Claim: Global warming will affect your taste in music

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

beatles-sunh/t DailyCaller – British researchers have claimed that global warming strongly influences our taste in music.

According to FirstPost;

Fancy listening to the Beatles’ ‘Here Comes The Sun’ when you are grinding out yet another long, sweaty heatwave? “These assumptions we have about certain weather being good and certain weather being bad, like sun being good — that might change,” researcher Karen Aplin of the University of Oxford said at a European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna.

Aplin and five other scientists combed through databases of more than 15,000 pop songs, finding statistical backing for the assumption that our moods are strongly swayed by the weather. These emotions, in turn, are expressed in the music artists compose and what the public likes to hear.

Read more: http://www.firstpost.com/living/wonder-songs-getting-worse-might-global-warming-2196750.html

I guess its not difficult to find a better proxy than tree rings.

My question, if we apply this principle to films as well as songs, what can we infer from recent films which express fear of ice and snow, like The Day after Tomorrow, or even the children’s film Frozen? Might scientists in the future, consider popular culture to be a better proxy for global temperature, than massively “adjusted” and probably defective official temperature records?

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Paul Marko
April 16, 2015 4:52 pm

Our civilization is regressing. Accordingly, our ancestors would have easily solved this warming problem by sacrificing a virgin. The odds of success are questionable, but in today’s society could we even get started.

DonK31
Reply to  Paul Marko
April 16, 2015 8:40 pm

The problem with sacrificing virgins now…How do you find one?

ulriclyons
April 16, 2015 5:07 pm

I notice a sudden flux of Björk posts on facebook when we have a cold snap in the UK.

Steve P
April 16, 2015 5:11 pm

.. finding statistical backing for the assumption that our moods are strongly swayed by the weather.

Gosh!
These guys really may be on to something here: No doubt, most of us prefer sunny days to cloudy ones, but no harm in spending a little (read: lots) of our cash to prove an obvious point, or is it a startling breakthrough?
Also noteworthy: Our moods are strongly swayed by music. Breathtaking stuff here, and the CAGW bandwagon rolls on, its crepe paper constantly changing colors to reflect the changing goalposts, and hey! That ain’t crepe paper, it’s our money.

Here comes the sun king
Here comes the sun king
Everybody’s laughing
Everybody’s happy
Here comes the sun king
Quando paramucho mi amore de felice carazón
Mundo paparazzi mi amore chica ferdi para sol
Questo obrigado tanto mucho que canite carousel

Track 11 on Abbey Road, John Lennon & Paul McCartney.
(2nd verse, much worse than the first…gibberish, in fact)

Bottom line question: does our taste in music, or lack thereof, affect our belief, or skepticism, about CAGW?
Inquiring minds would like to know what affect Rap, Hip Hop, and other such noise parading as music has on young, impressionable minds.

Annie
Reply to  Steve P
April 16, 2015 6:09 pm

What effect? They act as if they have been drugged and de-brained.

Steve P
Reply to  Annie
April 18, 2015 12:18 pm

Yes, and to pursue a perhaps trivial point, you may have noted that I used the word affect as both verb and noun in my comment.
While it is true that the general rule is to use effect as a noun, and affect as a verb, the latter also has good standing as a noun, whereas effects are objective, while affects are subjective:

¹af.fect n [ME, fr. L affectus, fr. afficere] hi(14c) 1 obs: feeling, affection 2: the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily changes usage see effect
[…]
The noun affect is sometimes mistakenly used for effect. Except when your topic is psychology, you will seldom need the noun affect.
Copyright © 1994 Merriam-Webster, Inc.

(my bold)
I take this to mean that effects are measurable, where affects, being subjective, are not. This is the same divide that separates science from psychology.
My interest is a possible link between heavy, bass-laden music and aggressive or violent behavior, hence the psychological slant and the use of the noun affect, but perhaps one or more of the erudite wordsmiths who haunt this hallowed blog will weigh in on the matter.
-☺-

Reply to  Steve P
April 16, 2015 6:12 pm

Reply to  Tom Trevor
April 16, 2015 6:14 pm

Rain or shine we still have the beatles.

Reply to  Tom Trevor
April 16, 2015 6:36 pm

“And the banker never wears a mac.
In the pouring rain.
very strange.
Meanwhile back in Penny Lane…..”
So the Beatles were secretly warning us about climate change even in even songs about roads.
In fact why should we all live in a Yellow Submarine? Well, quite clearly because the sea level has risen so much there is no dry land to live on. Their album covers make it clear that Paul is dead. He died of climate change, Help! I need someone not just anyone, Help me if can . Only someone like Michael Mann would understand.

