Ok, so I keep getting gaslighted by people around me (USA) when I comment how crazy the weather is, and how we’ve never had it like this, and they say things like “oh, you just notice it more now because you’re older” or “the weathers always done this”
But I don’t think it’s normal for weather to be -10 degrees F with snow, and then 3 days later 75 degrees F! That seems insane to me!
Unless I’m wrong and we really have had this insane type of weather “forever”. But it doesn’t feel like it.
the Question: Am I crazy, or right, and is there proof?
Just look at the data, there are historical records going back a century in many locations around the US. Find one close to you and do some digging.
The simple answer is that crazy does happen, and has happened historically, but it’s much more common now than it used to be.
I mean everyone just points to the extremes of the 40’s and says how “humans couldn’t be the cause of it, because look how crazy the temp extremes were then!”
We need to get away from anecdotes as a way to describe this problem. There’s dozens of reasons a city can hit a record high or low. It’s like saying Wilt Chamberlain is the greatest basketball player of all time because nobody else has scored 100 points in a single game, or Bill Russell because he won the most titles. Those stats are based on key games or favorable conditions and not really an overall, day-in-day-out performance. The same goes with climate. The year you have a “100 year snow storm” could be the same year you have a record number of days above 90°.
Science isn’t about focusing on outliers, it’s about focusing on trends and what the majority of the data is telling you. Unfortunately we can’t always comprehend slow moving data points, which is why we capture data and view it as a whole.
Humans in general are awful at long term anything. I myself am much worse than most humans at it.