Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
Honestly, growing up I had no idea whether parts of the mid-west or south were getting super cold temperatures. I just think that's part of being a kid (or whatever).
One thing about the span of media (and not just social media, but more national and global coverage overall) is that we hear all the bad news stories more frequently. When the coverage is all local, there are just less bad news stories that are extreme, so it seems infrequent. But on a national and global scale you see/hear these things all the time and things seem so much worse. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it can definitely feel worse just because of recency bias.
|
Oddly enough in the vein of this post, the Polar Vortex news / terminology could actually be evidence of warming temperatures over time. In the 2020s temperatures like this are now noteworthy while in the 70s & 80s and before we just called it January or Winter and the phenomina didn't have a specific name.
I now live in the US and one thing I find interesting is historical pictures of places in the US with tonnes of snow, frozen over rivers, and ice jammed streams. Eg. the Ohio river in Cincinnati frozen over in the 1970s. Ice jams on the Mississippi in St Louis Missouri in the 1920s. These are now places where snow and freezing temperatures are infrequent and limited to isolated weather events and the norm isn't to have snow on the ground for extended periods longer than a week. There's people in their 40s & 50s who have never experienced a frozen over Ohio river in Cincy or Mississippi river in St. Louis.