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It also doesn't help when TV weathercasters† show graphics that list what the "normal" temperature is supposed to be for that day. There is no such animal. There is an average temperature for a particular date, but there isn't a single "normal" number.

† In America, few TV weathercasters are actual meteorologists anymore. Some stations will claim they are, but often they are not. One way to tell is to look for the AMS logo next to the person's name on-screen.

We know the historic average, but also variability, and I'm pretty sure that data just so happens to be a standard example of what is specifically called the "normal distribution".

So I don't see what the problem is with charting, say, the 98% confidence interval, calling it normal, and stating that values outside that range are 1-in-50 year events.

Claiming it should be a "normal distribution" (aka a bell curve) is a major assumption based on there is a "correct" temperature that remains fixed over time.

To the best of my knowledge, few places have tracked temperature longer than the last 150 years and beyond that we have estimates and calculations that have variances/tolerances built in. Is 150 data points for a given location enough to KNOW both the "correct temperature" and that it does/doesn't move?

The problem is is that the average is presented without the range and called normal or typical. you may live your life and never experience an average day.

Thank you !

Most people never understand this aspect of statistics. Living in Houston, and having survived 3 out of 4 years with an above-100-year floods, I understand firsthand the clumping of events. But the "typical" guy on the street (oops, now I just violated my own rule!) has no clue what a distribution is.

Not sure how to solve this problem. Teaching statistics to everyone in not a solution (see the Monty Hall Problem [0] ).

[0] - https://statisticsbyjim.com/fun/monty-hall-problem/

Wow, people can be spectacularly ignorant of even simpler things like probability:

1) Scientists predicting the probability of an earthquake in a region that just had one. "If it doesn't occur, they'll say it was only a probability, and if it does, they'll claim they predicted it! Stop wasting taxpayer's money on this nonsense!"

2) "My mother chain smoked all her life and she's in her 90's. So smoking doesn't cause cancer."

> Saying it's hot today or cold today isn't an indication of climate change.It's what occurs over hundreds of years but especially the last 150 years.

> It seems we are sending mixed signals saying that one day or a decade shows climate change.

The article isn't making these points at all; it definitely seemed to be looking at a much longer picture, at least that was my takeaway.

On the section about the greater rainfall and the doubling of intensity, they ended with this text:

> We can't conclude that these isolated incidents are caused by climate changes. > > On the other hand, we can conclude that such incidents have already become more common. And that it will likely cost us several hundred billion NOK to arm ourselves against all this water.

People understand things through stories, narratives. All of which are oversimplifications. Always. Therefore, for any given popular one, you can always be the contrarian well-actually guy. You can always point out the broader inconsistencies, and you can always find a gotcha or implied hypocrisy somewhere. When all else fails you can always fall back on tone-policing like you did here.

I know you're not practicing active "denial", but consider the degree to which you chose to be a headwind or a tailwind. Tone policing is being a headwind.

> I'm certainly on the climate change team (if that's what you call it). But are articles like this good or bad?

> When confronting climate change deniers...

The article doesn't give me the impression that it's aimed at those wishing to support their arguments with climate-change deniers.

I don't want to make assumptions about where in the world you're from, and I do acknowledge that climate-change denial is a serious problem we need to combat, but in Norway and most other developed European countries, climate-change denial isn't really a thing* anymore. Most people in this field have moved on and are just trying to get to grips with impact and timelines (like this article).

* That's not to say climate-change deniers don't exist, just that they're not mainstream and are often either ridiculed or ignored.

> Anecdotal evidence isn't very reliable.

True. Yet, as climate change accelerates it's absolutely reasonable to expect that we will be able to sense its effects in our daily lives.

I also have quite a number of personal observations that point to the idea that the planet is warming up. On the one hand I try to remain rational and say that this is a long-term trend, but on the other I'm thinking: holy crap, things are happening so fast that I now have memories from when the world was noticeably cooler.

I think therefore that over the next decades we should start accepting anecdotal evidence as real evidence, as global warming starts having a real impact on our lives.

