Climatologist Daniel Swain’s success is built on a simple foundation. His area of expertise is how global climate change affects local weather. Many climatologists focus on seemingly esoteric topics such as the Earth’s average temperature recorded in degrees Celsius, radiation forcing, and cloud reflectance. Swain, by contrast, has worked with CBS, NBC, the Weather Channel, washington postand on his own blog and YouTube channel, Weather West, he talks about wind, rain, outside temperature, and how they are affected by the larger forces of the atmosphere.
“He uses language that is precise and profound, yet very relatable, which is why he is quoted everywhere,” Mark Hertzgaard, a longtime climate journalist and executive director of Covering Climate Now, told me. By Swain’s own tally, he gives more than 200 media interviews a year. In other words, he is as omnipresent in people’s lives as the weather forecaster. Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California’s Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources Research, isn’t exactly a “weather influencer,” the kind of streamer who delivers breathtaking updates about the next big storm. But he became one of the country’s most influential explainers of the relationship between weather and climate. If you follow any climate-related news, you’ve almost certainly heard a message from him.
For example, in January 2025, he was preparing to publish a major paper. At the time, the Southern California landscape was alarmingly dry after a previous wet winter with thick grass and little rain in the fall. The easterly wind was picking up. The paper explained this phenomenon, which Swain termed “hydroclimatic whiplash.” The term describes how global warming will make extreme fluctuations between above-average rainfall and drought more common, leading to damaging floods and devastating wildfires. Swain and his co-authors had spent years putting the paper together, and as the publication date approached, Swain told his staff: Nature Review Earth and Environment That exactly what it warned about was about to come true. “It was a ‘Oh, shit’ moment,” Swain told me recently. Two days before the paper’s release, in what Swain called an “eerie coincidence,” a fire broke out in the hills around Los Angeles.
Swain hosted nine livestreams on her YouTube channel in one week as devastating fires ravaged her neighborhood. Some lasted for hours. His phone and email inbox were filled with messages from reporters looking for someone who could provide a coherent account of the disaster. NPR called. of Los Angeles Times I wanted an estimate. guardian I was looking for a quick comment. CNN needed to know when he would be available. When he wasn’t on screen talking to his YouTube followers, he was talking to journalists. “During that period, I basically did continuous interviews, like eight or 12 times a day,” he said.
Swain, 37, grew up in Marin County, California. The county is known for its mild Mediterranean climate rather than extreme weather. Despite (or perhaps because of) the Bay Area’s mild climate, he was fascinated by meteorology from an early age. He remembers the winter storm of December 1995 particularly vividly. “Very, really severe storms, wind gusts over 100 miles per hour, very severe thunderstorms, constant lightning,” broke windows in his home and left him without power for several days.
He was completely hooked. On our family trip to the Sierra Nevada, we brought a battery-powered NOAA weather radio so we could track thunderstorm activity in the mountains. He was still in high school when he started the Weather West blog.
Twenty years later, the site is still powered by WordPress, has a distinctly Web 1.0 aesthetic, and receives 2 million unique visitors a year, he said. His stream-of-consciousness posts about the intersection of weather and climate change regularly receive thousands of comments. In his livestreams, which the professor calls “office hours,” he presents a boyish persona with the seriousness of an academic, with cerebral monologues occasionally punctuated by goofy humor. “What happens in the tropical Pacific doesn’t stay in the tropical Pacific,” he said on a recent livestream about the impending Super El Niño.
Swain attended the University of California, Davis, to study atmospheric science and eventually considered becoming a professional forecaster with the National Weather Service. He first worked on climate change communication several years later while working on his Ph.D. At Stanford. He came up with the phrase while writing a blog post about the drought that was hitting California at the time, and looking for a better way to describe the high pressure that seemed to be permanently stuck on the West Coast. Extremely elastic ridge. The media ate it up, and his phone hasn’t stopped ringing ever since.
