Ok, so I keep getting gaslighted by people around me (USA) when I comment how crazy the weather is, and how we've never had it like this, and they say things like "oh, you just notice it more now because you're older" or "the weathers always done this"

But I don't think it's normal for weather to be -10 degrees F with snow, and then 3 days later 75 degrees F! That seems insane to me!

Unless I'm wrong and we really have had this insane type of weather "forever". But it doesn't feel like it.

the Question: Am I crazy, or right, and is there proof?

I think you forgot a question.

Yeah I love being told by the auto mechanics I work with that they know more about the climate and weather than someone who has a PHD in climatology. I like to bring up how much they like it when someone comes in and tells them how to do their job - that's exactly what they are doing. Leave the expertise to the experts, morons.

Just look at the data, there are historical records going back a century in many locations around the US. Find one close to you and do some digging.

The simple answer is that crazy does happen, and has happened historically, but it's much more common now than it used to be.

edited!

I mean everyone just points to the extremes of the 40's and says how "humans couldn't be the cause of it, because look how crazy the temp extremes were then!"

It's definitely worse and swings more wildly than it did when I was a kid in the 80's. Plus the seasons are shifting, everything seems to start at different times than it used to. But you don't have to notice it, it's scientific fact that it's happening and you can find endless amounts of research that prove it.

Depending on where you live that kind of weather is normal. It's def normal in the northeast in spring and fall.

Climate change is more about the annual mean temperatures going up. Objectively it was colder 20-30 years ago in most places.

I always felt like when I was a kid we got snow in November - half a meter of it by Christmas - and now there's less of it and it comes later. But when I look up the actual snowfall stats for my childhood years, it's not that different from what we get now.

It's not all explained by climate change, but it does play a factor - especially with extreme weather events. Still, good to remember that weather ≠ climate.

We are experiencing Climate Chaos, you are not wrong. The people around you are in denial.

Right I get that. I was referring more to extreme weather events. I feel like there are WAY more storms here now than there used to be as well.

you must live in a conservative place where climate change denial is a part of their cultural-political identity ... it's the exact opposite where I live - strangers I chat with in a waiting room will openly and proudly state they believe in climate change in the midst of an otherwise banal discussion of the weather.

No. There aren't more storms, it's more that the storms that there are are more extreme in intensity.

Just look at hurricane data. The average intensity of storms has gone up, but not necessary the frequency.

This is a consequence of more moisture being in the air from warmer general temps.

But I don't think it's normal for weather to be -10 degrees F with snow, and then 3 days later 75 degrees F! That seems insane to me!

The climate is going crazy, but strictly speaking, you can't logically conclude that from solely your local weather fluctuations. I.e., climate change is a global property of our planet, which requires global statistics...which we have, but your folks either refuse to look or refuse to listen to experts who have looked.

And extreme weather events are more likely, but that doesn't mean they never occurred before or never would occur without climate change.

I'm not saying this to downplay the severity of the climate crisis or even to say that you literally can never use local weather events to reason about climate change, but IMO is it both politically and mathematically important to stress the global nature of climate change whenever it is brought up.

Yep, I got ya!

Ive never heard an IRL person say they believe in climate change, ever.

100% season shift. Now we dont get snow in November December, we get it in march April.

Yeah but that doesn't explain how the mean goes up.

In climate change the mean goes up because we are getting more extreme events, in the form of both heating and cooling events.

Lets put this in D&D terms, or at least dice rolls.

First, imagine you have two sets of dice, one blue, and one red. Blue represents cooling events, red represents heating events.
In this exercise, every individual die represents one unique event (a snowstorm, a cold blast, a heatwave, a hurricane, whatever).

Every year, you are going to roll some equal number of red and blue dice, and whatever you get as a result, those are the extreme weather events you get, and how extreme they are. Over enough years of dice rolls, the average will approach 0, but the individual years will bounce around in terms of their means, and individual events can be cover a wide range of extremes (0-6).

Climate change is like swapping some of red D6's (six sided dice) with a few D10's (red sided dice), and a few of your blue D6's with D8's. You increase range of possible extremes, tilted slightly to one side. And yes, the mean of individual years will go up (but not always), and over the course of many years, it will trend in a more positive direction.

Basically, the average doesn't just increase monotonically or continuously. It does so through the contribution of more extreme inputs.

you can't logically conclude that from solely your local weather fluctuations.

From a pure scientific method standpoint 100%

But changes local weather can easily be corroborated by satelite data of the polar vortex.

Like we can see that wind from the north pole is dipping south faster than it used to. Resulting in cold snaps as the wind rushes south and heat domes in regions between the jetstreams.

This directly results in the increasingly frequent and extreme weather fluctuations we've been been experiencing.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02022018/cold-weather-polar-vortex-jet-stream-explained-global-warming-arctic-ice-climate-change/

...

In my region we regularly have a "false spring" this time of year. We get a week of warm that melts the snow in the valley and then a week later it drops back down and snows again.

But lately the hi's and low's are 10c hotter/colder. The heat in between is so warm trees start coming out of hybernation. The cold snaps so fast that it threatens local agriculture.

We just got a foot of wet snow and tomorrow it's supposed to br 15c and sunny.

...

Couple years ago we were stuck in the heat dome and you could see the polar vortex swooping 100km below us and to either side on the weather channel.

Over here there's plenty who believe in climate change, but they think it's neat that we now have the climate in the Netherlands that Paris used to have in the eighties. There's also plenty who insist that the climate has always changed while ignoring that we see changes occuring thousands of times faster than before. And there's a group who'll say sure, but it's not something we can change, so no use trying.