No we shouldn't! You don't give up the principles of science just to expedite your political ideals. If you were going to do that, why bother with science in the first place? Just declare it so and shout it until everyone believes you!

I have memories of world 30 years ago being hotter than it is today. I don't credit it to "global cooling" because I'm not that silly. You shouldn't be either. You'll never notice a degree C of average temperature change. You regulate your body's environment's temperature with clothing, housing, heating, etc. And it varies much more dramatically hour-by-hour than over decades. If you simply changed your bedtime a little, you could experience global warming or cooling of the same magnitude as what actually happened.

If you understood science you'd understand why "you'll never notice a degree C of average temperature change" is wholly, irrevocably, unarguably, objectively, and absolutely scientifically incorrect.

The scientific reality is that climate models have made decently accurate predictions so far. The whole point of the models is that 1C or 2C of change is not just about your own personal subjective experience of how warm it is.

The predictions are about everyone's personal subjective experience of having their home flooded, or destroyed in a fire, tornado or hurricane - all of which become more likely as temperatures rise.

This has literally been understood for decades now - by climate scientists, by the fossil fuel industry, and also by insurers.

Those are the obvious first order effects. The longer term second order effects - water shortages, crop failure, economic instability - are at least as important, if harder to model. And the third order consequences - homelessness, resource wars, mass migration - even more so.

Just because you have failed to educate yourself properly, while persuading yourself that your subjective opinion about "clothing and heating" is as credible scientifically as that of thousands of climate science PhDs working full-time on modelling, and don't understand that these are specific, actionable predictions doesn't mean they won't affect you personally.

You can't notice it personally without doing science. You can't just remember how hot it was when you were a kid and know that global warming is happening. That's what the GP was talking about and what I'm responding to. Obviously scientists can measure it with suitable instruments and techniques but casual observers can't. I think you're arguing with a strawman by bringing floods and fires into it. But even if you want to go there, experiencing one flood in your life doesn't tell you that the frequency is higher than it was 30 years ago. There just isn't enough data or valid statistics in one person's personal experience and feelings.

Is there any level or consistency of anecdotal evidence that you would find acceptable?

No. See the enormous volume and consistency of anecdotal evidence for ineffective medicine. Most of China has believed and recreated the same false anecdotes about their TCM for thousands of years! Remember bloodletting? astrology? praying to God? If you don't apply methods for protecting yourself from human bias, then you're bound to fall victim to human bias.

Ok, so what standard of evidence for anthropogenic climate change would you accept?

I don't know, but I would reject all anecdotes. If somebody measured the temperatures around the world for many decades, I could accept that shows global temperature rise. Turns out they did and I do. That's data, not anecdotes. As for proving the cause, I don't know enough to understand how reliable that is. But climate scientists seem pretty sure of themselves so I accept their conclusions as much as any well studied science conclusions.

> one day or a decade

For one thing, a day and a decade are pretty different.

But more important, while a decade is really short on geological timescales, and probably isn't long enough to see natural/geo driven or many astronomically-driven changes... a decade is long enough for humans to get a real idea of trends in human-driven changes, or crossing of certain boundary conditions for long-horizon changes.

Is that a double standard, or is that a more finely articulated view?

From the article

> In some places, the timberline is over 100 meters higher than before.

You give the impression the article is saying “oh it is currently warm in Norway”. It seems to be much more than that.

Demagoguery has a better track record than science at influencing people's actions.

For example, Dr Semmelweis who literally prooved hand washing saved lives. He was mocked and committed to an asylum by his colleagues, where he ironically died from infection after a beating.

Climate change deniers mainly deny the human influence on climate, so even if you can convince them the earth is heating up, it's still a "natural process".

The article mentions a 115 year span of time.

People react to stories, not data. Anecdotes bring global warming home in a way people can relate.

People don’t change their minds if you throw a bunch of data at them. People change their minds if you make them feel.

