IMO it’s much more subtle. There are still really cold days in winter. There are still mild days in summer. You can even have a whole summer that’s cool or a whole winter that’s incredibly cold. I’ve heard that one of the effects of climate change is that the weather is more unpredictable.
Having said that, there’s a winter festival here that relies on naturally frozen outdoor water. A couple of years ago they had to cancel it because for the first time since it started it never got cold and stayed cold enough. If you look at the data, the length of that festival has been getting shorter and shorter every year. As for summer, having an air conditioner used to be uncommon, now it’s a necessity.
It’s tricky because some of that is lifestyle creep. An air conditioner used to be a much more expensive luxury, but now they’re cheaper. Technology changes, expectations change, so behaviour changes. We’re also notoriously bad at remembering what was normal in the past. We remember events and extremes, not averages. But, the number of days a festival can stay open in the winter is a much more concrete thing. It was just a given that it would be about 2 weeks when I was a kid, and they had a lot of freedom when it could be. Now it’s a matter of waiting for the weather to cooperate, and often it can’t run the full 2 weeks.
Credit the fucking artist. This is Shenanigansen.
Here is the original comic by Shen.
It felt surreal arguing with boomers about record breaking temperatures the other day. Like, a new record was just broken for the highest temperatures in many European countries while we’re sitting there, sweating our balls off in the middle of a 2 week long heat wave. “Nah” they kept saying “We’ve had hot days before.” When I showed them statistics they refused to look at them. Instead they changed the topic instantly and ignored me for a good 15 minutes. Those weren’t some strangers I just met, mind you. I’ve known these guys for my entire life.
Too many people but especially older people (at least from my experience) are completely delusional about climate. They aren’t interested in facts, not interested in other people telling them they’re wrong and they even ignore what they’re experiencing themselves right now in favor of a severely distorted, rather vague idea of what a summer used to be 50 years ago.
They are in complete denial. Imagine approaching death right as it’s impossible to deny your generation personally fucked up the future of civilization itself.
In my experience you now get one of: 1. The weather has always been like this, 2. I did everything I could, I recycled and brought my own cup to the coffee shop, 3. Oh well, I’ll be dead soon so it’s not my problem.
- I did everything I could, I recycled and brought my own cup to the coffee shop
Everything I could, except vote for representatives who prioritize climate over line-go-up
Did those exist? I don’t quite remember anyone in my country who had climate in their agenda (not even now, afaik)
Don’t know where you’re from but i bet there is a green party in your country that got like 1% of the votes in the last election.
There is GreenPeace that was outlawed this year, but yes there is a green party, it only once reached 1% and they hold 0.1% of seats in regional governments, so they existed indeed. I never thought of this as a way to do something about the issue. On the downside they have a pretty bad stance on everything else, and even the green position is not very consistent
In a de facto two party system it certainly can feel like a spoiler vote, however a single issue party can be highly influential in getting larger parties to adopt better positions on those single issues in order to avoid having votes syphoned away. In a truely multiparty system, a single issue party can directly extract concessions if they end up as part of a coalition government or are in a king-maker situation following an election.
fucked up the future of civilization itself.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration don’t you think? We are going to have higher highs and lower lowes things are going to be a bit fucked but it nothing close to civilisation ending.
Worst case scenario full ecosystem collapse and that will have the following issues:
- A couple billion people die.
- Most people who will die will be in the 3rd world or already weak (old, fat, etc).
- The west will face mass immigration and if we are to survive we must reserve our resources else everyone dies. Ie full ecosystem collapse will necessitate letting billions starve as they beg for resources we cannot give them.
This is bad but not end of civilisation bad. Ur food might be a shitter and u won’t have the new iPhone but overall u will still be living a better life than most kings throughout history.
Worst case scenario is Venusification, where runaway climate change forces make earth literally uninhabitable for all known lifeforms. If we continue on our current path this is a likely outcome.
Your less-apocalyptic scenario is one where our global economy collapses. If this happens, no area of the earth will be safe. Food production will drop by 80-90%, which means that human population will have to drop by 80-90%.
Your assumption that the West will be a safe haven is incorrect. The West’s economic advantage relies on imports, and in a collapse scenario those imports will stop. We can see a small version of this during the current Hormuz crisis- without middle east oil, weatern farmers have limited access to fertilizer, therefore crop yields are down significantly. Without fertilizer imports, the West cannot farm. Without natural gas imports, the West cannot heat its buildings.
In the collapse scenario, the violence won’t be localized in places like the US border. Humans, even in western nations, will be desperate. Your neighbors will be watching their children starve to death. They will be willing to break down your door and beat you to death if you have food.
