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HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

Patrick Egan and Megan Mullin write in the NYT that for a vast majority of Americans, the weather is becoming more pleasant [nytimes.com] as over the past four decades, winter temperatures have risen substantially throughout the United States, but summers have not become markedly more uncomfortable. Although warming during this period has been considerable, it has not been evenly distributed across seasons. Virtually all Americans have experienced a rise in January maximum daily temperatures — an increase of 1.04 degrees Fahrenheit per decade on average — while changes in daily maximum temperatures in July have been much more variable across counties, rising by an average of just 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit per decade over all. Moreover, summer humidity has declined during this period. As a result, most people’s experiences with daily weather since the time that they first heard about climate change have generally been positive. "By our calculations, the mild winters now regularly experienced in New York City make its weather nearly as pleasant as that of Virginia Beach back in the 1970s." And when winters are mild and summers are tolerable, people don’t have a huge reason to care about climate change [huffingtonpost.com]. That’s because people’s use their daily experiences of the weather — not infrequent experiences of extreme weather events — to form opinions about the climate, according to Mullin.

Perhaps that's why Americans are reacting to global warming 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 [people-press.org]. "Our new findings suggest that the weather changes caused by global warming cannot be relied on to spur the public to demand policies that address the problem. By the time the weather changes for the worse later in this century, it may be too late," write Egan and Mullin. Under all likely scenarios, seasonal trends are projected to eventually reverse: Future warming in the United States will be more severe in summer than in winter. Should greenhouse gas emissions proceed unabated, we estimate that 88 percent of Americans will be exposed to less pleasant weather at the end of this century than they are today. "When we do discuss temperatures, we should acknowledge the temporarily pleasant side effects of global warming [nature.com]. But then we should stress that these agreeable conditions will one day vanish — like ice on a warm winter day."

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