Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new study suggests that extreme weather does impact climate concern, but the effect on people’s thinking only lasts for 3 months after the extreme weather event.
From the Press Release;
Will extreme weather events get Americans to act on climate change?
Scientists are drawing a link between climate change and extreme weather events with increasing confidence.
…
Yet actually experiencing extreme weather does not seem to be having a significant impact on American citizens’ concern about climate change.
This may change in the future, especially if extreme weather events become more frequent and widespread. But, as things stand today, our recent analysis reveals that Americans experiencing more unusual weather are not any more concerned about climate change.
…
Our analysis suggests there is indeed an association between exposure to extreme weather and increased concerns about climate change. Importantly, however, we also find that people’s concern about climate change is associated only with recent extreme weather. In fact, events more than three months in the past typically have no bearing on opinions about climate change.
In addition, it is important to emphasize that these effects are dwarfed by Americans’ partisan identification and political beliefs. …
Read more: https://theconversation.com/will-extreme-weather-events-get-americans-to-act-on-climate-change-53199
The abstract of the study;
Abstract
This paper examines whether experience of extreme weather events—such as excessive heat, droughts, flooding, and hurricanes—increases an individual’s level concern about climate change. We bring together micro-level geospatial data on extreme weather events from NOAA’s Storm Events Database with public opinion data from multiple years of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to study this question. We find evidence of a modest, but discernible positive relationship between experiencing extreme weather activity and expressions of concern about climate change. However, the effect only materializes for recent extreme weather activity; activity that occurred over longer periods of time does not affect public opinion. These results are generally robust to various measurement strategies and model specifications. Our findings contribute to the public opinion literature on the importance of local environmental conditions on attitude formation.
Read more: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-015-1555-3
Even the IPCC doesn’t think there is a verifiable connection between global warming and extreme weather. Unless there is a noticeable surge in weather extremes, alarmists can hype the weather all they want; ordinary people will mostly continue to ignore them.
We keep on hearing about how bad the weather is compared to yesteryear, but I was alive back then and know that they are lying.
My older brother always use to tell me that he had to walk 5 miles to his school ( uphill both ways ) through 6 feet of snow every winter in Blind River, Ontario..Ha, I proved him wrong, I went out and measured it…it was only 5 feet !!
How could I have been so blind – global warming in action! 🙂
LOL
What, he skipped the part about not having shoes back then, and it being uphill…both ways?
And the part about wearing your dad’s pajamas LOL.
More Hovis required …
Man cannot live by half-baked statistics alone.
I was a teenager in New England in the late 1970s. The winters were cold and horrible. People of my parents age believed the Ice Age warnings of the time because it was colder than when they were my age. People of my grandparents age said “nonsense” it was at least that cold when they were kids. It’s almost like there’s a 30(ish) year cycle or something.
That’s incorrect. The winters weren’t cold in the 70s. The summers weren’t warm in the 30s and 40s. If you look at the latest adjusted homogenized data of the last 100 years you will see the climate has actually been on a very smooth upward path from 1880 to today and almost 100% in complete correspondence to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. 30+ adjustments to the temperature record have PROVED beyond a doubt that these things like ships being able to cross the northern passage in the 30s and 40s and the climate getting colder in the 70s were false perceptions of the thermometers and people of the time who somehow were apparently involved in mass hysteria of some climatalogical sort.
We also have to adjust our hysterical reporting of the past in other areas. For instance looking at the reported natural disasters of the early 20th century there were clearly some serious misreportings. They show millions of people dieing from droughts and floods and storms. We all know the worst calamaties are occuring NOW not back then. The world was much more peaceful in the past. It is only now with the enormous CO2 burden we have placed that all these bad things are happening.
There may be jobs for those 110 Australian climate modelers who lost their jobs correcting historical records. For instance, when I go to the NCDC’s records database for temperatures it still shows the 30s and 40s as having most of the heat records. Clearly this is wrong. We all know the latest temperatures are the hottest EVAH!@ So clearly those old records need to be downscaled and adjusted to the correct temperatures. All the press articles that quote temperature records of over 100 degrees for 10 days or 20 days need to be erased because the thermometers of the day were all broken.
There’s plenty of work to do to fix the past so we are able to understand the severity of todays weather better.
There is a good reason it only lasts for 3 months. 3 months is the next season and they move on from hottest day ever to earliest freeze ever, etc. People instinctively know how lame that is.
Bravo Stephana, me too!
