Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Apparently we’ve all become so used to unusual weather caused by climate change we haven’t noticed the world is ending.
The data is in. Frogs don’t boil. But we might.
By Nick Obradovich and Frances C. Moore February 25
…
Humans are amazingly adaptable creatures. We can live at the poles, in harsh deserts and even in space.
But sometimes our adaptability can be costly. Unhealthful diets, limited exercise, poor work-life balance, excessive time on social media — we each have bad habits we’ve become accustomed to that end up costing us in the long run. It takes an effort of will to recognize and modify the destructive patterns of behavior we’ve normalized.
…
However, the pace of our changing climate may also come with a downside. It may be easy for humans to normalize a climate that is, at least on geological-time scales, rapidly and dramatically changing.
…
Read more (paywalled): https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/02/25/data-are-frogs-dont-boil-we-might/
The abstract of the study;
Rapidly declining remarkability of temperature anomalies may obscure public perception of climate change
Frances C. Moore, Nick Obradovich, Flavio Lehner, and Patrick Baylis
The changing global climate is producing increasingly unusual weather relative to preindustrial conditions. In an absolute sense, these changing conditions constitute direct evidence of anthropogenic climate change. However, human evaluation of weather as either normal or abnormal will also be influenced by a range of factors including expectations, memory limitations, and cognitive biases. Here we show that experience of weather in recent years—rather than longer historical periods—determines the climatic baseline against which current weather is evaluated, potentially obscuring public recognition of anthropogenic climate change. We employ variation in decadal trends in temperature at weekly and county resolution over the continental United States, combined with discussion of the weather drawn from over 2 billion social media posts. These data indicate that the remarkability of particular temperatures changes rapidly with repeated exposure. Using sentiment analysis tools, we provide evidence for a “boiling frog” effect: The declining noteworthiness of historically extreme temperatures is not accompanied by a decline in the negative sentiment that they induce, indicating that social normalization of extreme conditions rather than adaptation is driving these results. Using climate model projections we show that, despite large increases in absolute temperature, anomalies relative to our empirically estimated shifting baseline are small and not clearly distinguishable from zero throughout the 21st century.
Read more: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/02/15/1816541116
A more positive way of expressing this discovery, if we assume the weather anomalies are real, is that humans are adaptable – we would have no difficulty tolerating a few degrees of global warming.
But if the authors of the study had said something that upbeat, how would they have included their boiling frog metaphor?
Ironic – ‘boiling the frog’ was exactly the approach CNN recommended for AOC’s green deal – see, that ten-year push would have caused people to notice.
That’s why they wanted twenty or thirty years to implement it, so they would educated reason out of everyone alive, and those that remembered a better life would be dead.
In China they had little red book with a selection of the Chairman Mao’s thoughts.
The Cortez’ little red book (it should be a compulsory reading and memorising for all of her followers) can be found here:
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/alexandria_ocasiocortez?lgm=l
“The biggest hurdle that our communities have is cynicism – saying it’s a done deal, who cares; there’s no point to voting.”
Wasn’t this the attitude that allowed her to win her office? She calls it a problem?
She must think her district voted for her because she is special.
Short bus special.
I could write a book just itemizing AOC’s non-sequiturs such as:
…and of course I could go on from there with every one of her ridiculous assertions (“we have 12 years until climate catastrophe.” ; “we all know that recently it has been much colder and warmer than ever.”)
The best way to counter the GND is not to address things that could be excused as vague long range goals (as her apologists are wont to do) but rather to address the impracticality of the basics:
– rebuilding even many (vs all) of the structures in the US
– reducing (not necessarily eliminating), air travel in continental US by High Speed Rail
– replacing fossil fuel with wind or solar in any/b> time frame, while at the same time
– eliminating nuclear sources of energy
We have to ignore “cow farts”.
We also have to emphasise that the “social justice” recommendations have nothing to do with Climate Change.
The amazing thing is that the “AOC Little Red Book” is based on only 2 months as a “politician” in the MSM lens.
It’s OK as long as AOC is not joined by other semi-clones in the near future, but that can not be excluded. Millions of new, the ‘facebook’ educated of life experience short youngsters are getting voting rights, might find such empty rhetoric attractive.
Everyone has a right to health care. They do not have a right to force someone else to pay for it.
Weapons-grade stupid.
