An overwhelming majority of people in the United States say they have recently experienced an extreme weather event, a new poll shows,
So, we have a normal spread of weather. Anything outside that spectrum is extreme weather. That’s just what the words mean. How often you’re going to have extreme weather depends upon how wide you’re assuming that spectrum to be. A cold day in June could be extreme, depends on how cold it is. An actual h7urricane turning up is extreme in a different sense – even though that happens to millions every year.
So, most folk have experienced extreme weather. Well, yes, they would have done.
and most of them attribute that to climate change.
Which is a lovely example of how bad the misinformation on climate change is. For, as we keep being told, climate and weather are two different things, aren’t they?
Which is a lovely example of how bad the misinformation on climate change is
Deliberately so, of course, as it has been for decades.
I’m calling Bullshit on this one.
You can get the results you want out of a poll simply by tailoring the poll questions. Once they make the poll questions public, I’ll listen to them. Until then… Bullshit is Bullshit. Especially when it is being pushed by the likes of AP.
If the media are constantly trumpeting stories about extreme weather events, increasingly people will claim to have experienced same.
Yarp – Compare to the number of people who claim to have had ghostly visitations, or seen auras. Interesting to estimate the overlap in the two groups – my guess is that it’s pretty high.
“climate and weather are two different things, aren’t they?”
It depends. When the BBC report on cooler than normal temperatures, it’s weather. Warmer than usual is climate. Except that weather which is different from expected is evidence of climate catastrophe.
Whatever. Don’t talk about those private jets, and stop blocking the Zil Lane.
The U.S. is a huge country with every environment and climate you can imagine. Mountains, plains, beaches, deserts, forests, swamps, islands, arctic, tropical, moderate. Plus we have the San Andreas fault. So yes, everyone here has been within the vicinity of a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, blizzard or flood at one point. Most of us don’t experience that stuff more than once or twice a year. And most of us don’t experience extreme versions of that stuff even five times throughout our entire lifespan.
I noticed last time I was in the UK that the Met Office issues severe weather warnings for heavy rain, a bit of snow and when it’s warm enough to sit in the garden. This helps shift the definition of what is ‘extreme’.
“when it’s warm enough to sit in the garden”
Be fair, in the UK that is extreme weather
On 2 June 1975, snow an inch thick covered the pitch at Buxton in a match between Derbyshire and Lancashire, and snow stopped play at several other county cricket matches.
I remember it live on TV, and I even know someone who was there. If that “normal” weather were to happen 48 years later it would be proof positive of climate change.
I did laugh at the YouTube video of the American legislators discussing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. You could see them struggling with the concept of percentages even before they tried to put a figure to it. When the figures they did come up with were x100 too high, tears of laughter changed to tears of despair.
Bjorn Lomborg, in one of his talks, puts up a slide which shows that deaths from weather have dropped from around 500,000 a year in c.1910 to less than 5,000 now.This not to say that there are fewer extreme weather events, but that, as we grow richer, we are much more able to cope with them.
My analogy would be this: if there is a train coming towards a group of people on the track, is it better to try to stop the train, or to move the people off the track…?
I can remember two sorts of extreme weather in my boyhood. (i) Winter 1963. Brrrrr! (ii) The years when a Sou’-wester blew behind a particularly high Spring tide and flooded the streets near the harbour. Happily those cunning Victorians had ensured that the relevant buildings were well suited to surviving a flood.
The buildings that weren’t designed to withstand flooding were always on a contour that meant they avoided flooding. I inferred that the flood level probably hadn’t changed in more than a century.
MC, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology is particularly prone lately to publicly predicting ‘wild weather’ or ‘extreme temperatures’ that end up as nothing especially unusual. And of course recently got their hand caught in the cookie jar for claiming their new automatic temperature probes were as accurate as mercury thermometers, and turned out to be anything but.
Here’s a good example of how TV weather forecasting has changed perceptions of high temperatures and by extension that extreme highs are happening more often.
https://twitter.com/UK16OUT/status/1550787150379089921?s=20
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/04/23/story-linking-increasing-number-of-home-runs-to-climate-change-was-too-silly-for-beeb-but-given-pride-of-place-in-guardian/
Sixes in cricket, anyone?
An overwhelming majority of people in the United States say they are above average, studies find
So am I, Steve.
Bboy – We both are my friend.
Nautical Nick: My analogy would be this: if there is a train coming towards a group of people on the track, is it better to try to stop the train, or to move the people off the track…
The answer depends on which one kills the ethicists.