Nasty weather is natural. It is happening someplace all the time and always has. Vivid graphics on TV make it look ominous and omnipresent. Some mistakenly blame humans for it.
If it were not for an endless stream of bad weather the Weather Channel would not exist. That, actually, is a shame. We should stop calling it bad weather and accept it as interesting weather. And we should stop confusing it for climate.
Rogue Weather?
“Scientists are drawing a link between climate change and extreme weather events with increasing confidence.”
If they were interested at all in accuracy they’d have written “rent-seeking charlatans” instead of “scientists”.
We’re all prone to confirmation bias, it’s human nature. Scientists use to actively combat their own confirmation bias. Now they embrace it. Perhaps the scientists who support the political state-sponsored truth always have.
How is this new thing,Extreme Weather, defined?
How does it differ from former extreme weather, AKA “Storm”?
Is the “change” in the weather or in the eyes of the perceiver?
If you have spent all your formative years in “Sim world” a real storm bought be a bit frightening.
Imagine the wailing and wetting of themselves if the 1926/27 Mississippi flood happened this year.
Or the string of Caribbean Hurricanes the Spanish Treasure Fleets endured(Or not).
Or a Pompai Type Eruption.
Waiting for the asteroid indeed, frightened little nincompoops huddling in fear at the bottom of this gravity well.
John. You left out the tri-state tornado of 1925 that killed 695 people.
How about the so-called Super Outbreak of tornadoes on April 3rd, 1974?
Or the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 – killed about 8000 people and was the deadliest hurricane to ever hit the US.
“How is this new thing,Extreme Weather, defined?”
Well, it would be weather worse than last month and not nearly as good as next month.
Might be a bit frightening.. spell check works in mysterious ways.
Just ask the people of Pompeii 😉
“In addition, it is important to emphasize that these effects are dwarfed by Americans’ partisan identification and political beliefs. …”
I guess these clones don’t realize they are wielding a double-edged sword!!! I think we can agree with them on this. The unquestioning left partisans swallow the nanny government gruel without a thought.
Except for “Hurricane Sandy” – they are still milking that one, (even though it didn’t come ashore as a hurricane). I think it’s more than 3 months – (over 3 years).
On April 3, 2013, the results of a poll concerning Conspiracy Theories were displayed during an airing of the Today Show on NBC which elicited a response from Al Roker, the resident weatherman.
The following is the relevant exchange as it was aired on the April 3 Today show:
WILLIE GEIST: Take 2, some conspiracy theories. Want to show you a little Public Policy Polling. They took 20 widespread conspiracy theories and asked the American public what it thought. Do you believe in these?
NATALIE MORALES: What does this say about us?
GEIST: Global warming is a hoax. Thirty-seven percent believe that.
AL ROKER: Wow!
GEIST: Twenty-nine percent say aliens exist.
MORALES: Wow!
GEIST: Fourteen-percent of Americans believe in Bigfoot. Seven percent say the moon landing was faked. Five percent, Al, say that Paul McCartney actually died in 1966.
ROKER: Let me run the record backwards and see if that’s what it says.
MORALES: But the number one most believe theory: 51 percent believe that JFK was killed in a conspiracy.
GEIST: That’s a majority of Americans believe that.
ROKER: But 37 percent said, 37 percent of these people don’t believe in global warming!
GEIST: Yeah.
ROKER: They think it’s a hoax.
GEIST: Yeah.
ROKER: I mean that-
MORALES: All these weather events.
ROKER: Okay, two words: Superstorm Sandy!
MORALES: Sandy? Right. There you go.
Source: newsbusters.org/blogs/geoffrey-dickens/2013/04/03/al-roker-appalled-poll-showing-37-percent-believe-global-warming-h (01/11/2014)
And 85.5% wouldn’t know a sigma from a sand crab.
Oh Bollox! 86.5%
I live on the south shore of Long Island. I was in my house throughout Sandy. I hated how they hyped it and saw the news reporters disappointment that it wasn’t actually a hurricane. They tacked the Superstorm on to make it dramatic.
Yes, homes were flooded, but it was a trifecta of events. Extremely high tide, a full moon, and the storm surge. We have areas that regularly flood without storm surge.
The local news still runs stories about homes that haven’t been fixed, and I suppose in order to keep it alive in people’s minds.
Isn’t that good news for CAGW ers? They’ll forget about the 2 feet of snow in no time. (which was caused by global warming) That’s how the link is so certain. Climate/weather of any kind is definitely caused by global warming. (evil co2 molecule) And who can remember how hot it was last summer? It’ll be the hottest year on record. Just one land falling hurricane and it will be a 100 % increase. And no doubt, it will be a super storm! I just can’t seem to get it out of my head, it’s worse than we thought.
