[markwkw]

On the other hand, looking at lived experience the story is quite tricky.

From the perspective of an individual it is very hard to detect this level of climate change. I can't tell how much warmer any given month was compared to even 20 years ago. We're talking about 28 vs 28.5°C average for a month. (and July and August made news because of pronounced anomalies, other months were probably even murkier stories due to natural monthly variability). This is not perceptible. And no one has an experiential reference point of Average Global Temperature of the 20th Century.

How hot was May of 2003 compared to May of 2023? I could attempt a guess but have zero confidence in it. Do you remember the average temperature of your teenage years summers? "It was hot", "between 25-30..." is all I can give without looking at data.

This is something we should keep in mind when advocating for climate measures, otherwise sceptics have another easy attack - "it feels basically the same, what are you talking about"

[yashap]

Depends where you live. I live in Vancouver, BC, and the effects here are very, very significant. It used to be that wildfire smoke in the city was super rare, but for the past ~10 years there’s been massive amounts of smoke in the city almost every summer. Weeks each summer where the air is filled with smoke, your throat itches non-stop, and it’s not healthy to be outside for extended periods. Virtually everyone agrees this is due to climate change, and it’s a pretty major negative impact on quality of living here, and pretty much everywhere along the west coast of North America.

Or another example, that I don’t have personal experience with - island nations dealing with a big increase in hurricane severity and/or frequency also have very visceral experiences of climate change.

[Gareth321]

Global warming is a potential factor, but decades of poor logging practises are also to blame (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259006171...).

[yashap]

Yeah agreed, I worded that poorly, there’s always multiple causes. Both logging and fire suppression are significant causes too.

It is worth noting, though:

- That paper cuts off at 2017. Things have gotten even worse recently: the previous high (on record) for hectares burned by wildfires in Canada was 7.1 million, this year we’re already at 16.5 million, and still growing quickly: https://natural-resources.canada.ca/simply-science/canadas-r...

- Climate change is seen as a major cause of the exceptionally hot, dry, wildfire inducing weather we’ve been seeing, e.g.: https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/climate-change-more-...

[input_sh]

It depends on your location I guess? I for one can definitely tell from my own experience, and I'm not even 30 yet.

Proper winter starts much later and is milder than before, it was 10+ degrees Celsius for the past five or so NYE (didn't even need a winter jacket), summer heat waves are more unbearable and last longer, we went from no serious issues with floods in the spring to a number of entire-towns-are-underwater levels of flooding...

Now some of these did happen before, but as an anomaly, definitely not something that happens multiple years in a row.

[rootusrootus]

This is a fair point. Out of curiosity, I went back and looked at the temperatures in my area the year I was born. Our highest temperature of the year was 96F ... on September 24! Let me tell you, if we hit 96F two weeks from now, it'll be front page news and evidence of climate catastrophe.

I think everyone has now fallen into the trap of mixing up weather with climate. We used to deride the deniers who said a cold snap meant global warming was fake, by pointing out that climate and weather are two different things. But more recently we point to every heat wave as evidence of climate change, every cold snap as well -- because 'more energy means more extremes!' Which may be entirely true, but it's hard to deny it looks like trying to have your cake and eat it too.

FWIW, back in 1974, the coldest day of that year was 12F. That would also be considered quite cold today. So that year hit some temperatures in both directions that would be noteworthy today, almost 50 years later.

[amrocha]

You can't take the number outside of its context. We know the earth is warming, that's not up for contention anymore. When you hit a 50 year record high temperature, the implication is that it's only going to get hotter.

It's not "doom and gloom because it hit 96F"

It's "doom and gloom because it hit 96F and it's only gonna get hotter"

[vGPU]

Except that just like the Air Force’s sunspot count, which is so blatantly false that NASA doesn’t even bother trying to get their own numbers to match up — the NOAA has been using statistical manipulation and outright fraud to create the appearance of global warming.

[amrocha]

I honestly don't know what to do when people like you exist that confidently refute the scientific consensus based on whatever they read online.

You're why I think the world is doomed. We can't fix climate change when there's a bunch of people who want to be contrarians so bad they're willing to die over it.

[vGPU]

Remember when people like you said the exact same thing with the exact same confidence, except it was global cooling?

[amrocha]

No, I don't, because I never said that, because there was never scientific consensus around that. Anyway, I hope you live long enough to see the world burn.

[gdilla]

uh, ok? It's the trends we're talking about. not one year or one day of data.

[wolverine876]

We now have the knowledge to connect weather events to climate.

[vel0city]

I can experience it here in North Texas. We've had a lot more snow events in the past few years than the over a decade preceding. It used to be an every few years kind of thing, now there's a couple big ice storms every year. Massive difference.

And it swings the other way in the summer too. Yeah, it's Texas, its hot. Upper 90s most days in the peak summer time. Every now a bad summer with a lot of 100F days. Now every summer has streaks of well over 100F days. This summer alone has been the hardest one for me to experience here in my over thirty years in Texas.

[sn9]

This summer has seen weeks or months where the lows haven't dropped below the high 70s F.

And that's only for a brief window of time before sunrise. It's still in the 90s F at midnight most nights.

[jakubmazanec]

Well, I'm not keeping records, but here (Czechia) the heat waves were really different from the past: twice in one summer for more than three weeks (in total), that simply never happened (I believe I remember reliably - public records agree -, because I don't have AC, so I have to consistently measure temperature and manage it by closing windows at 6 AM, closing the drapes, and during night by creating draft).

The perception of past weather patterns truly is unreliable, but I don't care if I can discern between temperature averages; the more common occurrence of extremes is what matters. I don't know how anyone can look at the reports of fires everywhere and not be certain this wasn't happening at this rate even few years ago.

[wolverine876]

> From the perspective of an individual it is very hard to detect this level of climate change.

That used to be a common claim, but it's past its expiration date. Extreme weather events are happening all over.

[badtension]

You are right, the changes are small and usually hard to see directly.

But we also have to remember that warming is not uniform across the planet, where I live the Berkeley Earth site [1] shows an average 2.5 C warming since the 1850s.

It is especially visible if your regular winter temperatures go below 0 C, but not much. Even 1-2 C warming may be seen as a much smaller snow coverage than before.

[1] https://berkeleyearth.org

[truculent]

I might be fooling myself but I think I can intuit the changes in extreme temperature events (not the averages though, as you say)