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?
My city moved up half a USDA Plant Hardiness Zone (7B to 8A) when the latest map came out in 2023. That’s not weather, that’s climate.
Welcome to the red states. You’ll be screaming internally a lot.
The food is good, though. And the sportsball team is looking good this year.
The fox news brainwash is just insane. I wish lemmings could live 1 day here and see how it really is outside their massive metropolis.
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!
The climate is going crazy, but strictly speaking, you can’t logically conclude that from solely your local weather fluctuations. I.e., climate change is a global property of our planet, which requires global statistics…which we have, but your folks either refuse to look or refuse to listen to experts who have looked.
And extreme weather events are more likely, but that doesn’t mean they never occurred before or never would occur without climate change.
I’m not saying this to downplay the severity of the climate crisis or even to say that you literally can never use local weather events to reason about climate change, but IMO is it both politically and mathematically important to stress the global nature of climate change whenever it is brought up.
you can’t logically conclude that from solely your local weather fluctuations.
From a pure scientific method standpoint 100%
But changes local weather can easily be corroborated by satelite data of the polar vortex.
Like we can see that wind from the north pole is dipping south faster than it used to. Resulting in cold snaps as the wind rushes south and heat domes in regions between the jetstreams.
This directly results in the increasingly frequent and extreme weather fluctuations we’ve been been experiencing.
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In my region we regularly have a “false spring” this time of year. We get a week of warm that melts the snow in the valley and then a week later it drops back down and snows again.
But lately the hi’s and low’s are 10c hotter/colder. The heat in between is so warm trees start coming out of hybernation. The cold snaps so fast that it threatens local agriculture.
We just got a foot of wet snow and tomorrow it’s supposed to br 15c and sunny.
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Couple years ago we were stuck in the heat dome and you could see the polar vortex swooping 100km below us and to either side on the weather channel.
Yep, I got ya!
You aren’t crazy, the weather is fucked. The proof is in min and max temps over the course of decades. You can also pull up precipitation/snow records over decades as well. A quick google search would find you tons of proof.
People who are climate change deniers, or just willfully ignorant, will deny there is a problem, and keep denying it until their home or workplace gets swallowed up in a climate calamity. Of those, there will be a percentage that doubles down on their bullshit even after being personally bitch slapped by the weather and becoming a statistic.
Stop engaging these people; it’s exhausting. I’m dating someone like this. We will discuss an issue, have a difference in ideology, then I will find and present data and proof that back up the things I am claiming, and my fiance will just double down on the bullshit to the point that it’s transcended to gaslighting.
|Stop engaging these people
You’re literally engaged to one? How??
One in ten year events have turned into one in two year events.
Yeah I love being told by the auto mechanics I work with that they know more about the climate and weather than someone who has a PHD in climatology. I like to bring up how much they like it when someone comes in and tells them how to do their job - that’s exactly what they are doing. Leave the expertise to the experts, morons.
I have nothing substantive to add but to add to the choir of voices saying you are not crazy. If it helps, most people around me also agree so add them to the count
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.
We are experiencing Climate Chaos, you are not wrong. The people around you are in denial.
I always felt like when I was a kid we got snow in November - half a meter of it by Christmas - and now there’s less of it and it comes later. But when I look up the actual snowfall stats for my childhood years, it’s not that different from what we get now.
It’s not all explained by climate change, but it does play a factor - especially with extreme weather events. Still, good to remember that weather ≠ climate.
When I was a kid in the early 80’s, we would go ice skating on the canals almost every year. since the 90’s this has hardly ever been possible.
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.
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.
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.