Here where I live in Perth, West Oz, I hear our media gossips often speak excitedly every time there’s a warm day whilst intoning gravely about climate.. but never is there any reference to the years where the roads melted, tyres on cars burst and children were hospitalized with burnt feet – in some cases where shoes had melted and stuck to their feet. Roads that had been here for decades prior like Stirling Highway still show the repairs that were done during this time, every petrol station sold tar remover and I recall each weekend washing the car also involved getting the tar off first.
Searching the online newspaper records for evidence of these melts is proving fruitless as there’s gaps in what is available, but my recollection was that this occurred the late 60’s and late 70’s. If anyone can find any media reference to these periods and events it might be interesting to use in reminding the current crop of media gossips of just how hot it got in the past.
Likewise–I remember it was so hot in southern California that the news stations used to routinely go out and fry eyes on the sidewalks. As to the extreme events–I have pictures of us kids in boats in the streets around LA. It is so much milder today…Around Bullhead city and Ft Mohave in Arizona here–it gets to 115 to 125 every year, but the news doesn’t mention it because of tourism. Now when it gets that hot, people act as if its never happened before–its maddening. And the “officially” recorded temps are lower than what the real person living there reports.
“fry eyes on the sidewalks”
These eyes, cry every night…
You can’t hide your frying’ eyes
I apologize to The Eagles, kinda.
Great, due to your aside reference, I have the Sesame Street song “Hace Calor” stuck in my head.
The problems of being a parent.
When I lived in Taft CA back in ’68 we never made the national news for the tarantula fights we held in the backyard either. Tarantulas only live in S. America.
A Climate Of Change In Calabria
These people pushing their agenda ain’t none too bright, are they? Seems like they’ve been suckered by their own propaganda. Every violent storm and there’s always those shots of trees crashing onto someone’s roof … where? Usually, it’s someplace else. They never show all those trees that completely missed falling on something or all those houses & cars that weren’t hit at all.
And then there’s that other metric … how many insurance companies have gone belly up due to the impact of claims due to all these weather disasters?
So, if your house is hit by an extreme weather event, it’s a disaster; if not, it’s a curiosity.
Leon
Good point. Damage is a function of (at least) 3 things:
1) current prices (i.e.: current prices greater than past prices)
2) storm severity
3) developmental change (i.e.: how many condos are here now as opposed to then)
Generally speaking the only thing reported is “storm severity”, and that can be pretty subjective
In other news, Keith Richards was found alive in a hotel room last night…
And Francisco Franco is still dead.
Living memory and climate change…. As we get older we experience bad weather events that are no worse than things that happened in our youth so we start to realize that the climate is fairly stable. Occasionally a weather record is broken but we have learnt that our own experiences still do not represent the limit of possible extremes and we know that with time most records get broken so the new record does not meant that the climate is changing drastically. Someone in their twenties who is just experiencing their first excruciating drought or baking hot spell will think differently along the lines that the climate is changing.
BOOK THE FIRST POVERTY
Chapter 1
Sun and Shadow
Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.
A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.
There was no wind to make a ripple on the foul water within the harbour, or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the two colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or day, for months. Hindoos, Russians, Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians, Greeks, Turks, descendants from all the builders of Babel, come to trade at Marseilles, sought the shade alike — taking refuge in any hiding-place from a sea too intensely blue to be looked at, and a sky of purple, set with one great flaming jewel of fire.
The universal stare made the eyes ache. Towards the distant line of Italian coast, indeed, it was a little relieved by light clouds of mist, slowly rising from the evaporation of the sea, but it softened nowhere else. Far away the staring roads, deep in dust, stared from the hill-side, stared from the hollow, stared from the interminable plain. Far away the dusty vines overhanging wayside cottages, and the monotonous wayside avenues of parched trees without shade, drooped beneath the stare of earth and sky. So did the horses with drowsy bells, in long files of carts, creeping slowly towards the interior; so did their recumbent drivers, when they were awake, which rarely happened; so did the exhausted labourers in the fields. Everything that lived or grew, was oppressed by the glare; except the lizard, passing swiftly over rough stone walls, and the cicala, chirping his dry hot chirp, like a rattle. The very dust was scorched brown, and something quivered in the atmosphere as if the air itself were panting.
