Climate change is creating bizarre weather around the world. Just this week, it was reported that Australia had experienced its hottest summer ever and the UK baked in winter temperatures that felt more like summer. These record-breaking temperatures get people talking, but what happens when climate change makes them a regular occurrence? Is there a risk that these exceptional events just become part of the 鈥渘ew normal鈥�?
Last week, my co-authors and I published a study that suggests people quickly get used to unusual weather, which has troubling implications for our ability to recognise the climate change happening all around us.
We measured the literal remarkability of different temperatures by seeing how much comment they generated on Twitter. Hot and cold conditions both generated lots of posts, particularly if they were unusual for a particular place and time of year.
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But temperatures quickly became unremarkable: after just a couple of years of strange temperatures, people stopped tweeting about them. Our best estimate is that .
This is a concern if we think about climate change, which gradually shifts the weather people experience from year to year. Very large warming is projected for the 21st century in the absence of ambitious climate policy. But if people forget what weather was like more than eight years ago, these unprecedented conditions won鈥檛 feel particularly unusual to people experiencing them.
Warmer cold
Moreover, natural variability in the climate system means we could continue to be surprised by weather that seems cold, even when that 鈥渃old鈥� weather is far warmer than the natural baseline.
The tale of the boiling frog has long been used to describe the dangers posed by change that happens slowly relative to people鈥檚 perception and memory. The apocryphal story compares a frog dropped into a pot of boiling water, who jumps out right away, to a frog placed in a pot of cold water that is gradually heated up. This frog never recognises the danger he is in and eventually boils to death. The risk is that slowly worsening environmental conditions lull us into a false sense of normalcy, leading us to accept changes that we would really prefer to avoid.
Our findings suggest we may be at risk of becoming boiling frogs 鈥� but they don鈥檛 determine that fate. No one alive today remembers 鈥減re-industrial鈥� conditions, yet there are plenty of records we can use to give us the longer-term context critical for understanding climate change. We need to be aware of how our own perceptions of normal versus unusual weather might slip over time, and of the growing disconnect between those perceptions and true natural conditions 50 or 100 years ago.
Keeping things in perspective means stepping back to take a broader view, bringing in other information or viewpoints to check our initial assessments. Typically, this outlook makes problems seem smaller, but the opposite is true regarding climate change.
Let鈥檚 make sure we keep the right perspective on the weather we are experiencing and recognise just how unusual things are in the historical or even geological context.
PNAS
