Is this normal?

Muggy in the West. Frigid in the East. It's impossible to intuit what's normal anymore -- or, more importantly, how abnormal things have become. Weather apps aren't helping.

Foggy fall morning in Eugene, Oregon.

I’m typing this from Oregon, where it’s been 60-something all week. At atmospheric river has been dumping feet of rain instead of snow, which was the case last December. The result is that parts of Oregon and Washington state have been flooded to the point of large-scale evacuation. Inflatable boats came to the rescue.

I moved here from D.C. last September. Friends there, and in the Northeast, are complaining to me about frigid temps and pesky snow all around.

“This is the coldest D.C. December I can remember,” a friend said this week.

At a time of runaway climate change — and when many of us move around quite a lot — how is a person expected to intuit what’s “normal” when it comes to the weather?

Short answer: none of this is normal

First off: None of the weather we experience today is “normal.”

All of today’s weather exists in a climate that’s between 1 and 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it would be if not for billions of tons of fossil fuel pollution.

That doesn’t mean that humans “cause” every weather event, but it does mean that we’e changed the background conditions in which those events develop. (We also are getting better at identifying our fingerprints on individual weather events. You can search through these websites on “climate attribution” studies for more detail).

Likewise, “natural disaster” is no longer an appropriate term in this era.

I like Michael Mann’s suggestion of “unnatural disaster.”

But, kinda like “fetch,” those linguistic shifts aren’t happening.

(Sorry, I had to make a late-stage millennial joke at some point…)

How abnormal is critical

Knowing none of this is normal is part of the mind puzzle that is the experience modern weather. More important is knowing how abnormal this moment might actually be. And that is just incredibly difficult to ascertain these days.

In a sense, this comes down to our memories of the weather. If we could remember the entire temperature record from the early 1800s (before the Industrial Revolution and all this fossil fuel pollution and warming) til now, we’d be pretty set. We’d know how to play any given day in a long history of changes boiling across many decades.

Our weather memories don’t work like that, of course.

First, we don’t live long enough to feel the full extent of the climate crisis. (This is an obvious point but also a profound one; our storytelling also fails to capture this scale).

Second, our memories of the weather are actually super short.

Research led by Fran Moore found in 2019 that, on average, the memory bank we access when deciding if a given day is “hot” or not is only two to eight years long.

Let me just repeat that the climate crisis is playing out on the order of decades, centuries and millennia. (CO2 pollution creates warming for 1,000 years).

Yet we are unable to feel those changes.

Our weather memories are estimated to be two to eight years long.

This creates profound risks. Moore’s findings have been compared to the (apocryphal) story of the frog in the boiling pot of water. In that tale, the temperature turns up so slowly that the frog fails to notice what’s going on and eventually is boiled alive.

It’s a semi-apt metaphor for our perception of global warming.

It’s also untrue. A frog jumps out of slowly-heated water.

(I find that point pretty comforting, actually).

The better metaphor, to me, is tinnitus.

The buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere and the slow rise in global temperatures are like a ringing in our ears. They grow so slowly that we fail to hear.

Weather apps don’t do this justice

We of course do have data to tell us what’s happening to the weather.

That data can help us decide whether a given day’s weather is unusual.

Yet that data is both difficult to access and misleading.

If you dig through the Apple Weather app, you can find a comparison to “the Normal Range” for the day’s weather. If you click on “averages” you see more detail.

The issue, if you look even more closely, is that these “normals” are calculated from 1970 to present. The World Meteorological Organization defines “pre-industrial” temperatures as those from 1850 to 1900. 1970 is well within the “industrial” era.

The result is a comparison that likely underestimates the amount of warming we’re experiencing. Given our goldfish memories of the weather, this is both significant and dangerous. Weather apps could help us feel these changes on a day-to-day basis. That might promote deeper thinking and emotional understanding of what’s happening to the planet as we continue to junk up the atmosphere. Instead we’re left floating through time, unable to feel how much is changing all around us.

It’s a classic example of what Daniel Pauly has termed “shifting baselines.”

I worry about this because if we can’t feel global warming in a day-to-day way, how can we be expected to fix it? Instead, we’re left to guess at what feels normal. And, in my case, I’m left to guess at why this December feels way more like summer.

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End notes from the field:

Shout-out to my students at the University of Oregon who presented their environmental journalism in a public showcase in Eugene last week.

One of their stories focused on the lack of snow in Oregon this year. Another on an almost-extinct flower and the woman trying to protect it. Another on the very-Oregon phenomenon of “glacier funerals” and the limits of that way of thinking.

You can see a bunch of their recent work at willamettedammit.substack.com.

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I’m genuinely curious if you all think our short “weather memories” are significant when it comes to climate confusion and inaction. Shoot me a note and let me know.

I’ll include some of your thoughts in the next newsletter.

Thank you for reading, and please consider sharing this with a friend!

— Sutter