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
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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.
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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.
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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?
Easter Island comes to mind here. When people settled the island it was a paradise, but after several hundred years they had reduced it to a barren rock. The people did manage to adapt and survive but wouldn’t life have been better if they could have used some foresight and saved their paradise?
Comparing Easter Island and its once-upon-a-time maximum population density to the disparate land surfaces of Earth today is . . . well . . .
The myth that Easter Island was destroyed by over population has been refuted over and over again.
It was still a “paradise” when it was visited by Cook in the 1800’s.
First sentences:
“The changing global climate is producing increasingly unusual weather relative to preindustrial conditions.
Oh yeah? Where are the global weather records for the preindustrial world that are used to make a comparison?
” In an absolute sense, these changing conditions constitute direct evidence of anthropogenic climate change. “
Oh yeah? Absolute sense?
Changing weather is per se “direct evidence” that humans are causing the change?
No chance that the Sun has anything to do with it?
There are good reasons to think CO2s doing stuff and that the Sun is not directly causing anything of similar size during the last 70 years. For me it s not a question if it ‘is the Sun’. It is a question of proving relative effect sizes.
‘The changing global climate is producing increasingly unusual weather relative to preindustrial conditions.’
That was just total bonkers. In my opinion, we have good enough weather now, and past weather 200 years ago was not better. End of this worser and worser shit. Prove me it is not merely improving at long term, we don’t have any reason to be alarmed on weather as it is now. I don’t want the effing glaciation back, this is a good direction to go.
MarkW
“Elevated temperatures, or more likely, random chance. Your time frame is way too short to draw any meaningful conclusions from”
The time frame examined was for the years 1816-2017.
“Another possibility is that El Ninos change the weather, no need to invoke temperature increases”
??El Ninos ARE periods of increased temperatures, and have always been associated with adverse weather events.
Since approx. 2000, our average global temperatures are equivalent to those seen only during prior El Nino events, so that we are currently living within El Nino-like conditions.
Expect more global weather-related disasters throughout this year, even if no El Nino develops.