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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

I'm talking about individuals making observations of weather in terms of "gee, it's sure been warmer around here lately." Notice the average temperature change in those diagrams: we're talking about less than a couple of degrees Celsius over two centuries. Observable globally by carefully taking tons of measurements and averaging, yes. But not observable by noticing that it's been warmer or wetter for a few years during a particular season.

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I agree. I think man-made climate change is looking pretty good as a hypothesis, but there is a lot of noise in the media about personally observing climate change that strikes me as phony.

One specific example of this is hurricane season in 2017, which many news sources have frequently linked to global warming.

I'm not saying it's impossible that there's a connection, but based on my understanding (pretty much just this [0]), this is not something anyone should be speaking confidently about.

A lot of people seem to have an "ends justify the means" perspective about this stuff: that being right in general about global warming gives them the right to exaggerate in order to stimulate a public response. I'm not really comfortable with that thinking.

[0] https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/

While you can't directly observe an average temperature difference that small, observing the effects on the local environment is different. Particularly if we're talking "frozen" versus "not frozen". People who grow things outdoors will notice when the last frost is in the spring and when the first frost is in the fall.

I think the point is that if you go back before the industrial revolution, these same big swings were happening back then too. Year after after of mild winters, followed by a few years of severe winters. Same thing with hurricanes. Some seasons have 3x the average and other seasons have none.

There is huge variability in climate regardless of global warming.

That variability is still climate change, even if it is not associated with general global warming trends. In either case, the people who don't believe in the actual data will be better-served to at least pay attention to the anecdotes, even if something is missing from them.

Because at this point, it's largely a game of political motivation, not confirmation of basic facts.

When academics are looking for human-observable changes in climate, we look at more subtle changes like distributions of indicator species or shifts in economic strategies linked to changes in climate. Just because people might not be accurate at averaging temperature doesn't mean they won't notice that the river levels are rising and their local herb population is changing.

I wrote this upthread, but what latitude are you at?

The temperature anomalies are quite high at northern latitudes. Closer to the equator and you wouldn’t see much difference.

If you’re at a more southern latitude, this may be colouring your view of the anecdotes in this thread. Most of them come from winter territory in north america, where temperature anomalies have been large.

To give a data point, as someone who observes it, I'm just above the 45th and in the mountains of Maine. I also keep local weather records, as well as have amassed the historical records in a variety of formats.

Higher average temperature partially manifests as hotter hottest days and those are definitely noticeable.

Which has nothing to do with this article about climate scientists.

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