America’s Go-To Climate Scientist

The success of the climatologist Daniel Swain rests on a simple foundation: His specialty has long been how global climate change messes with local weather. Many climatologists focus on subjects that seem arcane: mean global temperatures registered in Celsius, radiative forcing, the reflectivity of clouds. Swain, in contrast, talks in plain English—constantly, really, in interviews with CBS, NBC, the Weather Channel, and The Washington Post, as well as on his own blog and You Tube channel, Weather West—about the wind and the rain and the temperature outside, and how they are influenced by the larger forces of the atmosphere.“He uses language that is both precise and deep but very accessible, and that’s why you see him quoted everywhere,” Mark Hertsgaard, a longtime climate journalist who is the executive director of Covering Climate Now, told me. According to Swain’s own tally, he does more than 200 media interviews a year; he is, in other words, about as omnipresent as a weather guy can be in people’s lives. A climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources’ research unit, Swain is not exactly a “weather influencer,” that breed of streamer who delivers breathless updates about the next big storm. But he has become one of the country’s most influential explainers of the weather’s relationship to the climate; you’ve almost certainly heard from him if you consume just a scintilla of climate-related news.In January 2025, for instance, he was getting ready to publish a major paper as easterly winds were picking up across a Southern California landscape that was packed with grass after the previous, wet winter and worrisomely dry after a largely rainless autumn. The paper illustrated this phenomenon, which Swain had dubbed “hydro-climate whiplash.” The term describes how global warming will make extreme swings between above-average rainfall and drought more common, leading to damaging floods and destructive wildfires. Swain and his co-a