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“Your spice drawer is no stranger to the impacts of climate change,” writes frequent Bluedot Kitchen contributor Caroline Saunders. “One of the most affected is the minty-spicy star of chai, kheer, Swedish buns, and so much more: cardamom.” Read more about how farmers and researchers are coming up with a range of methods to adapt. (And here’s Caroline’s recipe for Cardamom Snap Cookies.)

“Every weather event takes place under different environmental conditions than those of 250 years ago.”  

– Friederike Otto, director of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and author of Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change

We’ve been thinking — and talking — a lot about weather here at Bluedot. And, of course, we always think — and talk and write — about climate. What’s the difference? Put simply, weather is what you see when you look out your window. Climate is weather patterns averaged over decades, centuries, millenia. Weather changes daily. Climate changes far more slowly, though since the Industrial Revolution and the dramatic increase in carbon dioxide (and methane and other greenhouse gases) we’ve pumped into the atmosphere, the timeline for change is accelerating faster than any time in history. In the past two years, the Earth got hotter faster than ever before. Let’s think of weather as the climate's expression of its mood. And the weather, as Friederike Otto characterizes it, is angry.

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• Dear Dot: Where Should I Buy a House?

• Climate Quick Tip: Weatherize Your Home and Save Money

• Summer in a Smoothie Bowl

• What’s Causing Sea Level Rise?

• Build a Rain Garden at Home

• Protecting Historic Homes from Flooding 

• Climate Change’s Impact on Cardamom

• A Recipe for Picnic-Perfect Cardamom Snap Cookies

• A Conversation With Weather West’s Daniel Swain

• From Utah: Paleontologists Discover Gila Monster Secrets

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In the climate science community, Dr. Daniel Swain is known for the research he conducts on how global warming affects extreme climate events. To everyone else, he’s the approachable, friendly voice behind Weather West, a popular blog offering real-time perspectives on California weather and climate. Because of his ability to clearly explain complex topics, he’s become the go-to weather expert for California media and a leading voice connecting climate change and extreme weather. In a 2024 interview with Bluedot contributor Tess Kazenoff, Swain explained why some people don’t connect the two things: “Historically, weather and climate science endeavors occurred literally in different academic departments at universities or different institutions in government,” he says. “You used to hear that you should never confuse weather and climate.” But make no mistake about it, he adds: “The changing climate is changing the weather. There’s a lot of people today who have lived through more extreme high temperatures or more extreme precipitation than their parents or their grandparents or their great-grandparents before them ever did.”

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Dear Dot: Where Should I Buy a House?

Dear Dot,

I’m a realtor curious about how climate change is going to impact where people will want to live. What are some climate change concerns people should be considering before committing to a next home/next location?

–Karen

Dear Karen,

When Mr. Dot and I were betrothed, we purchased a cottage on one of the Great Lakes. It was perched high above a thin strip of sand that sloped gently to the lake and faced west, allowing us to enjoy one of the top ten (reportedly by National Geographic) most beautiful sunsets in the world. But what Mr. Dot and I learned fairly quickly was that, some summers, our beach was vast, offering plenty of space for cottage crowds and beach volleyball. Other summers, our beach shrunk, sometimes vanishing entirely, waves lapping at the foot of the wooden staircase that wound down the cliff from our cottage. It was those years that Mr. Dot and I wondered if our investment was likely to vanish, too.

Put another way: Climate change is coming for all of us and we’d be wise to consider how best to plan for those impacts.

So Dot took your question to Jim Miller, a Bluedot editor and economist, who's studied both climate change and housing economics. And Jim urges all of us to consider a couple of things. What are they?
 
Read on. 
Got a question for Dot? Write her at deardot@bluedotliving.com.

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What You Can Do … With Some Yarn

“Climate change is a scientific concept that some find hard to grasp,” writes Sharon McDonnell in this story for Bluedot Living. “But there are ways to make it shockingly, graphically clear. Professor Ed Hawkins, a British climate scientist at the University of Reading, hit upon the idea of creating visual warming stripes, using a red to blue color spectrum to illustrate deviation-from-average global temperatures based on weather data for over a century.” Now, Professor Hawkins’s stripes are showing up on everything from scarves to dresses to leggings. And you can knit your own warming stripes with help from The Tempestry Project, which will provide you with yarn and instructions. 

The Keep-This-Handbook

How’s the Weather? 

Our colleague Michaela Keil, who edits Bluedot Living’s Brooklyn content and newsletter, wrote last week: “Someone asked me recently, ‘How do people in NYC feel about climate change?’ I don’t have a direct answer on how everyone is doing, so what I said was: ‘Humans are wonderfully and problematically adaptable creatures.’

“Flooding in NYC like we had last week might seem catastrophic, but we’ve adapted so that it feels like more of a nuisance than a blaring warning sign. A few years ago, I was at a pub with friends, and by the time I left, I found myself in puddles a foot deep — we had a tropical storm dumping rain on us and I’d had no idea. A year later, I took a very long walk across the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan because historic levels of rain shut down the subway. At the time, I was more upset that an important event had been canceled than I was about the rain.

“Most people will adapt to the conditions they are given and, most frustratingly, they will forget what the standard was. Reality can be a slippery thing in that way.

“So I’ve taken to writing down the weather and how it feels in my weekly planner. I’m hopeful that a few years down the road, I can flip through it and think, ‘I lived through some insane weather events,’ not ‘This seems normal.’”

How do you feel about climate change and more extreme weather events? Got any stories of people in your community (maybe you!) addressing the challenges?  We’d love to know. Email us at editor@bluedotliving.com.

Enjoy the weekend, and we’ll see you in two weeks.

–Emily Cain, Leslie Garrett, Robin Jones, and Jamie Kageleiry

Editors

Leslie Garrett has been covering climate stories for close to two decades.  She makes her home in Canada, west of Toronto. She’s still figuring out her favorite spot but it’s definitely near the water.

Jamie Kageleiry, a longtime magazine and newspaper editor from Martha’s Vineyard, says her favorite spot on earth is out on a kayak there, looking at birds.

Robin Jones is a Southern California native who served as an editor at Westways magazine for more than a decade. She lives in Long Beach and teaches journalism at Cal State Long Beach.

Emily Cain is a recent graduate of Cal State Long Beach, where she wrote and edited for the university’s award-winning magazine, DIG.

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