When I was a kid in the early 80's, we would go ice skating on the canals almost every year. since the 90's this has hardly ever been possible.

You aren't crazy, the weather is fucked. The proof is in min and max temps over the course of decades. You can also pull up precipitation/snow records over decades as well. A quick google search would find you tons of proof.

People who are climate change deniers, or just willfully ignorant, will deny there is a problem, and keep denying it until their home or workplace gets swallowed up in a climate calamity. Of those, there will be a percentage that doubles down on their bullshit even after being personally bitch slapped by the weather and becoming a statistic.

Stop engaging these people; it's exhausting. I'm dating someone like this. We will discuss an issue, have a difference in ideology, then I will find and present data and proof that back up the things I am claiming, and my fiance will just double down on the bullshit to the point that it's transcended to gaslighting.

The mean goes up because the average temps are rising.

I have nothing substantive to add but to add to the choir of voices saying you are not crazy. If it helps, most people around me also agree so add them to the count

We need to get away from anecdotes as a way to describe this problem. There's dozens of reasons a city can hit a record high or low. It's like saying Wilt Chamberlain is the greatest basketball player of all time because nobody else has scored 100 points in a single game, or Bill Russell because he won the most titles. Those stats are based on key games or favorable conditions and not really an overall, day-in-day-out performance. The same goes with climate. The year you have a "100 year snow storm" could be the same year you have a record number of days above 90°.

Science isn't about focusing on outliers, it's about focusing on trends and what the majority of the data is telling you. Unfortunately we can't always comprehend slow moving data points, which is why we capture data and view it as a whole.

|Stop engaging these people

You're literally engaged to one? How??

Humans in general are awful at long term anything. I myself am much worse than most humans at it.

Welcome to the red states. You’ll be screaming internally a lot.

The food is good, though. And the sportsball team is looking good this year.

The fox news brainwash is just insane. I wish lemmings could live 1 day here and see how it really is outside their massive metropolis.

My city moved up half a USDA Plant Hardiness Zone (7B to 8A) when the latest map came out in 2023. That's not weather, that's climate.

I'm in the Midwest, where we really have long had wild fluctuations in the weather day to day - think snowfall in the morning in early May followed by 60°F in the afternoon. I'm on the eastern half of Kansas, so there's a lot of open land to the west for big weather patterns to bounce around, and not a lot of bodies of water to moderate things.

I've had better luck commenting on trends rather than days: "Loving all this nice weather the last few weeks!" "Yeah, but honestly, it's kinda unnerving to have it in January..."

WTH do you live? We talk about it plenty where I live.

Magaland.

All you'll hear here on a cold day is "Ha global warming amiright!!?" I'm not joking either.
Or they complain the democrats are cloud seeding to change weather for immigrants.

I never knew I was surrounded by such dummies.

mean and average are two different things.

I feel like weather is vibes based. All I know is how today is relative to earlier that day.

Why don't you go ahead and keep digging this hole.

I mean plants that have grown here forever, literally evolved here, are dying because they can't handle the tempertures. That doesn't alarm anyone?

Of those, there will be a percentage that doubles down on their bullshit even after being personally bitch slapped by the weather and becoming a statistic.

There were covid deniers who, while diagnosed and hospitalized with covid, literally used their last breaths to deny covid's existence.

To me, "believing" in climate change is like "believing" in oxygen. I don't feel the need to say I believe in it. That's fascinating

Some people are much like Trump. They will contradict themselves midst their own narrative. One of my uncles literally texted that he remembered snow being around every day from early December to April - enough to play in - when he was a kid, and that nothing has changed with the weather, but then also said, so far this winter no snow that has stuck around more than a day and only a cm or so at a time. So which is it? Same as he remembered from childhood or the way it is now?

Phoenix is forecast to hit 100° on Wednesday, 3/18. This is a full week earlier than the current record for earliest 100° day (3/26/1988). Average is May 2nd.

Climate is fucked, yo.

I stuck my strap on in crazy. She hid how dumb she was until she made fun of me for reading and researching things. When I explained why knowing about shit was important she shared her uninformed opinions. Then I spent time trying to educate... That's when I realized she has no interest in doing better. I'm prepping for the break up. I am grey rocking hard.

Yup. This guy gets it.

Gotcha, sorry to hear that, hopefully it all goes as well as it can and you can escape the crazy.

Conservatives don't care about facts. They have the idea that there's a higher truth, and facts are supposed to support it, not the other way around, where facts define what's true. So if their talking heads say "climate change isn't real", they think it's the truth and any facts that get in the way are inconsequential.

Highly variable weather is nothing new. What is measurably new is the higher frequency of extreme weather events. That is the most apparent current consequence of climate change on the weather.

Things that used to happen once every generation are happening once every few years.

Which is generally outside the threshold of perception for the average lead poisoning victim.

Something that really brings that home is …

about 20 years ago my city redeveloped an old industrial waterfront area so now it’s one of the active parts of our city. All the buildings were built to handle 100 year storms

Now 20 years later there are regular floods and they’re talking about rebuilding to handle the new climate

Grey rocking to end a relationship? Why not just end it? That sounds like you're taking a huge risk and potentially wasting a lot of both of your time. You'd probably be better off just packing up and leaving in the middle of the night and maybe leaving a note. Rip that shit off like a bandaid, assuming you have made your choice. Life is far too short for shenanigans, trust me.

That's crazy.

Does one pity the abused and deranged dog that reacts to fear with violence? Even if there is demonstrable proof that they can change and reform and get better? Even if it bites you?