My man if the current trend continues for a few more years we will start having water wars. Winter has no snow anymore and droughts are a thing that happens every summer. Also you think people are going to stay put and wait to die? There will be mass migrations on a scale we haven’t seen before.
Stuff is already pretty bad in some places, in the US the Colorado River Basin is in a water crisis already, Lake Mead is getting so low they can’t use it for power generation.
I live in an area where ice used to be an industry. Not even a minute drive from my house is a lake where they’d cut big blocks of ice and ship them downstream to stack and pack in sawdust and such to last the rest of the year. This area supplied a lot of the ice for the city of Philadelphia because closer to the city the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers were too dirty and no one wanted ice from them.
This went on until around 100 years ago, maybe even a bit longer, my dad in his 70s remembers his grandmother still getting ice delivered for her icebox for part of his childhood until she finally got a refrigerator.
My friends dad, who was a bit younger than my dad, used to tell stories about how the local creek would freeze over in the winter and he and his friends would ice skate down the frozen creek to get to another town about 5 miles away.
I actively keep an eye on ice conditions around me because I would like to try ice fishing some day. It’s only been a handful of times over the last decade or so where any body of water around here has frozen over enough for it to be possible, and even then it’s only been just the absolute bare minimum 4 inches and I’d ideally want another inch or two before I felt comfortable enough to actually try it.
I’ve never even seen that creek freeze over enough that even some foolhardy kids would be able to try skating on it, I’ve seen it get maybe 1 inch of ice, and even that was a rare occurrence, they’d break right through if they tried.
These are things that people around me should remember or at least should remember their parents and grandparents talking about, not something that’s totally out of living memory, and yet they still refuse to see it.
are they doing the thing again?
i remember being up at lake tahoe (california-nevada border, USA. big freshwater lake) and the firm my dad worked for, one of the owners had a cabin up there. They were trying to convince my dad to buy into the practice so as part of his bonus one year (I was like, 4) we got to stay a weekend up there. tried to jump over a frozen creek, I was 4, fell through the (ice was a quarter inch, water was 6 inches, i was 4 remember) 12 foot hole in the ice to my watery grave. I spent (probably a second at longest) twenty three years, submerged (up to my shin at most? i really don’t remember), underwater, in that hole until my dad plucked me out, a grown man (yes all it took to turn from a 4-year-old to a fully grown adult, then man, because amab and i hadn’t done a lot of thinking by age 4, was getting my feet really fucking cold. truly i was a king among cold-feeted cold-feet-people.)
At least as far as ice harvesting goes, that’s a pretty well-documented historical fact that can be verified.
As far as my friends dad being able to ice skate on the creek, it’s a bit harder to verify what he was doing 60 or so years ago, especially since he’s dead, but he was also the kind of guy who did plenty of crazy things in his day, and that story would be downright tame compared to just about every other story involving him so it’s kind of hard to imagine that that was the one he misremembered or embellished, but I suppose it was possible.
And there are plenty of other little leftovers, like several parks and such in the area where the ice thickness is monitored by the park staff because once upon a time you used to be able to reliably skate and fish on the ice.
yeah, we got enough snow out here that it stuck to the fence once while i was growing up, and it was the weekend we were moving and we were in the damn truck during the hour it snowed. we had warm winters.
i got ice and cold as an adult (my first winter as an adult was in Utah), but i think it has a different effect on you as a child.
I had an extremely weird conversation a while ago. A coworker had never heard of global warming before. They listened intently as I explained, expression making it apparent that they were honest about their obliviousness.
How? It’s been part of the news circle for two decades minimum.
Truthfully, she said that she had heard about it in passing but had never cared to learn anything about it. She knew the name and not a thing more. This conversation was spawned when I pointed out that I could no longer relate to the weather that kids today experience because of global warming, and gears started turning and she asked many questions. As far as how? Education in the US is not equally distributed.
My grandma died back in 2019, but before her death she was hard into every type of climate change denial. She was also a lifelong evangelical christian, and used to make it super awkward when I would hang out with a friend who was black. In the years before her death she would send me links to things proving that that historical climate statistics are lying, and climate change is just a hoax people are using to make money. She was also huge into bible codes, and huge into Israel.
Not really sure where I was going with that… but I have a suspicion organized religion is to blame.
I don’t understand. Is it arrogance or are they somewhat aware that they did this, that they are responsible and that they’re leaving this mess behind for the rest of us?
You know, going by this and other comments I think you have the right idea. Like, we all are wearing blinkers as we go about our day because our whole world would fall apart if we fully realize our part in this mess. I imagine some older folks lie to themselves about global warming because their whole world view would fall apart completely.
To admit they agree with you would require them to admit they did nothing to stop it for decades despite mountains of evidence.