In retrospect, Swain admits the alliteration was a bit corny. But something corny can be catchy. “I accepted that, because I’m like, Well, I’m sure more people will watch this interview than read the blog.” he said.
Swain’s instinct for simple but resonant phrasing is a big part of his appeal. Consider his research on hydroclimatic whiplash (which the media has since shortened to “climate whiplash”). In a 2018 paper nature climate change About rainfall, he came up with this word rain whiplash. According to Swain, both the editor and reviewers rejected the article because it was “too intuitive.” Swain thought this.what do you mean? That’s the point. I’m trying to be kinetic.” The published title used a lot of beige Precipitation fluctuation rate. (Bronwyn Wake, Editor-in-Chief) nature climate changewrote in an email that such decisions regarding terminology “are made with the goal of ensuring clarity, scientific rigor, and consistency with established terminology in the field.” )
Noah Diffenbaugh is a climatologist at Stanford University who served as Swain’s Ph.D. Advisors said Swain’s explanatory skills come from his integrity as a practicing climate scientist. Some people within the ivory tower are suspicious of scholars who have become famous. However, Swain’s minor celebrity seems to have primarily evoked admiration from his peers. Rather, he has become a model for budding climate scientists to emulate and how to balance deep research with public communication. “When I hear from future PhD students about their long-term goals, they say, ‘I really want a job like Daniel Swain,'” Diffenbaugh said.
Of course, there are other climatologists who have achieved public fame. Their climate change communication often leads to political advocacy, and their sense of urgency is fueled by what they know about the state of the atmosphere. For example, scientist James Hansen has long been involved in climate change advocacy groups. Katherine Hayhoe, a professor at Texas Tech University and a popular speaker, is currently chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy. Swain, by contrast, is mostly concerned with the weather. His goal is to maintain a mode of explaining science.
Still, he couldn’t escape the uglier parts of the climate change debate. He said he has received “a tremendous amount of unsolicited feedback” through emails and social media, as well as letters, packages and calls to his personal phone. Sometimes someone confronts him directly. He said much of what he’s hearing is positive or at least neutral, but some is threatening. People write to him about how he and other meteorologists are controlling the weather, creating chemtrails, and working for Big Green and Big Oil. At the moment, he said, he is most concerned about messages from people who believe climate scientists are trying to mislead the public for financial gain or at the behest of foreign powers. “It is a tragedy that so many people now truly believe that the same people who are working so hard, sometimes at great personal cost, to improve the state of the world are trying to do the opposite.”
Swain’s own hard work obscures another personal challenge. That’s because he’s dealing with pain and fatigue from an autoinflammatory disease called Yao syndrome. Although he has found a way to deal with the condition thanks to “pretty strong drugs,” he still passes out frequently. “It feels like I get the flu a few times a month and it lasts forever,” he said.
Living with a rare genetic disease has strongly influenced how Swain thinks about extreme events like the January 2025 fires. During public presentations, he sometimes shares a slide showing a typical bell curve with a red arrow at the end of the distribution. Apparently it’s me!— an illustration of how his entire life is an outlier. “A lot of people would say, ’98 percent chance something won’t happen? That’s great. You can ignore it.’ To me, a 1 percent chance is not that remote,” he said. “It makes me think differently about risk and how we should think about events that are unlikely but actually have serious consequences. This is my experience. My entire life is about events that are unlikely but have serious consequences.”
Swain’s health issues have also affected the way he talks about how society seeks to address climate change. He wants people to understand that tragic events do happen, but that it is often possible to influence the probability or reduce the outcome. He calls this “second-order optimism.” That is, the ability to think about big bad things and not be overwhelmed by them. He has warned us many times, in plain language that is hard to misunderstand, that a storm is coming, but he still believes we can do something about it. Such a partly cloudy outlook is probably the best we can hope for from climate scientists in the era of global warming.
*Illustration Source: Kevin Carter/Getty;Dan Kitwood/Getty;Jilmarie Stevens
