A single, torrential rainstorm one day in June. An unseasonably warm day in January. A cold snap in late April. The wind, sun, humidity, and all the other things we experience when we walk outside every day: that’s weather.

Climate, scientists have long explained, is what you get when you mash together day after week after month after year of weather. Climate is the whole cloth woven together by individual threads of daily weather.

For years, scientists have cautioned that weather can’t tell us about how the climate is changing. That 70-degree day in January? There are a whole pile of reasons that could have happened. Climate change, they’ve said, could be part of the equation, but our statistical techniques haven’t previously