‘Boiling frog’ leaps to mind
As summers heat up are we normalising climate change?
New Zealand again just experienced one of its warmest summers on record, meteorologists will announce this week. It will sit within our top five hottest summers in more than a century of records — the figures are being finalised by Niwa scientists — and more unusually warm weather is predicted for the months ahead.
The summer of 2018-19 might be best remembered for a week-long heatwave that set new maximum temperature records in Hamilton (32.9C) and Wellington (30.3C), or for baking the Nelson region, where a massive bushfire raged amid a 40-day dry spell.
Yet it followed what was the second-equal hottest year on record, and the hottest summer on record, which included the hottest month on record, and a record marine heatwave.
On top of that, four of the past six years have been our warmest on the books. Globally, the past five years have been the hottest of the postindustrial age.
While meteorologists are sensibly reluctant to blame any single weather event on climate change, the background picture is incontrovertibly one of warming. That’s raised a troubling question that researchers have just explored in a new study: are we at risk of normalising extreme weather at a time we should be most worried about it?
That research, just published by US scientists, indicates that people have short memories when it comes to what they consider “normal” weather.
On average, people base their idea of normal weather on what has happened in just the past two to eight years.
Frogs in the pot
To reach their conclusions, the researchers quantified a timeless and universal pastime — talking about the weather — by analysing posts on Twitter. They sampled 2.18 billion geolocated tweets created between March 2014 and November 2016 to determine what kind of temperatures generated the most posts about weather.
They found that people often tweet when temperatures are unusual — a particularly warm March or unexpectedly freezing winter, for example. However, if the same weather persisted year after year, it generated less comment on Twitter.
This phenomenon, the authors noted, was a classic case of the boilingfrog metaphor.
A frog jumps into a pot of boiling hot water and immediately hops out.
If, instead, the frog in the pot is slowly warmed to a boiling temperature, it doesn’t hop out and is eventually cooked.
While scientifically inaccurate, this metaphor has long been used as a cautionary tale.
What New Zealanders think
Victoria University psychology professor Marc Wilson said although the study focused just on tweets out of the US, he assumed the picture wouldn’t be much different here. Studies now show New Zealanders are increasingly accepting climate change as happening and caused by man-made activities.
But concerningly, few Kiwis thought the world would be able to do what’s needed to escape the worst impacts.
“One question I’d have is whether the findings, as reported in this new paper, mean there’s a problem,” Wilson said.
“By that, I mean that record breaking-related apathy is a problem if it means that people are less likely to act to change their behaviour in ways that are consistent with climate change mitigation strategies.”
Climate scientist Professor Jim Salinger, however, doesn’t think New Zealanders will be exposed to climate apathy as much as other countries. He says everyone talks about the weather because it’s interesting, changeable and never far away. “In my opinion,” Salinger says, “we are less prone to such apathy.”
But if a normalisation effect was taking place, how could that be countered?
Victoria University climate scientist Professor James Renwick said this was a tough question. “Maybe we need to remind people of exceptional or memorable events from the past, and point out that recent extremes are different,” he said. “I have noticed that the string of fairly mild winters we’ve had over several years makes us all vulnerable to thinking the world has ended when a genuine cold snap comes through.”
Wilson highlighted strategies that Dr David Holmes, director of the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Australia’s Monash University, shared at a New Zealand psychology society conference last year.
“One initiative that they championed was to contact a lot of the TV weather anchors around Australia and encourage them and their broadcasters to include trend information when they present the weather,” he said. “I think this would be a fantastic thing to have happen here in New Zealand.”
A political issue
The other factor to consider was that for some, climate change was a grand conspiracy cooked up the overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists and scientific academies.
Wilson referenced a well-known study led by New York University’s Professor John Jost that involved asking people to estimate the ambient temperature during summer, as well as a little about their political beliefs.
It found that people who shared aspects of the psychological profile of a climate sceptic estimated that the weather was cooler than do those who agreed climate change was reality.
“Indeed, political identification is one of the strongest predictors of climate change belief both here and internationally.”