Reply to  Tom Trevor
April 16, 2015 7:36 pm

It is worse than I thought even “let it be” is about climate change.
” And when the night is cloudy
There is still a light that shines on me
Shine on until tomorrow, let it be”

RoHa
April 16, 2015 5:38 pm
April 16, 2015 5:49 pm

Somehow, the phrase “jumped the shark” comes to mind when I read this piece.

Alx
April 16, 2015 6:18 pm

When I think of Climate change, I think of The Who and “Won’t get fooled again”

Reply to  Alx
April 16, 2015 6:23 pm

Baba O’riley (aka Teenage Wasteland) is about a couple leaving the city for the country, I guess they have to leave because of climate change.

April 16, 2015 6:23 pm

33 Degrees (Fahrenheit or Celsius … take your pick …)

JimS
April 16, 2015 6:26 pm

The premise that weather affects our moods and possibly our taste in music has a ring of truth to it. For instance, while I was shovelling the snow off my driveway, every other day, all winter long, I kept humming, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…”; long after Christmas came and went.

GregK
April 16, 2015 6:48 pm

Probably true but in reverse.
There’s nothing on the planet happier than miserable english people ……because they know that’s the proper condition of humanity_ ______cold, fog-bound and suffering from flu.
If they are enjoying themselves they are unhappy because they know it won’t last.
I suspect plenty of Californians, Floridians and certainly Australians enjoy… “Here Comes the Sun”.
The first indication that winter is ending in Australia is hearing “Good Vibrations” on the radio.
Could the Beach Boys have been English? Hardly !
Karen Aplin needs to get out more and enjoy what little summer is available in Oxford

Eustace Cranch
April 16, 2015 7:05 pm

Boiling heat, summer stench
‘Neath the black the sky looks dead
Call my name through the cream
And I’ll hear you scream again
Black hole sun
Won’t you come
And wash away the rain
Black hole sun
Won’t you come
Won’t you come (Won’t you come)
-Soundgarden

April 16, 2015 7:39 pm

Reply to  Tom Trevor
April 16, 2015 7:56 pm

lee
Reply to  Tom Trevor
April 16, 2015 8:31 pm

C’mon baby light my fire.

Ernest Bush
April 16, 2015 7:55 pm

Yawn!

Walt D.
April 16, 2015 8:36 pm

By the time global warming or climate change arrives we will all be dead!

Robdel
April 16, 2015 8:44 pm

Is there anything climate change cannot do?

Dudley Horscroft
April 16, 2015 9:02 pm

Obviously coolth is good. Bring back Beethoven, Bach, Telemann, Haydn, Rameau, Purcell and Tallis. The question is: is good music the result of cool times or are cool times the result of good music? Perhaps heading for another ice age may be A GOOD THING!
Lovely to see the highly esteemed Mr J. Benny again, but I never saw “The Twilight Zone”. What was a shock was seeing the cigarette ad at the end! Horror!!!!!

2soonold2latesmart
April 16, 2015 9:03 pm
Mac the Knife
April 16, 2015 9:42 pm

Theme song for all AGW true believers: Fire – Aurthur Brown
https://youtu.be/pCU5hTCynkQ

April 16, 2015 11:25 pm

You’re as cold as ice!
You’re willing to sacrifice our love.
You never take advice…

michael hart
April 17, 2015 12:30 am

1:44 of magic

Espen
April 17, 2015 1:17 am

Obviously. With my fully coupled anthropogenic music model I calculate that by 2100, Chris Rea’s “On The Beach” will be played by 12 trillion people a day.

Editor
April 17, 2015 2:15 am

Little Lies by Fleetwood Mac could encompass the whole AGW hypothesis

ulriclyons
April 17, 2015 3:55 am

Not Chicken Little
April 17, 2015 6:01 am

Global Warming – is there anything it can’t do?

Tom in Florida
April 17, 2015 6:06 am

None of the above. Perhaps the best of all:
Hide the Decline
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dul_hYde0nk

indefatigablefrog
April 17, 2015 7:38 am

Somehow or other Matt Briggs contrived to manufacture the perfect parody of this research.
In advance!!!!
Another example of skeptic prescience:
http://wmbriggs.com/post/4423/