People are also generally not that easily tricked. If you play up the "bring global warming home with anecdotes" game, then you're equally vulnerable to "hey, sure is cold today, what now, Al Gore?" Nobody will be convinced of anything by this sort of nonsense.

Weather is not climate. Even when it supports climate change.

> Weather is not climate. Even when it supports climate change.

It's certainly been quite a shift to watch. 10 years ago, you'd hear "Sure is cold today, so much for global warming eh?" followed by cries that weather is not climate. Today, it seems that a hot summer day, or a cool summer day, or a warm winter day, or a particularly cold winter day, is just more proof of climate change.

I say this as someone who thinks climate change is real, by the way--but I am amused at how this all looks.

Somebody was saying last year that climate alarmists do more damage than climate deniers. I think this is true. All the prognostications sound a bit like a death cult telling us the world will end on July 15, 20xx or the Mayan calendar or the comet will signal the end and people just tune that noise out. They can smell hysteria. Part of the problem is co-opting celebrities or personalities that are louder than their understanding of the science, and make very loud and visible statements that tarnish the science and policy discussion. We'd probably all be better off if the messaging was a little more sober about what the real risk levels are and timeframes, trusting the people in time to come around. The idea of doing massive economic policy change overnight was/is a doomed proposition. It's self-defeating to try and scare people off drugs by overstating the risk, so too with scaring people into climate policy.

Agree. My argument is that you have to explain climate in ways people can understand.

I think everyone will agree tht the tree line can’t be 100m higher just because it was warm one winter. Trees take a while.

> Nobody will be convinced of anything by this sort of nonsense.

This is clearly false. Anecdotal appeals to emotion convince many people of many things, and the history of the climate change debate so far tends to suggest that appeals to emotion are much more effective than actual science.

They are good, as they try to paint a varied picture of how a complex phenomenon is affecting people's everyday lives. Sometimes you need more than charts to see.

> But are articles like this good or bad?

Articles like this make me want to sniff glue. What should be written — and disseminated widely — is the truth that climate catastrophe is on our doorstep.

Who gives a shit if Norway is warmer and warmer, or if some other place is colder due to the chaotic nature of weather? The point is, "global warming" is rapidly destabilizing — no, destroying — ecosystems that we depend upon for our survival, and unleashing feedback loops that we are helpless to stop.

It's only going to get worse. Most articles don't go far enough in explaining the severity of the situation, because it'll frighten the neoliberals and trigger the neocons.

If Hacker News is still around in the next decade, I can't wait to read all the comments by the people here who love to bikeshed about "optics" and bullshit when actual widespread famine is beginning to rear its ugly head. I'm afraid most of you will turn inside out with all that navel-gazing.

I disagree, I live in Southeast Australia and have never seen so many people accept climate change as real as this past summer.

If it takes a slight misunderstanding about weather relating to climate change to get immediate action, isn’t that a good thing?

"If it takes [mistruth] to get [policy change I want], isn't that a good thing?" vs. education and truth? Where does that slippery slope end?

It ends that it isn’t a complete mistruth, just a small hyperbole. The massive bushfires we’re still experiencing are real, the hail storms that followed were real and the 40+ days in hazardous air quality since 1 Dec are also real. As is the past 20 years of drought my country has experienced.

These events were definitively contributed to by climate change, perhaps not direct cause and effect as some assume, but there is more than just correlation.

> If it takes a slight misunderstanding about weather relating to climate change to get immediate action, isn’t that a good thing?

Probably not, since people will point out that this call to action is based in falsehood and the credibility of the movement will be compromised.

Climate change deniers cannot be convinced by science because their objections are not based on any facts. The science on climate change is unimpeachable and has been known as such for decades.

You understand that proving causation is extremely difficult in a complex system where you can't run controlled experiments? You essentially have to have a correct model. But how do you verify your model is correct? You still can't run experiments to test it because there's only one Earth. You can use historical data but if your model was designed using that data, then you can't use it again to test it. This is one of the hardest types of task in science. Not "unimpeachable" by any means.