Blinds, shutters, curtains, awnings, were all closed and drawn to keep out the stare. Grant it but a chink or keyhole, and it shot in like a white-hot arrow. The churches were the freest from it. To come out of the twilight of pillars and arches — dreamily dotted with winking lamps, dreamily peopled with ugly old shadows piously dozing, spitting, and begging — was to plunge into a fiery river, and swim for life to the nearest strip of shade. So, with people lounging and lying wherever shade was, with but little hum of tongues or barking of dogs, with occasional jangling of discordant church bells and rattling of vicious drums, Marseilles, a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling in the sun one day…
LITTLE DORRIT, by Charles Dickens
“Climate change; if you don’t believe it just look out the window.”
The trouble is that folks started looking out the window and not seeing anything special to worry about. The alarmists don’t understand that because they keep telling us to look out the window.
My mother remembers the dirty thirties. She thinks it’s way better now. It would be really hard to get her worked up about CAGW. My kids haven’t seen much climate change in their lifetimes.
The reason democracy works is because people aren’t nearly as stupid as the ‘elites’ think they are. Even if they can’t quite put their finger on the reason why, folks still have a pretty good idea when they are being lied to.
Why are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump doing so well? The citizens have figured out that the Democrat establishment is just as bad as the Republican establishment. Once they figure out that the alarmists are part of the establishment, we can guess that the alarmists luck will turn bad really fast. [/rant]
How are you supposed to believe in climate change when it took you three hours to get four miles thanks to the snow that we were assured would be a thing of the past? Particularly as the reason so little snow was so catastrophic was the councils cut the budget for snow clearing and gritting roads as a result of the same predictions.
Before they adjusted the data the warming we are seeing is an almost perfect match with predicted amounts from cleaner air thanks to the smoke laws of the fifties and sixties. the trouble is it did not come from a fancy computer model it came fro an old tank with air of different particle characteristics inserted and the effect physically measured. Primitive but from comparisons far more accurate than the computer models compared to the real world.
Say what? I haven’t seen that data. Calculating a change in distributions of extremes requires monumentally big sample sizes. I doubt we have that much data.
The flooding in Carlisle has been blamed on global warming /climate change but can I recommend a shepherds life by James Redbanks for pointers to the real problems like the wonderful bit about the ministry and his wildflower policies. Also his comments on the old farmers repairing the dry stone walls instead of tearing them down and selling the stone.
We had a friend in the lake district and I remember when one house was flooded the old farmer in the pub saying “told thee daft boogger that the stone wall held the water as well as the sheep so leave it be, but thee outsider thought ‘e knew better.”
We also still have not got anywhere near the height of the 1640 flood level plaque in Abingdon.
No trends in hurricanes (table 8 page 11) or typhoons (table 16 page 15) 1945-2014
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2630932
Also, the IPCC has backtracked on the agw to extreme weather connection
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/03/pielke-jr-agrees-extreme-weather-to-climate-connection-is-a-dead-issue/
Even IPCC’s 2013 AR5 report reluctantly admits there haven’t been ANY increasing global trends in severe weather frequency nor intensity for the past 60~100 years (depending on the phenomenon): hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, tornadoes, droughts, floods, thunderstorms, tropical storms, sub-tropical storms, etc..
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/03/pielke-jr-agrees-extreme-weather-to-climate-connection-is-a-dead-issue/
Rather than CAGW alarmists admitting they were wrong about severe weather, CAGW alarmists try to propagandize every one-off weather event with the hopes creating the IMPRESSION that severe weather is “worse than we thought” (TM), when reality actually shows no increasing trends…
Leftist MSM and politicians have been relatively successful with their weather propaganda, but more and more people are starting to see through their lies.
The only action these climate science clowns want is to have the government collect more taxes to fund their “climate science”. Talk about an incestuous relationship!
This is really the simplest thing to understand.
The topic of the over-estimation of the magnitude or probability of an event to which we have recent exposure is discussed widely in psychology.
Here is a part of the wikipedia page for “availability heuristic”.
“Applications
Media
After seeing news stories about child abductions, people may judge that the likelihood of this event is greater. Media coverage can help fuel a person’s example bias with widespread and extensive coverage of unusual events, such as homicide or airline accidents, and less coverage of more routine, less sensational events, such as common diseases or car accidents. For example, when asked to rate the probability of a variety of causes of death, people tend to rate “newsworthy” events as more likely because they can more readily recall an example from memory. Moreover, unusual and vivid events like homicides, shark attacks, or lightning are more often reported in mass media than common and un-sensational causes of death like common diseases.
