Ah! That first really warm day of spring. It comes as a relief to know winter’s chill is losing it’s grip and welcome warmth of spring is about to arrive. Only now that first really warm day can show up very early, even on Christmas, as some areas of the country experienced recently. Some of us are alarmed by these changes we see, a new study suggests many more of us perceive it as just some unseasonably pleasant weather. Something we normally welcome.
Global Warming Feels Quite Pleasant
Gray Matter
By PATRICK J. EGAN and MEGAN MULLIN APRIL 21, 2016
In a poll taken in January, after the country’s warmest December on record, the Pew Research Center found that climate change ranked close to last on a list of the public’s policy priorities. Why?
In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, we provide one possible explanation: For a vast majority of Americans, the weather is simply becoming more pleasant. Over the past four decades, winter temperatures have risen substantially throughout the United States, but summers have not become markedly more uncomfortable.
..., we took a different tack, calculating changes over time on a county-by-county basis, weighted by population.
Our findings are striking: 80 percent of Americans now find themselves living in counties where the weather is more pleasant than it was four decades ago. Although warming during this period has been considerable, it has not been evenly distributed across seasons. Virtually all Americans have experienced a rise in January maximum daily temperatures — an increase of 1.04 degrees Fahrenheit per decade on average — while changes in daily maximum temperatures in July have been much more variable across counties, rising by an average of just 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit per decade over all. Moreover, summer humidity has declined during this period.
As a result, most people’s experiences with daily weather since the time that they first heard about climate change have generally been positive. By our calculations, the mild winters now regularly experienced in New York City make its weather nearly as pleasant as that of Virginia Beach back in the 1970s.
To those of us who believe climate change is the most profound challenge of our age, our discovery is both illuminating and disheartening. In previous work, we’ve shown that Americans make sense of climate change in part through their personal experience of the weather. Our new findings suggest that the weather changes caused by global warming cannot be relied on to spur the public to demand policies that address the problem. By the time the weather changes for the worse later in this century, it may be too late.
Then later in this century the more negative effects to our weather will kick in with a vengeance, as the paradine flips, with summer temperatures soaring.
And it will change for the worse. Under all likely scenarios, seasonal trends are projected to eventually reverse: Future warming in the United States will be more severe in summer than in winter. Should greenhouse gas emissions proceed unabated, we estimate that 88 percent of Americans will be exposed to less pleasant weather at the end of this century than they are today.
The authors write that shifting our emphasis to the increasing frequency of extreme weather events might be a better way to communicate the urgency of our predicament, to overcome the perception that the changes we’re experiencing at the present time due to changes in the climate are pleasant or welcome.
Here in the Pacific Northwest April has been unusually sunny and dry. We’re more used to April coming in like a lion and going out like a lion. This comes after Seattle’s rainiest December through February period ever. This winter’s rainfall was not even close to the old record. It was even driving a native like myself to wonder how we can stand so much continuous pelting rain. So people in Seattle no doubt welcome the drier spring weather on a personal level, even if they don’t necessarily welcome long term changes in our weather patterns on an intellectual level. There is a dissonance, experience vs understanding. Another source of psychological inertia for those of us lucky enough to live in places seeing mostly “pleasant” changes (for now).