…using a lot of big fancy words….to flat out lie
” It may be easy for humans to normalize a climate that is, at least on geological-time scales, rapidly and dramatically changing”
As nothing is rapidly and dramatically changing, just their vacuous claims, this is complete and total propaganda.
The way in which the Left obsesses about climate, the myriad ways they twist the narrative, but of course none are willing to give up their many pet luxuries, oh no, that would beneath their stations in life, but they bleat like sheep for someone to “do something” and tell them that their lives and energy are somehow “green”, well their fossil fuel use is green, the C02 is plant food.
No, no nooooo…
My CO2 is Green, Their CO2 is BAAAAAD
This could easily pass as a spoof article. It’s such total BS that I can smell it through my computer monitor.
The things some people do for grant funding and academic grades!
Doesn’t “Social Normalization” refer to “Becoming Accustomed to”?
Doesn’t “Becomming Accustomed to” indicate “Adaptation”?
Wouldn’t Social Normalization actually be just another form of Adaptation?
Oh come on now. It sounds like you’re trying to split frog hairs. 😄
Bryan A,
… my thought exactly.
Wouldn’t “social normalization” be an INDICATOR of such physical adaptation? Otherwise, “social normalization” would NOT occur! Rather, large-scale survival stress and suffering would be detected.
Damn good thing we keep normalizing (adapting) our social advancements otherwise we’d still be grunting and painting on cave walls.
Is this a progressive actually arguing against progress, and wanting to remain inflexibly conservative?
Is there nothing CO2 can’t do?
so, don’t trust your senses and memory. why would they want that?
The minor little problem is that the disasters are not happening at any higher rate, indeed a lower rate. And the mild warming is thus far beneficial in total.
Total chutzpah is a requirement for an employee of the WaPost.
the only real indication that the populace has that things are getting worse is the MSM pushing them to believe and fear that it is. The MSM does a real good job upsetting the Sheeple
Please remind me what the correct temperature of the world is.
Colder than what I feel in summer; warmer than what I feel in winter..
72° farenheit
Not 72 F – I cant snow ski at that temp. – And the beach should be 78 F. Geez
I prefer upper 80s so I can run nekkid thru the woods…okay a loin cloth.
This could easily pass as a spoof article
==========
By Nick Obradovich and Frances C. Moore Butts.
I’m thinking of writing a dissertation on the similarities between the contemporary mass loss of rationality by sections of the western world when it comes to perspectives on how climate(s) operate and affect humanity, and the madness that was “spiritualism” that pervaded societies in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
I think the mass brain fizz that underpinned both these episodes has never been psychiatrically explained, but the behaviours are cannily alike –
based on nothing more than an ephemeral notion;
unquestioning reliance on self-appointed “guides”;
lots of meetings of sects to compare observances of expected supportive phenomena;
‘pay-to-play’ fee schedules in accordance with capacity & willingness to pay;
eager unskeptical reportage of the experiences of participating “leaders”;
once captured by the ‘movement’, disciples never recant, despite rationality continuously presenting them with the fallacy of their dogma.
I would welcome suggestions as to where I should submit my draft dissertation for publication.
Update –
I was just reading that many card-carrying followers of spiritualism were “reformers” and “socialists”.
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you to discover that such people would be taken in by a flawed movement like spiritualism.
Yes. Marxism is a 19th century kookie fad, like phrenology and spirit rapping.
I remember Spirit, and they certainly weren’t rappers! 🙂
What about the Crypt Kicker 5?
Don’t forget all the advocates and groups for the various ‘Utopias’ within that time-window, and their separatist retreat-ism, into perfected communes of equality, which regularly went belly-up (with horrible to fatal consequences) when the ideology of total human perfectionism was revealed to be out of step with the ground-truths of everyday human life needs and interaction. We still see people advocating for radical anarchism or socialism today, when all that conservatism is even interested in, is what works in the ground-truthed world of everyday human life and needs.
You’ve got to wonder why they have been taught to detest what actually works? lol
At this point it’s pretty clear that low IQ and poor moral character are prerequisites for participating in the climate scare. They’re simply yapping at each other.
But “they” are a majority in the House of Congress, a few seats short of a majority in the Senate, and an election away from possibly holding POTUS.
I’m sure there are a few folks in Venezuela who thought the Socialists were just “yapping at each other”.
We need to wake up!
At this point it’s pretty clear that low IQ and poor moral character are prerequisites for members of Congress. They’re simply yapping at each other.
FIFY
Actually, I think that applies to politicians worldwide.