For example, many people think that the likelihood of dying from shark attacks is greater than that of dying from being hit by falling airplane parts, when more people actually die from falling airplane parts. When a shark attack occurs, the deaths are widely reported in the media whereas deaths as a result of being hit by falling airplane parts are rarely reported in the media.”
As, you can see the section is titled “applications”. And in the field of the creation of mass hysteria, such insight has certainly been “applied” with great success.
So, there is no mystery in this. All that is required is that the target population must be bombarded by the exaggerated warmist propaganda 24 hours a day and 7 days per week and 365 days per year. And that the propaganda must contain frightening images of chaos and destruction. Even if they must be reruns of disasters from former times.
And, all the time mentioning, climate change, climate change.
Finally, the people will simply beg us to take away their money and save them from this imagined monster…
Here is the full instruction manual for operatives. I mean…the wikipedia page from which the quote was taken:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
How many people get hit and killed by falling airplane parts in the US every year?
I think there are at least a few to several shark attacks, most years have several in Florida alone.
This sounds like an odd example, and then they give no stats?
i doubt the example, unless they are talking about plane crashes and airshow disasters.
The odds of a random part falling off a plane is one thing, but for it to hit and kill someone would be extremely unlikely.
Ever look down on a plane flight?
I would guess it is less than one in 300,000. I got this by figuring one square foot per person and the area of the US. So 300,000 parts would have to fall, or sufficient size to kill a person, for every death, on average over time.
Not buying this example at all.
This is how I figure these things.
It does not get reported because it is not happening much.
Of course, I am talking about what the article implies, a random person walking down the street of plowing their field and a plane flying above them just happens to have a part fall off. Being killed on the ground when a plane crashes may be different odds. Still rare.
But sharks get people every now and then, although many do not die.
I used to swim at Playalinda beach at Cape Canaveral National Seashore. the next beach North is New Smyrna. New Smyrna is the shark bite capital of the US. Every year people get attacked there. Sometimes many.
I’m not concerned about falling airplane parts. It’s the falling parts from flying saucers that worry me. I got hit once. Damn near poked my eye out.
“Airplane parts” could include a full airplane as a special case. With that definition, the conjecture is probably true.
I did walk away from that post thinking exactly the same thing, Menicholas.
How likely is it that I will be killed by falling aircraft parts.
However, I concluded that the definition of death by falling aircraft part may have been as loose as the parts in question.
For example, a loose aircraft part which had fallen from another plane – destroyed Concord and effectively killed everyone on board and several people on the ground.
Does this qualify as death by falling aircraft parts?
http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20000725-0
And then with regard to Shark related deaths, what about the “Sharknado” events, in which numerous people were savaged by falling sharks picked up and deposited by a freak weather phenomenon?
Or was that only in a crap Hollywood Movie?
These days the distinction seems to be getting blurred.
Menick
Look up Poisson distribution. There is the famous London bombing problem. The city was divided into squares to evaluate the probability of a given square being hit during the blitz or by V2s. Surprisingly it wasn’t that high. It was assumed with a black out and quality of air navigation (winds rain etc) it would approximate randomness for this relatively small area.
Nice statistics, but y’all are forgetting something.
There are two groups far more likely than any others to be killed by falling airplane parts: Ground Crew, and military. They are near the planes when they take off, land, or are otherwise moving. The number one thing though, are infantrymen getting hit by things falling out of helicopters that they just jumped out of.
Those alone could fill the gap to exceed the paltry numbers killed by sharks.
Jonathan Haidt wrote about a study that shows how Liberal Left social psychology is. There is a lack of diversity that hinders research. There is concern it silences opposing voices.
“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.”
I’d like to see a study like that regarding climate scientists.
Sources: http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/32539/
http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/01/07/new-study-finds-conservative-social-psychologists/
Absolutely, and the evidence for this was never clearer than in the case of the career of bogus “scientist” Diederick Stapel:
“Stapel’s star got brighter when he published a study in Science about an experiment at the Utrecht train station which claimed that a trash-filled environment brought out racist tendencies in humans. In another study published earlier, Stapel claimed that eating meat made people selfish and less social. Yet a third study claimed that association with the word capitalism made people eat more M&Ms. Stapel threw the questionnaires in the trash bin and ate the M&Ms himself.”
http://www.amren.com/news/2013/04/the-mind-of-a-con-man/
Piers Corbyn has predicted a very clod event in the next 3 weeks for America and Canada. Let’s see ‘eh. He’s usually right.
