Rapidly declining remarkability of temperature anomalies may obscure public perception of climate change

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Frances C MoorePatrick Baylis

Abstract

The changing global climate is producing increasingly unusual weather relative to preindustrial conditions. In an absolute sense, these changing conditions constitute direct evidence of anthropogenic climate change. However, human evaluation of weather as either normal or abnormal will also be influenced by a range of factors including expectations, memory limitations, and cognitive biases. Here we show that experience of weather in recent years-rather than longer historical periods-determines the climatic baseline against which current weather is evaluated, potentially obscuring public recognition of anthropogenic climate change. We employ variation in decadal trends in temperature at weekly and county resolution over the continental United States, combined with discussion of the weather drawn from over 2 billion social media posts. These data indicate that the remarkability of particular temperatures changes rapidly with repeated exposure. Using sentiment analysis tools, we provide evidence for a "boiling frog" effect: The declining noteworthiness of historically extreme temperatures is not accompanied by a decline in the negative sentiment that they induce, indicating that social normalization of extreme conditions rather th...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jul 26, 2019·Current Environmental Health Reports·Mathilde PascalNikita Charles Hamilton
Jul 31, 2020·Journal of Geophysical Research. Atmospheres : JGR·Martha M VogelS I Seneviratne
Sep 11, 2019·Current Environmental Health Reports·Mathilde PascalNikita Charles Hamilton
Sep 12, 2019·Journal of the Royal Society, Interface·Nick Obradovich, Iyad Rahwan
Feb 6, 2020·Nature Communications·Frances C Moore, Nick Obradovich
Dec 17, 2020·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Tamma CarletonJonathan Proctor
Feb 13, 2021·Scientific Reports·Iain S WeaverRudy Arthur
Mar 4, 2021·PloS One·Simon Porcher, Thomas Renault
Jun 23, 2021·Climatic Change·Vijay S Limaye
Sep 25, 2021·Npj Regenerative Medicine·Armin GarmanyAndre Terzic
Jan 12, 2021··Edoardo VignottoFlavio Lehner

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