Somebody that could notice climate change on geological time scales would be really old. Not just grandfather, or even great-grandfather old, but like thousands of years old at least. Like before people wrote things down. Gonna have to call BS on that claim.
…we each have bad habits we’ve become accustomed to that end up costing us in the long run.
Oh. Sort of like making alarming predictions based on bad data and worse analysis. And then screaming about looming disaster if we don’t do immensely foolish things to fend off the calamity.
You mean like that?
Ok, the record high temp where I am (north of Atlanta) was set in 2012 (106 degrees F), edging out the previous record of 105, set in 1980. Since then, the high for each year has been 92, 95, 97, 100, 94 and 95. In fact, the yearly high temperature has been in the 90s or low 100s going back to at least 1930 (when it was 103).
There have been no higher temps to adapt to where I am, slow, fast, or whatever. Just where have temps risen to force adaptation to a hotter environment?
“The changing global climate is producing increasingly unusual weather relative to preindustrial conditions.” WHERE??? Unless they can point to a place where the weather has been consistently out of the bounds of its normal climatic range, then no place is experiencing a climate change requiring adaptation.
Those who believe the manmade, catastrophic climate change crap may eat this stuff up, but everytime someone publishes a nonsense piece like this, it just further reinforces my opinion that they have no evidence of, much less proof for, any significant climate change. That means man is responsible for nothing wrt climate, and there will be no *unusual* catastrophes, just the same old stuff mother nature has been throwing at us since the start of time.
I think this is a “soft spot”, a chink in the alarmists armor; a concept that “every day folk” can get their heads around. No models, no talk of the troposphere; forget Arrhenius and Callander – just push back on kitchen table statements like this, that they’ve very successfully gotten the public to believe, through repetition, is gospel; to the point that “everyone” bends their memory to align with this meme.
A great example is AOC’s latest rant where she says in effect “…we have all seen that it is much warmer and colder than ever before” based on her 29 year lifetime. (She must be very sensitive to temperature to notice 10ths of a degree change.)
My problem though is HOW to introduce real data in a way that would reach the public!
Drs Christie, Pielke, Curry can produce solid observational data at a recent congressional hearing and the alarmists (Democrats) bring on a former NFL player who experienced trauma from repeated concussions which he claims was made worse by “Climate Change” (I’m not making this up); and which story do you think the MSM ran with? A “Climate Social Justice” witness also appeared with a cap with “12” on it which he said summarized his testimony that we only had 12 years before climate catastrophe.
I continue to believe that Happer’s committee has to be non-confrontational (no Red Team/Blue Team mission) but rather address specific national security issues as they arise objectively, and when their conclusion on a specific aspect of the topic differs from the “13 US Agency Report” show the observational data they used to make their recommendation, and how it differs from that report.
If DJT were then to enact a policy or an action based on the report, extreme MSM and activist alarmists would come out of the woodwork to object. The chess master could then immediately say “I’m listening; give me the historical data that backs your position.” This would freeze the legitimate scientists that have used ad hominems to counter skeptics, and leave the MSM and activists hanging in the wind.
Or so I would hope.
jtom:
“Unless they can point to a place where the weather has been consistently out of bounds of its normal climatic range, then no place is experiencing a climate change requiring adaptation”
Another way to look at the effect of rising temperatures is to examine the incidence of weather-related natural disasters.
The Wikipedia list of natural disasters in the United States, 1816-2017 lists 37 weather-related disasters between 2000 and 2017, with 14 of them occurring during the very strong 2014-2016 El Nino. For the prior 17 years, there were only 16, and for the 17 years before then, only 7.
In Great Britain, there were 24 between 2000 and 2017, and only 4 in the prior 17 years.
It does look as if increasing temperatures are the cause of the large increase in weather-related natural disasters, and that relief could be obtained if temperatures were to be lowered.
(However, I would hurry to maintain that the temperature increases are NOT due to increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere).
More ‘disasters’ being the result of more people, with more to lose, living in more vulnerable locations in a more connected world with more capacity to register and record them, with more data (with more spatial and more temporal resolution) and more sensitivity to human loss. No change in ‘extreme natural events’, just our ability to identify their impacts.
Eric Hunter:
What you say is partially true. However, during the 19 months of the Oct 2014-2016 El Nino (the warmest on record), there were 10 weather-related disasters, the most ever recorded in that short period of time.
None of your objections would have applied to those disasters. The only variable was the elevated temperatures.