He should try predicting the clods in Australia too,;)
Rain Clods, no doubt…
Paying us a visit is he?
“the effect on people’s thinking only lasts for 3 months after the extreme weather event.”
I KNEW climate change was responsible for my crap memory.
Australia CSIRO 350 stood down http://www.skynews.com.au/news/national/2016/02/08/csiro-job-cuts-to-affect-bom-weather-data.html
First snow ever, that’s not what the guide books say. Kuwait is the same latitude as Brisbane and it snowed there last winter. Lebanon gets snow every year.
Not a meaningful comparison. Yuznho Sakhalinska (Sakhalin Island Russia) is the same latitude as Paris, it frequently gets minus 40C there, never in Paris. Boston and Bordeaux, same latitude. Bitterly cold winters in Boston, never that cold in Bordeaux. Lebanon; only in the mountains. We went skying in the morning and golfing in short sleeves on the coast in the afternoon.
@ Eric, where did you find that picture, is there a link somewhere? Thanks.
Hi Tobias, its one of Anthony’s stock images, not sure where he found it…
Thanks Eric it just looks actually so similar like a pic we took in BC Canada (eventually my wife painted it and it is hanging in my office) that is why it caught my attention immidiately, The mountains below are a carbon copy
Perhaps it would help if climate scientists looked at the work done by social scientists. They showed back in the sixties that any extreme event’s effect averages out, so it does not just switch off, it declines steadily boosted by similar even if lesser ones and negated by opposite ones. In short given time weather becomes climate.
The posted article says people forget about extreme weather after about 3 months.
I have observed just the opposite happen. My wife and I moved to a locale in Northeast Washington in 2008. The first winter dropped 2 feet of snow between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Long term residents all said that while snowfall had been lighter during the recent decade, it used to always snow heavily when they were young.
Last summer we moved to Central Oregon. For the last 2 years I have been watching web cams to get an idea of expected snowfall, and saw only light snowfalls of a few inches at a time that melted away between events. This time we got 20 inches over a week right after Thanksgiving, and at least 9″ are still on the ground. Locals say that snowfall had been light for several years, but it used to snow this much most winters!
It seems that extreme snowfall is never forgotten. Though records show heavy snowfalls for both areas have come along periodically, people remember every event, swearing it was “usually”.
I think the time that passes between extreme weather events gets dropped from memory, so that extreme weather seemed to have been more frequent years ago, at least in our memories. Thus whenever several months have passed since the last extreme weather event, people think extreme weather is getting rarer, whether it is or isn’t.
SR
Of course, if the lack of weather (precipitation) is the extreme weather, it only takes a short time before the lack of weather seems extremely persistent…
SR
People’s memory of extreme events is directly proportional to how much it affected them. It’s not that affected by what the media tells them – that’s the short-term part.
If you had to dig yourselves out 60 days in a row, you’ll remember that a damn sight longer than if you had one bad blizzard.
If your house floods and you have to live in a hotel, a caravan or whatever for 6 months before the repairs are all finished, you’ll remember that a lot longer than if the local park had some swans swimming on it for a few days.
If you have power cuts all winter, you’ll remember that a lot longer than if you kept warm with central heating.
People remember things that really affected their lives.
I remembered being in a van which overturned at 50mph for many years afterwards, especially if young men were driving cars too fast.
I remembered the blizzards in Scotland in early January 1987 because I skied to work and hacked open a frozen river for water at the weekend when climbing the winter mountains (both extremely rare events).
I don’t remember the famous 1987 hurricane in the UK, because I was in Scotland and we just had a fairly windy evening, nothing special. Those in the SE who had trees collapse near their homes probably have a more vivid memory…..
We certainly do.
I remember the Philadelphia Bulletin had the hottest and coldest USA temperatures every day posted everyday during the summer during the 1950’s. Usually Yuma AZ was the hottest with 120F or + and the coldest was usually somewhere in Colorado – Leadville at 10,000 ft was the coldest… I was in Blythe, CA in 1955 during the summer and it was 120FG in the shade. There is probably some record somewhere this….
What a load of BS.
My father in law often told us his memories of growing up on the family farm on the Canadian praries in the early 1900’s.
He used to have to walk ten miles each way to get to school. Through snow drifts over his head. While wearing shorts. In bare feet. Except for the barbed wire he wrapped around his feet for traction on the ice.
Those warmists should be thankful for all the warming.
