Climate change has become big news and it has undoubtedly become politicized and monetized. There are detractors and supporters, but it’s undeniable that the weather has become schizophrenic.
Let’s take a look at our localized temperature graph from our Netatmo home weather station.
One short week ago, our minimum temperature was a touch above freezing. By Friday we’d experienced the hottest day of the year (31.8C at Home Farm) and today we topped out at 18C but it felt a lot colder than that throughout the day. It was cold, cloudy, damp, windy and dark, and it felt like winter, not the middle of summer.
For me the last seven days have encapsulated climate change as phenomenon. Not too long ago, scientists were saying earth was heading towards another ice age. Now it appears that our planet is heating up at an unprecedented rate, with the prospect that certain parts of the world may yet end up getting suddenly colder.
That’s how the past seven days have felt. Last week, all the windows were open to help us stay cool and fight off heat exhaustion; today the central heating has been on all day. It’s crazy, but how utterly confused the vegetables in our veg patch must be.
I am, however, cognizant that one of the most important things to remember about climate change is that natural climate variability will still be happening all the time.
Even if the climate is forecast to be warmer in the future, periods of cold weather that occur naturally aren’t going to stop. Chances are that such cold spells will be less extreme, but a cool summer, or even a few cold years in a row is not necessarily proof that global warming isn’t happening.
[…] the weather becomes increasingly unpredictable, we would like to have the tools and knowledge to help us forecast and predict what it will be […]
I’ve had a life long interest in human history, from a more anthropological point of view. I’ve learned that one of the best ways to learn about a culture is through what they eat, and what they wear, whether it’s a culture from 5000 years ago, or today. So many factors are at play, but from my observations and research, geography and regional climate are among the most influential. I’ve also noticed that pretty much through all recorded history, humans have sounded the alert about apocalyptic predictions and climate change. It also seemed to me that humans have always blamed humans for these changes! Even when they invoked gods, spirits or demons, it was still due to human actions.
I’ve lived long enough to see several doomsday climate predictions. What I don’t understand, with all our current knowledge of climate systems, do we humans still think climate should ever stay the same? Or that there ever was any “perfect” range that was normal, and needs to stay that way? I recall, maybe 15 years ago, someone had sent a photo to a local newspaper that got published. It was of farmers in the area, plowing their fields, on Christmas Eve. It was taken in the 1880’s! Our region has not seen winters that mild, since, even though we’re supposed to be having “unprecedented” warming for the past 30 years.
It tends to leave a person immune to panicking, after a while.
Thanks for the thought provoking response.
I think that climate and weather is supposed to change, but when you look at historical records and data, these significant changes occur over prolonged periods of time. I believe that the amount of carbon humans have released into the atmosphere has contributed to accelerating this change.
On the back of this, data shows that the climate is changing in a way that is outside the range of natural climate variability.
Also, due to the nature of carbon dioxide and many of the other greenhouse gases, emissions created today will remain in the atmosphere for many decades to come, continuing to contribute to the climate’s changing trend.
I don’t know what that eventual change will lead to and what impact things like melting ice caps and rising sea levels will have on the planet. Maybe, as with Coronavirus, we will have a new ‘normal’ when it comes to weather. Time will tell.