Looking for the war in the weather

This post started with a chat with a friend. We were talking about wars and climate, and he threw a question at me: does the war in Ukraine change the weather, through the change in emissions that the conflict causes? And then, more to the point, how would you actually answer that? I didn't have a good answer, but I liked the second part of the question more than the first. Most of my work is short-term forecasting, hours to days ahead, where the atmosphere you start from matters more than almost anything else. Climate projections are a different animal: decades instead of days, emissions pathways instead of initial conditions, and big ensembles of climate models that can disagree a lot with each other. I had used CMIP6 data here and there, but never properly, so this looked like a good excuse to sit down with it and get familiar with long-term projections. I also have a strong interest in how we model weather extremes, and lately I feel more and more pulled towards the seasonal and…