[cameldrv]

Everyone who cares about climate change needs to stop talking about it in C to an American audience. 2 degrees sounds small, but 3.6 degrees F is significant. 3 degrees still sounds reasonably small, but 5.6 degrees F is getting to be a lot. Generally speaking Americans have no idea how much a 2 or 3 degree C difference is in F and so they just hear 2 or 3 degrees F.

[gmuslera]

More important than that, we are not talking about the temperature you are feeling right now where you are, but global average temperature, and in the context of the 1.5°C over the preindustrial average, we are talking about that average, kept over several years.

What you feel locally is weather, including extreme weather. It can go to extremes in either direction, but with more global average temperature the system have more energy to increase the frequency and how extreme is that weather.

And speed matters. The baseline of preindustrial times is because we started the high emissions trend around there, but we reached 0.5°C by 1930-1950, and 1.0°C by 2015-2017. And the first full calendar year that had over 1.5°C over preindustrial times was 2024, but we need more years to average to talk about the same numbers.

[cameldrv]

Yes there are a lot of complicated second order effects from an increase in the average, but if you simply told people "We're looking at temperatures everywhere going up by 5.6 degrees on average, all the time", that sounds like a lot. 3 degrees doesn't sound like that much.

[gmuslera]

The problem is that you don't see the averages. What you see is that in some places for some days the temperature was 40°C over what they used to have in that time of the year (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/03/24/parts-of...), the heat dome of 2021 should be a good warning (or warming) of the kind of extreme weather that 1.5°C could bring and increase frequency. Or the disruption of the polar vortex bringing extremely cold temperatures.

What you see in your normal everyday life is that things that you were used to are not that way anymore. And that there are some activities (like agriculture) that depend on some stability on weather. At least till we cross another threshold and things not seen in human history start to happen enough to be noticed, but by then it will be too late. What we need is to trust the measurements.