Not to mention they’d have to give up conveniences they’ve grown accustomed to or be labeled hypocrites.
I want to build bridges between generations more than anything but it’s really hard when being wrong and inconvenienced are two things boomers hate
It’s willful ignorance.
It’s either shifting baseline syndrome or people that can’t be bothered to give a shit since they had their fair share of this world already and are waiting to die.
They all need to be jackyl and hide style today. Couple days of cold April weather, then bam 40c.
Ive had long hair almost all of my life. Today Im getting a mohawk because I’m tired of being this sweaty all the time.
Ive been rocking the shaved sides long top look. I usually keep it up in a pony tail or bun. its the best of both worlds, you get the coolness of short hair (mostly) and ability to style if thats your thing.
It’s usually like this were i live, but the fall sometimes has some cute floods that kill a couple of people and destroy buildings
The really cool thing about climate change is that even as the average temperature of the planet increases, winters get more and more severe. Think about how damn hot the rest of the world has to be if one continent is experiencing record lows while the overall temperature of the planet is hotter than average
What’s rarely communicated clearly enough is that “warming” means “more energy”. If it had been called something like “atmospheric energy buildup” from the start, maybe there’d be fewer people saying dumbshit like “so much for global warming” every snowstorm.
Yeahh
Spring:
You need that winter guy to be huge and bulky as well.
Climate change is making extremes more references. At the same time as we’ve been having record heat, we’ve had record winters as well.
In Canada, when can we get that winter?
Isn’t canada really cold?
Too bloody hot for me.
Quality edit
Thx, i hate bad quality ones
As someone from the equator:
I went to a country on the equator that cracked the code. Live at the equator but on a bigass mountain many thousands of feet in the air and you’ll get the consistent days and weather but at a temperature that won’t roast puny AC adapted people alive 😭🧠
Also, the record high temperature in Singapore (1 degree north of the equator) is 9 degrees Celsius lower (37C) than France’s record (46C).
I remember when 30° was considered acute.
ur acute :)
UR MOMS OBTUSE
Obtuse caboose on the loose
On a moose on the loose!
U r a bee
You’ll still get the winter from the top panel, spring oscillates between summer and winter weather on a weekly basis, and fall is just floods.
Not my experience. The winters have been super mild these last few years, but now there is like a cold wave (analogous to a heat wave) for like a week or two where it gets really cold. But we’ve also had a week of snow, followed by nearly 20°C on Christmas Eve. The weather is all kinds of fucked.
our winters got colder and drier, we know its a mediterrinean climate here in the west coast, the ecology reflects that. there are 4-or 5. Chapparal, mottaral, of course mediterrenean basin, and perth.
it was only 1 year it got extremely hot and rainy, it was 2017, a whole month of non-stop deluge, and then the summer went up to 108f. pandemic winter is just very cold(bad for atopic dermatitis sufferers,chillblains)
Yep, Denver’s winter felt like perpetual spring this year right into summer. I miss winter so much. Now we’re in “shit’s on fire everywhere” season…just getting started. I’m sure the high winds will make an appearance soon too.
I was dreading summer this year in SC since the scorching spring just canceled the rain for weeks on end and launched us into extreme drought, one of the worst since they started making records. So I expected surely summer would twist the knife and crispify everything even worse. Then surprisingly summer turned around and has unusually had almost too regular deep bouts of moderating rain and thunderstorms that pulled us back to only abnormally dry for the year so far and kept things from getting too hot (though the humidity has miserable, like stepping out into a mouth). I thought spring was supposed to be the rainy season here… still, even with a lush green summer saving us I think it was still not great for a lot of the native insects and the less drought tolerant native plants. One of my blueberry plants and the maypop seedlings I had going up and died even with some supplemental watering and the previously numerous bees mostly vanished when their numbers dropped off a cliff. That left little competition when paper wasps hatched and proliferated after the worst was over and I’m a lot more leery of those territorial guys and the aggressive yellowjackets than the cute bumblebees due to my phobia. 😔
It’s equally likely for winter to make old winters seem like mild springs in comparison. Climate change makes all weather events more extreme.
A summer for the whole family!
During this heatwave have been discussing with wife about moving north of Scotland after we retire… we were heaving 38+ and they had a warm 15…
I stumbled upon a new wikipedia article about this heatwave that mentioned Sweden recorded a new all time temperature high (like most areast hit by the heatwave). In Germany (where I live) we just had three consecutive days with each recording a new all time high, all above 41°C. Sweden’s new record high is 32,sth°C. I know where I wanna live during future summers.
We are planning on moving up north when I retire in a few years. Get up there quick before everyone wants to move there.
I’m barely over 30and you old farts are pulling the ladder up behind you. Fucking boomers
I loved that winter.
