Earth is getting hotter – so why is this summer so dismal?

By Jack Marley, The Conversation

Fossil fuels have kept Earth 1.5°C hotter than its pre-industrial average temperature for more than a year now.

And yet, where I live in the UK, this summer has felt like one of the coolest I can remember. If the planet is in the middle of “a large and continuing shift” to a hotter climate as scientists say it is, why is the weather so cold during what is supposed to be the warmest time of year?

Satisfactory answers to questions like this can nip climate scepticism in the bud. Luckily, the experts we’ll hear from today have plenty.

Matthew Patterson is an atmospheric physicist at the University of Reading. He says that the UK’s dismal summer hasn’t been unusually cold – in fact, measurements of temperature, sunlight and rainfall in June 2024 were all close to their seasonal averages.

Unfortunately, “average” conditions now feel colder than they used to.

Everything cold is new again

Europe has warmed at roughly double the global average rate since the 1970s, while extreme summer temperatures have risen even faster. The UK has had its five hottest days since 1910 in the past five years.

“Such a rapid rate of warming means we have come to normalise extreme heat, while relatively cold or even average conditions feel unusual and thus newsworthy,” Patterson says.

Patterson argues that people are quick to forget how the climate felt even in the recent past. And of course, we have no reference for what it was like before we were born. Ecologists refer to this phenomenon as shifting baseline syndrome: each new generation comes to accept as normal what previous generations would have considered extreme.

A rapidly warming climate will still produce extremely cold weather. It is winter in southern Australia and the weather there has been unusually cold according to Andrew King, a senior lecturer in climate science at the University of Queensland.

Read Full Story https://theconversation.com/earth-is-getting-hotter-so-why-is-this-summer-so-dismal-234311