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?
Depending on where you live that kind of weather is normal. It’s def normal in the northeast in spring and fall.
Climate change is more about the annual mean temperatures going up. Objectively it was colder 20-30 years ago in most places.
Right I get that. I was referring more to extreme weather events. I feel like there are WAY more storms here now than there used to be as well.
No. There aren’t more storms, it’s more that the storms that there are are more extreme in intensity.
Just look at hurricane data. The average intensity of storms has gone up, but not necessary the frequency.
This is a consequence of more moisture being in the air from warmer general temps.
Yeah but that doesn’t explain how the mean goes up.
In climate change the mean goes up because we are getting more extreme events, in the form of both heating and cooling events.
Lets put this in D&D terms, or at least dice rolls.
First, imagine you have two sets of dice, one blue, and one red. Blue represents cooling events, red represents heating events. In this exercise, every individual die represents one unique event (a snowstorm, a cold blast, a heatwave, a hurricane, whatever).
Every year, you are going to roll some equal number of red and blue dice, and whatever you get as a result, those are the extreme weather events you get, and how extreme they are. Over enough years of dice rolls, the average will approach 0, but the individual years will bounce around in terms of their means, and individual events can be cover a wide range of extremes (0-6).
Climate change is like swapping some of red D6’s (six sided dice) with a few D10’s (red sided dice), and a few of your blue D6’s with D8’s. You increase range of possible extremes, tilted slightly to one side. And yes, the mean of individual years will go up (but not always), and over the course of many years, it will trend in a more positive direction.
Basically, the average doesn’t just increase monotonically or continuously. It does so through the contribution of more extreme inputs.
The mean goes up because the average temps are rising.
mean and average are two different things.
Why don’t you go ahead and keep digging this hole.