Human beings have notoriously bad memories about weather, like
just about everything else. We tend to overemphasize extreme
events and downplay the dull normal, which is why your
Granddad’s stories about walking uphill in the snow, both ways,
probably aren’t true. But if you think that the daily weather
has gotten weirder lately—more extremes and more sudden
changes—it turns out you might actually be right. According to a
recent study by Princeton University researchers published in
the Journal of Climate, extreme sunny or extremely cloudy days
are more common now than they were in the early 1980s, and the
swing from heavy storms to dry days is also more intense than it
was in the late 1990s. Altogether, a third of the planet is
experiencing more extreme and erratic variations in day-to-day
weather. The weather—not just big storms, but the daily stuff of
the evening newscast—really is getting weirder. More from TIME:
IPCC Report: How Climate Change Is Worsening Extreme Weather The
researchers—led by David Med