Mr Henry,
That does mean that such a high frequency of similar magnitude events has never happened before, merely that they went unrecorded. Past warming periods would exhibit similar events, albeit with less evidence.
Elevated temperatures, or more likely, random chance.
Your time frame is way too short to draw any meaningful conclusions from
Another possibility is that El Nino’s change the weather, no need to invoke temperature increases.
More Natural Disasters?
Don’t you mean “More Reported Weather Events” that cost money?
Including Wild Fires, which are not just weather related?
I suggest you look at a different Wiki page for your Natural Disaster, try just US Hurricanes and then tell us 2000-2017 have more than the other periods, in fact why aren’t all those Hurricanes listed under the natural disasters?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_hurricanes
Burl:
“It does look as if increasing temperatures are the cause of the large increase in weather-related natural disasters, and that relief could be obtained if temperatures were to be lowered.”
The 1870’s were wetter in the UK, including a highly similar analogue of the Jan-Feb 2014 floods in the winter of 1876-77. Cold winters are definitely not caused by warming. The heatwaves are purely products of short term solar variability as the cold winters are, and were lesser than the 1976 heatwave. The AMO influences UK weather patterns, and that is normally in its warm phase during a solar minimum.
Ulrich Lyons:
There was a very strong El Nino in 1878-79, with anomalous average global temperatures spiking to (+)0 .40 deg C (per Hadcrut4 data), a temperature not seen again until 1997, during the 1997-98 El Nino, ~ 120 years later.
There was a great hurricane in England in 1878, a great Tornado breakout on Aug. 9, in the US. and the great gale (hurricane) of 1878, on Oct. 23. Somewhere I had read that it was also a period of starvation around the world due to failing crops.
Just some rather weak support for my comments.
You state “cold winters are definitely not caused by warming”
Actually, they can be, due to changed weather patterns caused by El Ninos or El Nino-like temperatures ” See “El Nino in history”, by C.N. Caviedes (2001)
El Nino is not forced warming, it is a response to low solar or stratospheric aerosols.
“There have been no higher temps to adapt to where I am, slow, fast, or whatever. Just where have temps risen to force adaptation to a hotter environment?”
—
I think PNAS are referring to climate-change induced higher electricity bill adaptation.
PS: ‘PNAS’ is properly pronounced ‘Penis’.
Temperature anomalies are everywhere; when compared to the pre-industrial age commonly known as the Little Ice Age. Global Warming is the left’s Universal Tool. It panics the herd, justifies redistribution in the name of justice or fairness; and, its solution via carbon taxes and the west’s accelerated adoption of expensive energy both redistribute wealth locally and globally. What is not to like.
4 more names to go in the Hall of the (We’re smarted than you) Deluded
Man these people are bound and determined to get their apocalypse. How sad that their religious devotion will most likely eventually see them on the street begging.
Yup, the eco-fascist apocalypse.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Atom-its-nucleus-and-surrounding-electrons-The-protons-and-electrons-of-an-atom-are-a_fig11_303309704
“Every atom of carbon has 6 protons, 6 electrons, and 6 neutrons.”
I’m no bible thumper, but about that dual meaning…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body
“Carbon is the basic building block to most cells in the body.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/29/AR2008052903266.html
Carbon Chastity
“Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe. There’s no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.” – Charles Krauthammer, May 2008
Talk of replacing cash with a carbon card [then a chip] cooled down after Climategate, but the Green New Deal is Crazy staring us in the face.
Only the Truth shall set us Free.
Nasty as it is, rationing is to me a far far better approach than taxation. If CO2 is really, and I mean really, a problem, then ration it so that everyone is affected equally. With taxation, only the lower half suffer.
Do you think Gore, Di Caprio, Suzuki, et al will have the same ration as us lowly peons?
How large a black market in ration cards do you think there would be?
Who would set the limits for how much ‘carbon’ we are allowed?
This would end motor sports and air travel, for example, or would there be ‘indulgences’?
Rationing as a “better approach” is like preferring to be hit over the head with a brick rather than a hammer.
So how are you going to get the termites to quit generating CO2 or the ocean to keep from expelling CO2 or the forests from rotting their vegitation or ….
The number of the beast is not 6,6,6 (carbon numbers), but 666 : “the number of a man”. Some speculate 666 represents mankind maximized since Man, and only Man, was created on Day 6. In any case, carbon being an essential element of all life makes it hard to connect it to a particular man.
