A connection between recent weather in IA and climate change

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This alarming trend dates back to the winter of 2018-2019. There were so many early outs, late starts, and cancellations. There was a month stretch where we had a full day of school a grand total of 3 times, including the coldest temperatures in Iowa’s history on one of those days.

This past August, we had a derecho. Something no one around here ever remembers experiencing before.

This winter, there have been 3 or 4 big snowstorms, including today where there was snow, high winds, and fog all at the same time for quite a few hours.

Surely climate change has something to do with this. Will we have more derechos in the coming years? Is the earth deteriorating? What’s going on?

Ocean currents, atmospheric circulation and weather patterns are disturbed due to the climate change.
No, the Earth is not deteriorating - but it's changing and many things about the change are hard to predict.
Humans and Nature are pretty resilient and, in this or that form, will likely survive - but we're travelling through uncharted territories of climate right now. Weather becoming less predictable is likely.

It has been known for a lot of years that anthropogenic climate will not only lead to higher temperatures, but also to more extreme temperature variations. When I first read a textbook about global warming back in 2003-2004, this was already common knowledge in the scientific community.

It is however difficult to directly establish a link between specific weather extremes (a local event) and climate change (an attribute of the entire system).

And the weather on Venus really, really, really, really, really, really sucks...

Where I love, in central Europe, summers have become unbearably hot, long and dry.
Winter has somewhat shifted towards February/March and been unusually snow rich or almost entirely lacking snow.

In other words: winter's gotten weird and unpredictable, while summer has become what you'd expect from an event called global warming.

Watch the trends. Yes, weather patterns are changing over the US. Fortunately, IA does not have to rely on things like agriculture that may be disproportionally hit by climate change--sorry for the sarcasm, but climate has been impacting a lot of our economic output for some time. I from Maine and their fisheries and forestry are also being impacted from climate change. We are losing species and ecosystems.

This is such an old conversation and people are still surprised that what scientists have been telling us for a very long time is true. The downside is we don't have a great deal of time to make significant changes. And because we have waited so long, the changes are harder to make.

The whole thing about climate change is, you really can't assess it by looking solely at recent events.

Normally that happens the other way round here, every time it's cold or raining someone will say "So much for global warming eh? Hahaha" like they've said something profound.

But it also works the same when you're being genuine and agreeing with the scientists, rather than being sarcastic in disagreement. Short term local weather isn't the same as climate change. You don't know whether you're experiencing variations from the norm, or the norm itself.

It is not quite true that the influence of climate change on events can't be estimated:

Core Concept: How does climate change influence extreme weather? Impact attribution research seeks answers