(p. 9) CHRISTMAS in New York was lovely this year — especially for those who prefer to spend the day working on their tans. It was the city’s warmest ever, with temperatures peaking at 66 degrees.
Record-breaking temperatures are occurring with alarming frequency in the United States, but Americans are reacting with a collective shrug. In a poll taken in January, after the country’s warmest December on record, the Pew Research Center found that climate change ranked close to last on a list of the public’s policy priorities. Why?
In a paper published on Wednesday [April 20, 2016] in the journal Nature, we provide one possible explanation: For a vast majority of Americans, the weather is simply becoming more pleasant. Over the past four decades, winter temperatures have risen substantially throughout the United States, but summers have not become markedly more uncomfortable.
Of course, people’s preferences about weather vary widely. Some want a snowfall every winter, while others would rather wear sandals year-round. So we sought to develop a measure of the average American’s weather preferences. To do this, we made use of research by economists who study local population growth in the United States. They have found that Americans have been moving to places with warm winters and cool, less humid summers. We made the inference (not true in every case, but reasonable to assume in general) that Americans prefer such conditions.
Then we evaluated the changes in weather conditions that Americans have experienced over the past four decades (i.e., roughly since climate change emerged as an issue in the public sphere). Climatologists customarily report weather changes averaged over the land surface — an approach that counts changes in sparse Montana just as heavily as shifts in populous California. But because we were interested in the typical American’s exposure to weather, we took a different tack, calculating changes over time on a county-by-county basis, weighted by population.
Our findings are striking: 80 percent of Americans now find themselves living in counties where the weather is more pleasant than it was four decades ago.
For the full commentary, see:
PATRICK J. EGAN and MEGAN MULLIN. “Gray Matter; Global Warming Feels Quite Pleasant.” The New York Times (Sun., APRIL 24, 2016): 9.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 21, 2016.)
The Nature article mentioned above, is:
Egan, Patrick J., and Megan Mullin. “Recent Improvement and Projected Worsening of Weather in the United States.” Nature 532, no. 7599 (April 21, 2016): 357-60.