Heat? Frost? Hurricane? Just think, and not so seen. Scientists explain why our habit of underestimating weather anomalies is dangerous.
Researchers have identified the peculiarities of people's attitudes to climate change and weather anomalies.
EVERYTHING'S ALRIGHT
The climate is changing - we get used to it. Yes, we remember, of course, that earlier the winter was normal, and if it’s spring, then the streams murmur, and the ice melts, and the heart melts. Now what? Solid anomalies.
However, a person gets used to them very quickly, scientists say. So fast it’s dangerous.
The fact is that climatic processes take place on a completely different scale than our brain is able to perceive. Tens of thousands of years between ice ages. More than a century since global warming began. And our emotions about the weather, even the most abnormal and extreme, are enough for only a couple of years. Then we get used to it. These are the conclusions reached by Francis Moore, a researcher at the University of California.
Moore and his colleagues were not too lazy to analyze 2 billion messages on Twitter, which in one way or another mentioned the weather. From everyday chatter ("Uff, well, it's hot!", "Azzy cold today") to tweets about various weather disasters. So many were scribbled by 13 million social network users in just two years, from 2014 to 2016.
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The tweets were driven through a sieve of linguistic analysis, thanks to which scientists classified the attitude of users to the weather: positive, negative, neutral or completely indifferent, whether people are surprised by unprecedented heat or abnormal cold or write "all the rules." Then the Americans took the meteorological archives and compared the emotions from the tweets to what the weather was like in the days when they were written.
And a very simple pattern was discovered. The more significant the deviation of air temperature from climatic norms, the more often people discuss the weather. The sign of the anomaly matters: they write about unusual cold weather on the Web more actively than about heat.
MEMORY FOR TWO YEARS
However, this discovery is, in general, in the style of "captain evidence". Another thing is interesting: not when people react violently to anomalies, but when they stop paying attention to them. It turns out very quickly. Literally the second time! For example, Moscow has a record heat, this has never happened in all 140 years of meteorological observations, the absolute maximum has been blocked - the Internet has exploded! (Americans have studied their tweets, but the psychology is general). And if the temperature record beats for the second time in a month, there is already noticeably less attention to it.
When similar anomalies repeat for several years in a row, no one pays attention to them at all (except for meteorologists, but they are on duty). And also an example from our life: in Moscow, almost all winters of the 21st century are warmer than it should be according to climatic standards. Indeed, the thaws, the December rains and the absence of snowdrifts almost before the New Year surprise few people. We got used to it.
August heat in Europe in summer 2018.
People adapt to abnormally warm weather, be it winter or summer, the fastest, says Moore and the team. For at least two years in a row, the temperature, say, in March, is above the norm - and the average person gets the feeling that this is “normal” March. And if in the third year the weather returns to climatic norms, posts and tweets immediately pour in: freezing, horror, where is spring?
We take longer to get used to other oddities. On average, after 5, and maximum for 8 years, any extreme weather begins to be perceived as quite normal. Let me remind you that climate change is a scale of tens, hundreds and even thousands of years. That does not fit in our head at all.
Yes, I'll clarify: the study took into account primarily tweets about air temperature - something that can be monitored daily. Of course, people continue to react to hurricanes, tsunamis and other natural disasters.
FROG IN KIPYATKA
On the one hand, our ability to get used to any weather is very positive. What is snow for us, what is heat for us, that we are pouring rain … This is a kind of psychological protection from stress - what is the point of lamenting that does not depend on us?
Again, at all international conferences on global warming, both scientists and politicians unanimously say that humanity needs to adapt to climate change, because we can no longer stop them. For example? Build houses in the north with the expectation of melting permafrost. Thinking about how to protect the Maldives, Venice and other beautiful seaside places from the rise in the level of the oceans. And here it turns out that we ourselves have already adapted. One less problem.
But in fact, this feature of perception is dangerous, scientists say. And they compare it with the "effect of a frog in boiling water." What kind of effect is this? If you put a live frog in a pot of cold water and put it on the stove, the water will heat up gradually. So gradually that the amphibian does not sense danger. And it will cook. The same can happen to humanity if we continue to pretend that nature does not have bad weather.
FACT
April 2019 was the 411th consecutive month that the average temperature on Earth exceeds climatic norms. 411 months is 34 years. It turns out that those of us born after 1984 did not see normal weather at all, only abnormal.
YULIA SMIRNOVA