Still, I do notice a change from my youth to now, as did my father before me. However, it is indeed a gradual shift as far as temperatures, but a noticeable one here with respect to weather features; snowfalls, dry days through summer in some areas here, &c.
One thing that makes the shift more clear here, perhaps, is we do not enjoy the smoothing effect of the Gulf Stream that you enjoy. Our temp and humidity bandwidth is inevitably larger; hotter in summer and colder in winters. We feel the difference between the El Niņo and La Niņa patterns far more clearly.
Where I live now, we really haven't seen the extremes like others have. For us, this summer has been pretty much in line with many others in my memory, though I have only been here less than two decades, not a lifetime. Others in the Americas have seen a shift and, on average, it is a measurable shift.
The press and the wailers annoy me, though. We're inundated daily with tales of misery, Grampa Joe smiling at us and saying stupid shit about "You can't deny it now" yet no-one is mentioning we just now shifted pattern from something like five years of La Niņa to a strong El Niņo and the majority of the climate behaviour this year has been quite predictable for that reason. Selective facts thrown in the face do as much damage as complete denial or blaming it all on Man's Sin or other cop-outs.
Make no mistake, I take on the extremists just as strongly as I do the complete deniers, for neither are doing anyone any favours. As long as the voices remain shrill and blindly repetitive of "belief" without an attempt at understanding the issue, we can never move on to practical solutions and mitigations. Its the problem we have here with social issues as well as this environmental one.
I'm not a member of the climate deniers, or of the "let's take advantage of other countries dialling back, fire up our stacks, and make some real money" crowd. I'm also not a member of the blamers or the chicken-little crowd.
I am, however, a pragmatist and a member of the science & engineering world. The data taken and interpreted by physicists, chemists, and climatologists says there has been a potentially dangerous effect on the climate wrought by humanity during the Industrial Revolution/Machine Age. This is nothing new over the last decade or even a couple decades. It's another example of the power of man realised like never before by harnessing steam, generating power and heat by petro means, the power of the Machine Age.
In the 60s during the first real environmental movement, just reducing our messing up our bed was considered legitimate, and we've strayed from that. We did reduce, whether it was stack scrubbers, catalytic convertors, unlead fuels, chemical dumpings into watersheds. We made real progress on the CFC/ozone layer issue; that is a real success story by the way.
Now, largely because every moron can scream over the social media and be heard, we are too busy screaming and have embraced the notion that those voices deserve to be heard. They don't.
Actually, we have a great opportunity which we are squandering. The Machine Age is over and the Information Age has begun. What is a social disaster is an environmental opportunity. We can make practical progress unfettered by the strictures we worked under in the 60s during the Machine Age. We can get Americans out of their dam SUVs, for example. We can do more to centralise power generation where its more efficient rather than generate it under the bonnet and make it practical in many cases, such as in the metropolitan corridors. We just need to give up the notion of "solution or nothing" and implement reduction and progress. Lots of low hangers to pluck that just aren't hard.
I'm ok with the interpretation of the data that says climate change is sneaking up on us and about to really bite us in the arse, myself. Regardless of my or anyone's "beliefs" though, anything we do to clear up some of our mess has to be beneficial, so why wait? That is my point and what I find rather frustrating. It's humanity being too fat, lazy, and self-absorbed as a species to be bothered anymore.
Have we just given up?
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