SR
Basic building block of the human body:
>90% of the molecules in a baby’s body are H2O.
Water molecules are 75% of the weight, but they are light.
It is fair to say that water is the main building block of the human body. Water contributes a huge proportion of the total GHG effect. There is also a lot of carbon in the human body.
Ergo we are comprised largely of greenhouse gases.
I can also prove my body contains permafrost and methane hydrates, if you give me a few minutes of your attention.
Where I live , the frogs are more concerned about freezing to death ….
this month looks to be about 8deg F below average , next month forecast to be 11 or 12 deg F below avg …
( high temps )
We’ll have -10C tomorrow. The dear frogs are not exactly boiling to death anytime soon. Mooreis welcome here to enjoy a swim. I’ll make an opening to ice, and offer a hot sauna for revigorating any blueish toes.
Moore et. al have, perhaps mistakenly, placed their finger on the problem. It’s not climate and weather data
that drives our “knowledge” of global warming, it’s billions of social media posts. And they should have added millions of news articles and talking TV heads. In the rare instances when someone looks into actual records of storms, floods, fires, snowfall, polar ice and so forth, not weather models but actual records, it can be quickly understood that what is going on today, weather wise, is no different than what has ever gone on as far back as the written record extends.
The greatest danger we face today is not global warming, or Russia, or China, it’s the web.
The web is not the problem; it is our inability to use the web to get the real data, the reality of climate change (in BOTH a current and historical context) across to the general public.
The web (in contrast to the MSM) could be our friend; the question is how can we use that tool.
I do not have an answer.
Well, Russia and China know how to weaponize the web.
Social media is in a very dangerous position in controlling who hears what.I’m afraid we’re seeing a revolution which is not technological but a political one.
My opinion is that the more this nonsense gets published (think GND, think Santer 5 sigma, think warming=>cooling and polar vortex, all just this month), the faster the whole CAGW scam fails.
Filmed set up children in Sen. Feinstein’s office saying ‘we did not vote for you to ignore GND…How old are you…16…Well, you didn’t vote…’ is comedy gold.
Ridicule is a very effective ‘sunlight disinfectant’.
Oh noes, we’ve become adapted to something that isn’t happening.
Humans crossed an ice bridge to colonize the Americas. Extreme weather, maybe, but no BOILING! Ha, gotcha there. 😉
It was a land bridge, largely lacking ice, due to the loe lrvel, windiness and dryness of Beringia, the continental shelf floor of the northern Bering and southern Chukchi Seas, exposed by low sea levels, thanks to so much ice on the land in vast sheets.
Aha, climate refugees!
Not according to what they say further down where they say they used “decadal trends in temperature at weekly and county resolution”. The weather only comes into play from the 2 billion or so social media comments. Assuming of course they didn’t find some long lost archive of social media posts from preindustrial America they are not comparing weather. Then to top it off they used climate model projections.
The boiling frog myth is appropriate. It shows if you increasingly publish papers that are drifting further and further from science nobody will notice when the papers become completely devoid of science.
Greg,
Your last paragraph is a keeper!!
I live in Tucson exactly because it is warmer here than anywhere else I have ever lived.
Come Saturday and Sunday the temps here are supposed to be about 78 F both days, about average for eaely March. Meanwhile most of the rest of the country will be 30 degrees F below average.
And then these moronic toads have the utter cluelessness to write:
“In an absolute sense, these changing conditions constitute direct evidence of anthropogenic climate change. ”
Apparently those toads skipped critical thinking on the way to their university degrees. They clearly have no idea what constitutes direct evidence of weather extremes compared to the past.
This is the Lake Wobegon Syndrome. In Garrison Keeler’s Lake Wobegon tales, every parent just knew their children were Above Average. Which of course defies the logic of an average.
Similarly, every generation wants to believe they (we) are living, struggling, and surviving through Exceptional Times (worse than average). Because by doing so implies they too (we too) are exceptional for managing to get by.
We all want to feel like the struggle of everyday life has meaning. We all want to be exceptional.
Nick and Frances (the authors here) clearly lack historical perspective as well as critical thought. They want to be exceptional. They clearly are not.
I think the authors need more funding to investigate this topic further, LOL.
I’m sure they’d love for you to write them a big fat check from your 401K/IRA acct to continue their research if socialmedia hysteria.
Otherwise, these toads are just looking for grants on the taxpayers dime.