“In like a lion, out like a lamb,” we crowed when March rolled around in New York City, where I grew up. Weary of gray skies, relentless cold, and soot-blackened snow hills along city streets, we lived for the lamb-end of the month. Now, four decades later, the lamb, apparently lost, was found nosing around the Northeast on a 72-degree Christmas Day. The lion, meanwhile, bounds erratically across continents, heedless of the season or traditions that every culture has built around the basic rules of weather. It’s not just hot–cold extremes, either. Last spring in Oregon, where I moved partly for the mild weather, a tiny tornado touched down without warning on an ordinary, meteorologically ho-hum afternoon and—like a finger from heaven—flipped four cars around a college parking lot. Mind you, tornadoes don’t happen in Oregon. That’s what we keep getting: Unheard-of weather. Never-before-seen heat in Antarctica. Nonexistent snow packs for the first time ever. The world’s driest places suddenly awash. Epic ice storms. Super-typhoons. Wildfires turning normally sodden British Columbia into a sm …