Weather vs. Climate and Human Perception

• How can we reconcile the variability of weather with that of climate?  How does our humanness restrict our thinking?

This question is most intriguing to try to answer, since it deals with the human issues of perception in relation to climate change and our own short life in the scope of this global change. This huge perception “stumbling block” could be argued to be the biggest issue facing immediate action towards policy making in favor of climate change mitigation. The book emphasizes this within the first chapter of the book, providing a human context for our understanding of weather changing from year-to-year and from generation to generation, as people comment on the milder winters occurring. However, the book briefly mentions that human perception can change in relation to how the CURRENT weather is on a day-to-day basis correlating with their belief in global warming’s existence. In other words, a cooler day lowers peoples’ belief, while an extremely hot day increases their belief. With this thinking, it would appear that humans tend to closely tie weather and climate variability together, using the immediacy of daily weather to fuel their perception of global warming—or not. This ideology would appear impossible to untangle unless humans thought about weather patterns in various areas for longer amounts of time. However, humans do not think this broadly about a subject when they are immediately concerned with what’s around them. Scientists who devote considerable amounts of time to analyzing these trends and patterns do, as well as detailed records compiled from around the globe.

For example, this summer was the hottest one on record, with various cities across the US with record high temperatures. This information for THIS summer in conjunction with records for temperatures from many past summers paints a more complete picture of our shifting climate, however, many people don’t seem to perceive this broader shift. This is due mostly, one would imagine to our life span. Past generations may have experienced different weather patterns, but often it seems this information is not transferred onto the next generation and then reinforced very strongly. We each have our own narrow time span of events that we experience and then deem as important, without witnessing a clear warming pattern that nearly all scientists commonly recognize today. How do we reconcile our “weather” with our broader “climate”? The text tries to answer this question with the general consensus that we must think outside our own lives, connect with others who share different thoughts, and act quickly on our judgments about the discovering of warming. The text sums up the complex discovery of global warming as such: “…[it] was patently a social product, a limited consensus of judgments arising in countless discussions among thousand of experts.” Thus, a true consensus about the existence of arguably the greatest environmental concern of our time, came from MANY people of a diverse set of backgrounds studying various environmental effects through different periods of time. In other words, weather and climate were separated for scientists—now we as individuals must think in a similar fashion to reconcile the two words “weather” and “climate.”