might be roughly the same as they are now, said John Abatzoglou a climatologist at UC Merced, reports KQED.

California - and presumably other places - should plan on more extremes in the future rather than just basic changes in precipitation totals.