Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
of degrees push some summers over an arbitrarily defined threshold temperature above
which Hansen then classifies them as being 'extreme.'
Hansen's threshold between a 'normal' summer and an 'extreme' summer has no
physical meaning—instead it is rooted in statistics. While certainly some temperature
thresholds exist that have physical meaning—like the 32°F, the freezing/melting point of
water/ice—noneexistintherangeoftemperatureswhichcharacterisesummeracrossmuch
of the globe. Whether or not the average summertime temperature is greater or less than
some arbitrary value is of little practical significance.
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So how do climate advocates get people to care about such things that they can
hardly see or feel? They make it
personal
, by trying to connect virtually every weather
event to global warming/climate change/ global climate disruption, because weather is
something that is universal to the human experience and detectable on a daily basis. The
idea that weather can affect you is borne out in the daily news throughout history; floods,
thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, droughts and heat waves are a shared part
of the human experience globally via pain, suffering, and property destruction.
What better way to make people concerned about small, virtually imperceptible,
century-scale changes in temperature than by saying that these changes directly affect the
daily weather, making it more extreme?
This fear-mongering speaks to the human psyche, for mankind has long feared the
effects of severe weather and the primal urge is to seek shelter from it and to avoid it
whenever possible. It is a basic survival instinct learned from experience, but contrary
to the lack of any learned experience from a century of virtually undetectable global
temperature change.
Why it seems that extreme weather is 'getting worse' when the data shows
otherwise
With the help of the electronic media, many, if not all, of the extreme weather events
we see globally on a day to day basis are etched into the minds of people simply by the
act of watching news broadcasts, reading newspapers, listening to radio, getting Twitter
or Facebook alerts, receiving SMS messages on cellphones, or reading web pages. Live
television news broadcasts gravitate towards what is action-packed and exciting, which
tends to cater to the viewer's emotions, rather than address the factual content. This is
essentially the
modus operandi
of the electronic media, and particularly, television news.
The goal is to capture eyes and ears, and to keep them engaged.
In 2011, Bouziotas et al. presented a paper on flood trends that concluded:
