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It seems less extreme to me but not what I would say typical. Overall the winters are milder and the summers hotter. The seasons seem to more overlap or run into each other. Growing up weather and the seasons were generally predictable. Now in Feb. you may have an ice storm with below 0 temps and next week it will be in the 80s.
We had the Medieval Warming Period, then we were cooling from around 1350 to 1850 (Little Ice Age), now we're warming again. When we get done warming, we'll start cooling again.
When you're looking at patterns involving hundreds of years, I don't see how any scientist can look at a 20 or 30 year period and claim anything.
I agree though I vociferously disagree about this being man-made. The one point that the alarmists do have is that adapting to climate change, even if cyclical, may be daunting. Most of mankind was either nomadic or agricultural during the Medieval Optimum (the correct name for the Medieval Warming Period) and the Little Ice Age, which actually bottomed during the late 1700's. In modern times, moving a city the size of New York or Toronto if either is in the tundra or is glaciated over may be quite a challenge. Less so in North America where the bordering countries, the U.S. and Canada, are somewhat similar and rather friendly. Try moving Norway or Britain south to the Balkans. The "natives" might not be so receptive.
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Originally Posted by 2mares
It seems less extreme to me but not what I would say typical. Overall the winters are milder and the summers hotter. The seasons seem to more overlap or run into each other. Growing up weather and the seasons were generally predictable. Now in Feb. you may have an ice storm with below 0 temps and next week it will be in the 80s.
Maybe things were like that in February 1990, where a short spell of single-digit weather was followed by high 70's in mid-March. There has been nothing mild about January and February 2011, 2013 or 2014. All three have been solidly frigid for long stretches of those months and none of the mild spells were close to 70's much less 80's. None of the Marches of those years hit the 70's or 80's.
I think the biggest thing that sometimes they seem more severe is all the news hype over everything. That being said I do have concern about global climate change.
NO, it's been hotter and colder at any given time. We went from Global Warming to Climate Change. I guess the colder temps don't add up to Global Warming so now they're calling it Climate Change. I love how they use word play to fit their agenda.
Location: Huntersville/Charlotte, NC and Washington, DC
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As a guy who has spent 22 of his 26 years in Virginia. The last couple of winters in Virginia have been much more extreme in terms of single digit temps than I've ever seen. It has been below 20 degrees more days this year than I ever remember. Snow is not rare here but the singe digit temps are something I'm seeing more frequently than prior years.
I remember seeing an old photo from a Galveston newspaper that had icebergs in the Gulf of Mexico around that time, and I think it was in late spring or summer to boot. If I recall correctly, it was because of a massive volcano eruption (maybe Krakatoa?). I don't doubt it was the cause because I remember Houston in August 1992, when I was dreading how hot I was going to be at Lolapalooza but it was chilly instead. It was because of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991. We didn't get 20" of snow, but it was highly unusual to be so cold in August.
My entirely subjective impression is quite the opposite. It feels that every successive summer is hotter, longer and muggier than the previous; and every successive winter is longer, colder and snowier. The intermediate seasons, with temperatures between in the 40s through the 60s, seem to be contracting. I live around 50 miles north of the Mason-Dixon line. But is seems that every winter, our temperature is colder than in much of Siberia, while every summer, our temperature is hotter than in the Sahara.
I don't have a strong partisan position on "climate change", but regardless of the cause, or the underlying implications, it seems to me that the weather is getting worse.
That probably has more to do with your age and the effects of the weather on your body, and the fact that you're probably in climate-controlled buildings more often now than you were when you were a kid so it just seems much hotter/colder.
I know when I was a kid the heat never bothered me in the summer. I didn't even know when it was extreme because I was always outdoors. Now I sit in my air-conditioned office or home and go outside less frequently, and when I do it seems like I walked into a hot oven. I would have thought it was just getting hotter until they started talking about past heat waves where the temperatures were just as hot or hotter when I was a kid and I was blissfully unaffected.
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