They may be right, but likely not for the right reasons. People also consistently think crime is getting worse even when it's getting better.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perc...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perc...
When discussing climate change with the average person, I get strong vibes of post-9/11 US, the idea that there is now a problem so incredibly urgent that any justification for extreme and illiberal policy is suddenly acceptable. Reddit now casually bandies about the idea of raiding Brazil to preserve its forest, in a rather disappointing mirror-image of early-2000s neoconservatism. In the face of fear we seem lose our values as Americans incredibly quickly.
Also, before you say that Reason is right wing (sorta granted, though less so these days as libertarians move out of coalition with the right), Ron Bailey is not a climate change denier. Read some of his other coverage before you slam the source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hu...
To claim a 3x increase would be an example of binning your data to exaggerate effect.
This is without touching on the issue of measurement bias, which is extremely difficult to determine the level of.
For the curious, data by decade is here (for the US):
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml
This topic sometimes comes up because there are graphs that show the total number of hurricanes increasing, but the criticism is that shows bias because over time we began to observe more hurricanes that never made landfall.
[edit] and here is by-year, up to 2018.
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E23.html
By a quick check it seems these numbers do not match the landfall-by-decade counts above. But these are labeled "impacts/landfalls", so maybe there is some categorization difference? Is an "impact" different from a "landfall"?
[edit 2] here's one difference:
* - Indicates that the hurricane center did not make a U.S. landfall (or substantially weakened before making landfall), but did produce the indicated hurricane-force winds over land. In this case, central pressure is given for the time that the hurricane winds along the coast were the strongest.
The constant alarmist nature of news does contribute to people being alarmed and believing that things are worse.
In any event even if the frequency and magnitude aren't deviating from historical records, coastal populations are increasing all over the world, so all else being equal vastly more people are affected.
My own theory is that as bad events get rarer they cross some threshold that makes them become more newsworthy when they do happen, so that we hear about them more, and salience bias - the fact that examples quickly come to mind - make us think it's happening more. This applies as much to hurricanes and mass shootings and "hate crimes" and violent crime in general as it did to shark attacks in the mythic "summer of the shark". Once the media has an existing narrative they can hang a story on (eg "it's just like Columbine!") they find it easy to report more stories like that, until eventually we all get sick of that topic and move on to something else.
But I'd expect there's a fair bit of the effect you're saying too.
An average climate change skeptic is a person who believes that strong hurricanes are just the weather and cold winters are proof that climate change isn't happening.
An average climate change believer is a person who believes that cold winters are just the weather and strong hurricanes are evidence of climate change.
Neither of those parties have fully thought out positions.
There have been numerous reports of police departments changing their reporting and classification of crimes as their regions came under scrutiny for crime rates.
Furthermore, sometimes the crime rate per capita goes down but the population size increases more than enough to make up for it. What you see on the news and the streets is absolute crime numbers, not how much of it exists per person in a given region.
Read The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker. Violence has consistently been on a long downward trend. There may be spikes localized by time or space, but it's doubtful we are reversing the trend on any long timescale or large area.
Police can change some classifications here or there, but it's kind of hard to reclassify homicides.
White kids in Oak Park have almost nothing to fear from Chicago gang violence.
The same is not true of black kids in Oak Park --- and we're well integrated --- and extremely not true of black kids in Austin. Kids in Oak Park have, for obvious geographical reasons, friends in Austin and vice versa. Oak Park kids have been shot and killed in parks across the street from Oak Park.
It is a huge problem, and one that is easy for policy-types to overlook and downplay because it isn't a problem for white people.
I wonder if it's because it fits into a narrative? An isolated incident is more easily dismissed or forgotten.
Getting back to the main topic, climate change has become a narrative, too, not just an isolated phenomena. Hurricanes, even if mostly random, become part of a larger story.
I just finished reading 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and it got me thinking a lot about narratives. Maybe people naturally have a strong desire to be part of a narrative. Perhaps the hero, perhaps a minor character in a big drama; or, if necessary, the villian.
Is that true? Last I looked, most mass shooting were domestic violence or gang-related
I agree that all crime is something to be concerned about, and that minor crimes are easier to sweep under the rug with creative record keeping. But let's also keep in mind what's really important.
>But let's also keep in mind what's really important.
Because of the factors mentioned above, I think I'm doing that.
Outside a select few urban areas that actively have a policy of not engaging in enforcement action against petty property crime (which results in an increased amount of this crime per capita because the people that do it do it a lot more and more people do it at the margins) this is not true. Violent crime is down across the board and has been trending down since the 90s (though the decline isn't as steep as it used to be) by basically any measure you care to use.
As you say police recorded crime isn't seen as reliable because there's too much variation across time and in different areas.
The crime survey is seen as statistically sound though.