In the other major battle with the; USDA/UN world health org., Dr. Tim Noakes has said that if all diabetics around the globe were put onto LCHF, “at least six major pharmaceutical companies would go out of business”.http://www.biznews.com/low-carb-healthy-fat-science/2016/01/22/tim-noakes-and-what-good-scientists-do-when-faced-with-the-evidence/ ZIKA is a just a grain in the sand compared to – stratospheric health care costs, a chronically sick health care system, epidemics of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
“Scientists are drawing a link between climate change and extreme weather events with increasing confidence … OF STAYING ON THE GRAVY TRAIN !
The temperature drops, because the polar vortex is broken and the winter will be long.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/gfs_t50_nh_f00.png
Don’t jump the gun …
http://users.met.fu-berlin.de/~Aktuell/strat-www/wdiag/figs/ecmwf1/temps.gif
http://users.met.fu-berlin.de/~Aktuell/strat-www/wdiag/figs/ecmwf1/fluxes.gif
This is just the waves caused by the decrease in solar activity.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_WAVE1_MEAN_JFM_NH_2016.png
http://sol.spacenvironment.net/raps_ops/current_files/rtimg/dose.15km.png
Let’s see galactic radiation.
Now look at the temperature anomalies.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_TEMP_ANOM_JFM_NH_2016.png
Jump temperatures in the stratosphere.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/50mb9065.png
Jet stream dives to on the east United States.
It will be cold in the eastern US.
http://www.weatherplaza.com/en-US/sat/?region=usa.ir
@ren: http://www.aer.com/science-research/climate-weather/arctic-oscillation
Pentagon orders commanders to prioritize climate change in all military actions
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/feb/7/pentagon-orders-commanders-to-prioritize-climate-c/
The Pentagon is ordering the top brass to incorporate climate change into virtually everything they do, from testing weapons to training troops to war planning to joint exercises with allies.
A new directive’s theme: The U.S. Armed Forces must show “resilience” and beat back the threat based on “actionable science.”
They will fix this with a global winter via nuclear war.
Except that the concept of nuclear winter was quite possibly invented by the Ruskies in order to promote western calls for unilateral disarmament.
And would have no more reality in practice than the predicted persian gulf war oil fires cooling – which turned out to be a load of hogwash.
“According to Sergei Tretyakov, “The KGB was responsible for creating the entire nuclear winter story to stop the Pershing II missiles.” Tretyakov says that the KGB wanted to prevent the United States from deploying the missiles in Western Europe and that, directed by Yuri Andropov, they used the Soviet Peace Committee, a government organization, to organize and finance demonstrations in Europe against US bases. He claims that misinformation based on a faked “doomsday report” by the Soviet Academy of Sciences about the effect of nuclear war on climate was distributed to peace groups, the environmental movement and the journal Ambio which carried a key article on the topic in 1982.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures
Bureaucracies love the “climate change” meme, as a way to boost their relevance and hopefully, funding.
Don’t you just love “military intelligence”?
The problem with “crying wolf” is when the wolf does not show up, one does tend to lose credibility. If Algore could continually revise An Incovenient Truth so it did not look silly, perhaps he sould not be a running joke. Remember what Winston Smith’s job was in 1984. Now he would be doing it for NASA GISS.
“Rent-seeking “scientists” are drawing a link between climate change and extreme weather events with increasing desperation.” There, fixed. It’s a complete fabrication, of course, and they know it. But, they are simply following the sirective of their hero, Stephen Schneider who said “….we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” For the now-failing Climatist Industry, there is no decision and no balance. Lying is their only option, and they just lie their pants off.
man killed by falling meteorite……….extreme weather
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/Govt-confirms-meteorite-blast-in-Vellore-killed-man/articleshow/50894959.cms
The flip side of the same coin is “Will the common-sense of American voters ever convince the climate-ejits that their doomsday scenario is exaggerated?”
I find great irony in the entire “severe weather” line since both the geological record and the historical record show that the Little Ice Age was marked by more frequent, violent storms while the Medieval Warming had notably milder weather. Guess that doesn’t fit the political summary’s scary story compulsions.
It is doubly curious, because the computer models predict that most of the warming should take place toward the poles with little effect on the tropics. This should actually produce less tension in Earth’s heat exchange engine, but I guess warning of milder weather just doesn’t do ring the scary story alarm very well.
