Daniel Swain in TIME — 2020 Was a Year of Climate Extremes. What Can We Expect in 2021?

2020 was a year of extreme weather around the world. Hot and dry conditions drove record-setting wildfires through vast areas of Australia, California and Brazil and Siberia.  Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA focused on the links between climate change and extreme weather, weighs in. It’s impossible to know if 2021 will be as record-breaking as 2020, but it’s highly likely that more extremes are on the way. “From one year to the next, there’s still a lot of random variation superimposed on top of the long term trends,” Swain says.