By Rob Jordan, Standford

This past July was the hottest single month in Earth’s recorded history, but warming isn’t the only danger climate change holds in store.

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the simultaneous occurrence of extremely cold winter days in the Eastern United States and extremely warm winter days in the West, according to a Stanford-led study published in Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres. Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are likely driving this trend, the researchers report.

“There’s this idea that the past few winters were more extreme than usual, particularly since the conditions in the East and West were so different,” said senior author Noah Diffenbaugh, an associate professor of Earth system science at the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “Looking back at temperature data from the past 35 years, we’ve found that in fact 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 did have the biggest difference in winter temperature between the East and West.”

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