Another Harpo Marxist paper:
http://www.city-journal.org/2016/bc0205rb.html
[excerpt]
“In chapter 15, we finally get to Malm’s solution, which is, wait for it . . . central planning. A few paragraphs after quoting Leon Trotsky, Malm notes that the majority of global greenhouse gases are emitted from four places: the U.S., the E.U., China, and India. The way to cut those emissions is simple, says Malm. We merely need to “set up one special ministry in each and we would be on our way.” Ah yes, a special ministry. Welcome, comrades, to Professor Malm’s Climate Gulag. It’s for your own good, after all.”
We need to go back to the good old days prior to climate change or what. That should make the global warning extreme weather people happy.
Here is link about the winters of 1887-1888 on the northern plains: http://climate.umn.edu/pdf/mn_winter_1887-1888.pdf
According to Laskin’s account, “Even in a region known for abrupt and radical
meteorological change, the blizzard of 1888 was unprecedented in its violence and
suddenness. There was no atmospheric herald. No eerie green tinge to the sky or
fleecy cirrus forerunner. One moment it was mild, the sun was shining, a damp wind
blew fitfully out of the south – the next moment frozen hell had broken loose. The air
was so thick with find ground wind lashed ice crystals that people could not breathe.
The ice dust webbed their eyelashes and sealed their eyes shut. It sifted into the loose
weave of their coats, shirts, dresses and underwear until their skin was packed with
snow. Farmers who had spent a decade walking the same worn paths became
disoriented in seconds……The blizzard of January 12, 1888, known as the ‘the
Schoolchildren’s Blizzard’ because so many of the victims were children caught out
on their way home from school, became a marker in the lives of the settlers, the
watershed event that separated before and after. The number of deaths – estimated as
between 250 and 500 – was small compared to that of the Johnstown Flood that
wiped out an entire industrial town…the following year or the Galveston hurricane of
1900….But it was traumatic enough that it left an indelible bruise on the
consciousness of the region. The pioneers were by and large a taciturn lot……..Yet
their accounts of the blizzard of 1888 are shot through with amazement, awe,
-18-
disbelief…..The blizzard literally froze a single day in time. It sent a clean, fine blade
through the history of the prairie….”.
I guess the climate charge people are really long for this kind of weather.
Like that huge increase in hurricanes:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/accumulated_cyclone_energy.asp?basin=gl
Oooops! ok so just the opposite has happened the last 2 decades. Hurricanes are only one type of weather. How about like that huge increase in violent tornadoes;
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/images/tornado/clim/EF3-EF5.png
OK, so violent tornadoes are also just one type of very extreme weather that has decreased noincreased.
Surely Super Storm Sandy………
Nope, Hurricane Hazel in 1954 formed for the exact same reasons and did the exactly same thing, in the same place, starting out as a much stronger Cat. 4 which was stronger(and during global cooling):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Hazel
OK then, that widespread severe drought in the Cornbelt in 2012 must have been caused by Climate Change as were were told!
Nope, actually, the 24 consecutive growing seasons without a severe drought(previous one was 1988) in that region was a record and represented the best growing conditions in recorded history.
OK, time to tell the truth then. The types of extreme weather that have increased are related to heavy rain events/flooding. Warmer air holds more moisture. It also makes heat waves in the Summer more unbearable , with higher dew points/humidity. Also, more record warm nights and record warmth in the higher latitudes.
Odd that human caused Climate Change seems to get the blame for only bad things, with a planet greening up and and most life benefiting……..but you don’t need to pay attention to those facts. They are just observations, you know, empirical data.
Computer models and government paid scientists are much better at telling us what we should know about climate.
The key to inducing global warming hysteria is to push beyond weather items. For example, we can blame all forest fires on global warming, In my recent pseudo paper I managed to say we would see increased child mortality from hypothermia as children fell through thin ice. We can also blame low milk prices on warmer winters, as cows give more milk in milder winters. This is bad for farmers. You get the idea.
How many Hiroshima bombs are the equivalent of that thunderstorm at the top? Quite a few I’d guess.
Hiroshima bombs are an excellent way to describe heat/energy when:
1. You are releasing all of that energy in one location in seconds………..as in the original event that resulted in the term.
2. When you are trying to scare people that don’t understand the ocean/atmosphere system by intentionally using a term that sounds very alarming to mislead a targeted audience. The vast heat capacity of the oceans mean that adding a Hiroshima bomb of heat is like adding a drop of hot water to your in ground pool. Even adding 4 drops of hot water per second to your pool will contribute, in a relative sense just a minuscule bit of heating vs a days worth of solar energy.