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People have adapted almost completely to the idea of snow being some rare, special event. People who fondly remember playing in the snow nearly everyday in wint

• kibwen 7y ago
  "The world as first seen by the child becomes his lifelong standard of excellence, mindless of the fact that he is admiring the ruins of his parents." [...] "Generation to Generation, the natural world decays, the ratchet of perception tightens. Gradually, imperceptibly, big sharks give way to small sharks, small sharks to baitfish, baitfish to jellyfish to slime (algae and cyanobacteria). On land, the big cats and wolves becomes feral cats and coyotes. The wild standard sinks ever lower and becomes ever heavier to raise. Few notice, few care. Eventually nobody remembers that wolves not long ago freely roamed the Adirondacks, and hence there is mad howling over the suggestion of returning them to their homeland. Southern Californians panic on learning that a cougar track has been discovered on the fringes of their neighborhood- mindless that cougars roamed these hills and canyons long before gated communities drew their lines in the chaparral. 'Shifting baselines' help explain why the Pennsylvania deer hunter sees everything right and nothing wrong in a forest that's swarming with deer yet as barren of biodiversity as a city park." ~ William Stolzenburg, Where the Wild Things Were
  • carlmr 7y ago
    "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck The same effect, but the good side of it.
    • pavlov 7y ago
      This is what’s happening with Greta Thunberg and young climate activists, and explains why the boomer generation is so upset about it.
      • gatherhunterer 7y ago
        That’s only part of it. She is also a woman and a foreigner and she is reasonably well-educated. Americans spend more on the war efforts of other countries than we do to our own public schools. Fear, xenophobia and intellectual insecurity are part of this phenomenon as well. She is also economically privileged and Americans are increasingly divided by income and income-related health factors like physical fitness and addiction. Taking advice from a wealthy, educated European female is simply not an option without opening the door to some uncomfortable observations. These people make take some unscientific ideas to their graves but they will also take a lot of fear and hatred with them.
        • malandrew 7y ago
          Don't forget that a Facebook glitch a few days ago accidentally doxxed the person updating her Facebook posts, revealing that it's her father, Svante Thunberg, authoring her posts. https://pluralist.com/greta-thunberg-facebook-bug-dad-svante-thunberg/ https://pluralist.com/greta-thunberg-facebook-bug-dad-svante... I acknowledge climate change is a thing and should be taken seriously, but the left does itself no favors by manufacturing a petulant child as its messenger. You need messengers that are credible and aren't just preaching to the choir if you want to make progress in convincing people.
• Kye 7y ago
  There's a term for this that I can't figure out how to search for. It refers to the way people don't notice how the natural environment changes around them because it's so gradual. The context I saw it in was, I think, the way someone didn't think much of the lack of fish in a body of water other than having nostalgia for fishing with their dad as a kid. I think the culprit in this case was overfishing, but the term was general enough to apply to any change like this. Maybe someone reading this knows the term.
  • maccard 7y ago
    It's called the Boiling Frog Efffect [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
    • Kye 7y ago
      This was something different. More observational, less judgemental. I think it had the word environmental in it, but that didn't help build an effective search query. It was specific to the phenomenon of people not noticing a change in climate or ecology because it happens over such a long period. edit: The article links to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality It fits, but it doesn't ring the bell my head is looking for. Maybe that is it. Memory is weird.
      • Cthulhu_ 7y ago
        Normalization of Deviance? It's in a document of mine somewhere right next to creeping normality.
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
      • AMerrit 7y ago
        I think you're thinking of the classic shifting baseline example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline It comes up a lot when talking about fisheries stocks, and how each generation basically resets to what is a normal amount of fish.
• alfromspace 7y ago
  People do adapt, and I think that's a feature, not a bug, often forgotten. Climate change is real, but how hubristic was it for us to work toward a globally industrialized world, then post hoc pretend that we must A. Take drastic action to preserve the climate within the centuries-long snapshot we're accustomed to, or else the planet is on fire B. Never expect humanity to adapt, and pretend it's some kind of terribly stupid and illogical thing to do. Certainly in the long term, the climate will change. We harnessed the natural world and brought it on ourselves sooner. I think we should do what we can, but the apocalyptic language of "planet on fire", etc, and all of us pretending that our little snapshot of the climate is all there ever was and we should never expect to adapt to anything else seems utterly foolish and more big-headed than I can put into words.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • pjc50 7y ago
    The planet as a whole is not on fire, sure. But there are much bigger than normal wildfires in equatorial regions - Amazon, Africa, Australia. Australia is the one getting the most attention as it's closest to "western" cities.
• tw04 7y ago
  > People have adapted almost completely to the idea of snow being some rare, special event. People who fondly remember playing in the snow nearly everyday in winter during their childhood have come to expect 50-60 degree January afternoons and think of snow as a special occasion. These people are saying those twice a year snowfalls are proof that nothing is changing, while knowing full well that they were wearing layers of coats and scarves years ago and walking around in t-shirts now. As someone who believes in climate change, and grew up playing in the snow - what on earth are you talking about? Where is this magical place where it used to be snowy all winter long and is now averaging 50-60 degrees with snow now being a rare occasion? Exaggerating to the extent you are does nothing but hurt the message because it's blatantly and obviously false and when climate deniers read people making claims like you are, the entire discussion loses all credibility.
  • paulryanrogers 7y ago
    Northern Ohio
  • vlan0 7y ago
    >As someone who believes in climate change, and grew up playing in the snow - what on earth are you talking about? Where is this magical place where it used to be snowy all winter long and is now averaging 50-60 degrees with snow now being a rare occasion? I agree. In the Northeast part of the US we still get really cold and snowy winters. But almost year after year our summers are getting hotter. And the seasons in between those are getting shorter.
