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by RickJWagner·9y ago·view on hn ↗
I see arguments here that people can readily feel a change.

I have to admit, I don't see it. It's been an unusually calm summer where I'm at. We haven't had a summer with several days over 100F in quite a few years. If anything, it's been less hot.

But I'll surely give the report a read. It is an important topic.

6 comments
It is hard to notice the gradual changes, and we tend to give too much weight to the natural variance in the weather.

A conversation I had with an older East coast snow ski instructor was illuminating. The ski season is a few weeks shorter than it was 30 years ago. That's real economic impact.

Just do some research into the trends, it's been enough to convince me: nuisance flooding along the east coast, number of regional summer days in the 90s, sea levels have been rising but the rate is now increasing, satellite imagery of the antarctic, recession of glaciers, and then notice how all these trends correlate with the increase of atmospheric CO2 since the industrial revolution. Rather than the headlining global trends, I think it's more impactful to see how climate change affects different regions.
Only thing I could really point to is a number of incredibly mild winters a few years in a row. But even then, I was under the impression that climate change wasn't particularly measurable on a year-by-year scale. Maybe I'm wrong.
Just because the individual changes aren't going to be noticeable year over year, doesn't mean the cumulative changes won't hit tipping points for noticeable effects to occur in certain cases.

Just like people won't notice the sea levels changing each year. But at some point, flooding is going to go from a rare occurrence to a regular occurrence once the sea level raises past a certain point.

In Europe, we're facing ridiculously hot summer back where I come from and very mild winters for a few years in a row.

To give an example - parents have a small garden, living in the valley under mountains. Till about 2-3 years back it was impossible to plant outside twice a year like near mediterranean, it was simply too cold for too long. My 90 year old grandparents never ever could do that, now they can. We're facing bugs (ie ticks) which were never there before. Winters moved from +-4 months of solid snowy winter to few weeks of snow and a lot of cold rain. And of course glaciers are retreating at ridiculous rate, ie 10m/year.

This is anecdotal but winters in Vermont (where I grew up) and Chicago (where I live now) are almost snow less now. I think it snowed once last year in Chicago and three or four times the year before. I haven't noticed it being aggressively hotter in the summer but It's been much warmer in the winters.
I don't notice the anomalies myself (well, I live in a west coast suburb...) However I stumbled upon a pretty cool visualization on temperature anomalies on Twitter a few days ago: https://www.flickr.com/photos/150411108@N06/35471910724/in/p...
As the saying goes, to boil a frog, you simply have to gradually turn up the heat.

Of course you won't notice much when comparing this year to last, especially since the weather's fairly random.

But the trends all point in one direction. Even remembering to my childhood (barely 15 years ago) paints a different picture than what we have today.