A research letter published in the journal Nature finds that climate change has made the weather in the United States far more enjoyable over the past four decades.
The researchers looked at seasonal temperature changes since 1974, rather than annual averages, and found that “80% of Americans live in counties that are experiencing more pleasant weather than they did four decades ago,” the authors concluded.
The reason, they say, is that since the 1970s the winters have been getting warmer, but not the summers.
In their words: “Virtually all Americans are now experiencing the much milder winters that they typically prefer, and these mild winters have not been offset by markedly more uncomfortable summers or other negative changes.”
Charts in the study make this pretty clear. Average daily temperatures in July haven’t budged since 1974, and relative humidity in that month is actually lower than it was four decades ago. In contrast, there’s a clear upward trend in the average daily temperature in January.
It’s worth noting that this is a possibility that skeptics of climate-change-doom-and-gloom predictions had pointed to years ago.
Here, for example, is what Thomas Gale Moore wrote in a paper for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution back in 1996: “If climate change were to manifest itself as warmer winters without much of an increase in temperatures during the hot months, which some climate models predict (Gates et al. 1992), the change in weather could be especially beneficial to human health. The IPCC reports (Folland et al. 1992) that over this century the weather in much of the world has been consistent with such a pattern: winter and night temperatures have risen while summer temperatures have fallen.”
The Nature findings showing that this is exactly what’s been happening in the U.S. It is, however, being treated as a huge problem.
The Huffington Post called it “bad news in the long run” because it “could prevent people from taking climate change as seriously as they should.”
The Christian Science Monitor declared that this is “not great news for climate awareness.”
To be sure, that’s the message that the authors of the research letter try to send as well. “Climate change models predict that this trend is temporary, however, because U.S. summers will eventually warm more than winters.”
Assuming that’s true, it still raises a question: Why is it that every study and every news story about future warming seems to always portray it as a total, unmitigated disaster?
Surely, as hundreds of millions of Americans have experienced in the past four decades, there must be some benefits brought by a warmer planet. National Geographic, for example, ran an article almost a decade ago noting that, in Greenland, global warming “has opened up new opportunities for agriculture, commercial fishing, mining and oil exploration.”
Has anyone ever tried to weigh the economic and social costs and benefits of global warming to see how it comes out on balance? Doesn’t that seem like useful information to have before committing trillions of dollars to prevent it?