    • throwaway5752 7y ago
      The Gatlinburg, TN fires should have been a wake up call for the whole eastern coast of the US. When the east coast summer firestorms come, it will be horrible, worse than Australia by orders of magnitude. Life there isn't adapted to it, nor is the population. I give it 5 years
      • vlan0 7y ago
        >When the east coast summer firestorms come, I cannot speak to other areas, but the Adirondack Park fire seasons are actually in the Spring and Fall. >I give it 5 years Eh, maybe in southern areas. But that's highly unlikely in the ADK.
• throwaway_tech 7y ago
  >Coffee could go extinct and our generation would just have nostalgic idle chats about it here and there Maybe the consumers...you have to keep in mind the competing interests of capitalism. I could see SV and SV VCs falling all over themselves with such a "market opportunity." >And so long as someone has financial motivations to push the idea that this is normal, people will keep thinking it is and they'll forget just how much things changed. This! I could see VCs start investing in numerous companies hawking all kinds of caffeine pills and supplements, spending billions on marketing, such that consumers would stop talking about the nostalgia of coffee, rather begin asking how we ever lived without X startup that has disrupted the industry and optimized "human energy."
• monktastic1 7y ago
  Charles Eisenstein: "MacKinnon illustrates this phenomenon, known in psychology as “change blindness,” with an anecdote about fish photographs from the Florida Keys. Old photographs from the 1940s show delighted fishermen displaying their prize catches—marlins as long as a man is tall. When present-day fishermen see those pictures, they flat-out refuse to believe they are authentic. Human beings tend to be blind to gradual changes in their environment, assuming that the way things are right now is how they always have been and always will be. We do not miss the former beauty of the world, he would say, because we have never known it. I am not so sure that we don’t miss it. I think we do miss it, but we don’t know what it is we are missing. We feel a void, a sense of poverty, a hunger for something unidentifiable. Transferred onto money or consumer items, that hunger drives continued cycles of destruction. Transferred onto drugs, gambling, alcohol, it drives the unsolvable social problem of addiction. Perhaps the degradation of nature is not without its consequences after all."
  • monktastic1 7y ago
    And the preceding passage: "Explorers and naturalists of previous centuries give staggering testimony to the incredible natural wealth of North America and other places before colonization. Here are some images from another book, Steve Nicholls’s Paradise Found: Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.” I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now."
• travisoneill1 7y ago
  Are you sure that your memory is correct? We have measured a warming of around 1 degree so far and that doesn't seem like enough warming to go from snow every day to 50-60 degree days.
  • minikites 7y ago
    That's not how climate change works. Imagine if this was a technical thread and someone argued that changing a byte in a file or library is fine because "that's not enough of a change to have an effect".
    • paulddraper 7y ago
      Natural and artificial systems have difference sensitives to perturbations.
    • lacker 7y ago
      That's even less how climate change works.
• paulddraper 7y ago
  I seriously doubt that snow has gone from common to rare to casual observer, all because average surface temperature has risen 1.4 deg F in the last 130 years. [1] (Granted this is an only average; there could be specific places experiencing that phenomenon.) Americans are experiencing less snow because they are migrating to warmer areas. [2] [1] http://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/Temperature-Change-Over-the-Last-100-Years http://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/Temperature-Change-Ove... [2] https://www.curbed.com/2017/3/27/15077042/sunbelt-snowbelt-migration-census-cities https://www.curbed.com/2017/3/27/15077042/sunbelt-snowbelt-m...
  • ericmay 7y ago
    Well, I live in central Ohio and we had ~ 1 inch of snow so far this year. Lots of rain, and it was 64+-3 degrees last Sunday.
    • paulddraper 7y ago
      Sometimes it is warmer, sometimes it is colder. One data point is one data point. EDIT: This is the other side of the its-snowing-so-no-global-warming coin.
      • ericmay 7y ago
        Hey thanks for the lesson in anecdotal data. I had no idea! Extremely valuable.
• NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  > Kids who never drank coffee would grow up and never think about it, much less care Which pretty much nails the problem. Us older folks remember that cold, snowy winters were normal, that there were orders of magnitude more insects such that frequent stops to clear windscreen, headlights or helmet visor were just normal. We remember mixed farms that husbanded the land rather than beat it into submission. Those kid's normal is no insects, no snow, monoculture industrial farmland everywhere, signs of human interference in every remote corner of the globe. Most live in concreted cities where food comes from the shop, not the land. Everything is based on that "normality of childhood". They quite literally don't see the problem. Even seeing old photos and film footage doesn't convey... I wish I'd listened to more of my granddad's tales of shire horses and traction engines. I wish I could have seen through his eyes. The environment and natural world has become a theme park to visit for a skiing holiday, safari or to farm to oblivion. To watch in the latest Attenborough. Only a few outdoorsy types understand it, even fewer what it used to be any more. Most of us have no connection with the natural world. Every industry and activity has become unsustainable by injecting rampant consumerism and near limitless fossil fuel into the process. Ironic so many of us are starting to actually care about impact, as it reaches worst ever. I really do think OP has it right saying we need the "appearance of immediate, severe-yet-not-deadly impacts on our day-to-day lives" before anything truly significant will happen.
  • mobilefriendly 7y ago
    No insects but many more ticks.
• lsh123 7y ago
  > People have adapted almost completely to the idea of snow being some rare, special event. People who fondly remember playing in the snow nearly everyday in winter during their childhood have come to expect 50-60 degree January afternoons and think of snow as a special occasion. These people are saying those twice a year snowfalls are proof that nothing is changing, while knowing full well that they were wearing layers of coats and scarves years ago and walking around in t-shirts now. I fondly remember playing in the snow in Siberia and above north circle in northern parts of Russia during my childhood. Now in California, I am truly expecting >50F January (and I mostly get it).