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Hottest May in History for Texas

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Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#51

Post by titzer »

refurb wrote: post #37
AlotOfReading wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mainly a problem for industrialized westerners. Go ask a herdsmen that spends all year outside and they'll have a fairly good memory for extreme weather events in the same way that you and I remember what the social climate of 2008 was like. Anthropologists and biologists commonly track changes in floral/faunal ranges and ecosystems by asking the people who observe them daily.

No, human memories are just generally pretty crappy and selective, at least compared to hard data.

They aren't worthless though. The current over-reliance on super-human storage systems coupled with a nasty dopamine loop that doesn't reward good memories really distorted our perceptions of what people can and should remember. Entire oral histories have been passed down centuries because brains are pretty big.

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#52

Post by lupire »

dgfitz wrote: post #33
FollowingTheDao wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I picked the worse time to be homeless in Washington. Cold and wet, non stop. Leaving this week cause I can’t take it anymore.

You chose to be homeless? Or am I misreading that? If you feel so inclined I am quite curious why you chose to be homeless.

No post body was provided.

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#53

Post by thematrixturtle »

tamaharbor wrote: post #48

Everyone wherever I have lived thinks their weather is special. “If you don’t like the weather here one timeframe, just wait for the next”. Change is apparently the nature of weather.

/me waves from the tropics, where there are effectively no seasons

Although after living here long enough, you start to recognize monsoonal microseasons. It's still ~30 deg C all year around, but the average is a couple of degrees cooler in 'winter', especially after a couple of days of solid rain, and a couple of degrees hotter in 'summer', especially after a dry spell.

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#54

Post by eyelidlessness »

tamaharbor wrote: post #48

Everyone wherever I have lived thinks their weather is special. “If you don’t like the weather here one timeframe, just wait for the next”. Change is apparently the nature of weather.

I anticipated this sort of response seeing the title but didn’t anticipate it being (currently) at the top of the comments on HN. It’s a pretty myopic take.

I live in a place (Seattle) where the special thing about the weather is that it’s temperate and fairly predictable (our version of timeframe in your paraphrase is 5 minutes, otherwise it’s fluctuations within a stable range). Well, it used to be anyway.

Two data points doesn’t make a trend, three might suggest keeping an eye on it. Five years running with consistently uncommon heat and humidity and prolonged fire seasons isn’t a weather variable, it’s a change in climate.

Again, Seattle has been relatively stable. Relative to global temperatures, we’ve lagged behind the trend. World records have been concentrated in recent years in a way that’s only deniable if your probability models scale to centuries. Local records in other places make that completely untenable as a hypothesis, with some places breaking whatever pertinent record pretty much constantly for several years longer.

Weather does change, it’s the nature of living on a spheroid spinning around on a tilted axis with most of its energy coming from a nearby star. Many trips around that star showing similar persisting changes isn’t weather. It’s climate.

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#55

Post by maybelsyrup »

refurb wrote: post #24
moistly wrote: post #12

I guess the snarkers will always regale us with their snide dismissal, but as someone who has lived in one place for going on a half-century, I witness the change: winters had feet of snow and now have inches. Temperatures drops are harder, temperature highs have gone from 40C to nearly 50, which is insane. Rainfall patterns have changed markedly, and they’re interfacing with snowmelt and now flood events happen like…

Human memories suck. I have family who every time it snows say “i can’t remember the last time it snowed this much!”, then you look up weather records and it snowed more 3 years ago.

No post body was provided.

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#56

Post by labster »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #55
refurb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human memories suck. I have family who every time it snows say “i can’t remember the last time it snowed this much!”, then you look up weather records and it snowed more 3 years ago.

Quoted post unavailable.

#NaturalVariability

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#58

Post by lupire »

refurb wrote: post #11

Wait this article is from May 12th. It’s not “the hottest May on record”, because May isn’t even over? What the article says is the average high/low of the first 11 days is hotter than the hottest month. Uhhh… statistics don’t work like that? You cant compare a part month to a full month and make that claim because your selectively comparing some days to an average of a whole month.

It's a weather forecast not a research paper.

And it goes on to say "Unfortunately, our lead will only increase with the third week of May likely to shatter numerous records across the state of Texas. "

Anyway, those 10 days were hotter than any other first 10 days of May:

https://www.lcra.org/first-ten-days-of-may-among-the-hottest...

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#59

Post by lupire »

hervature wrote: post #27
refurb wrote: post #11

Wait this article is from May 12th. It’s not “the hottest May on record”, because May isn’t even over? What the article says is the average high/low of the first 11 days is hotter than the hottest month. Uhhh… statistics don’t work like that? You cant compare a part month to a full month and make that claim because your selectively comparing some days to an average of a whole month.

I don't know why you are being downvoted when you are entirely correct. It is this type of use of stats that give cheap ammunition to skeptics. For the downvoters, I guess if May 1st is hotter than usual, you're happy to claim the entirety of May will be hotter than usual?

https://www.lcra.org/first-ten-days-of-may-among-the-hottest...

And short term weather forecasting is common technology.

Re: Hottest May in History for Texas

#60

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

LanceH wrote: post #49
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #38

Cmd+F "Climate" "Not Found"

And, once again, screaming "climate change" when there is a high begets "counter arguments" when it's cooler. Not every article with a hot point of data is proof and shouldn't be treated as such. To be very clear before the knee jerk downvoting occurs, climate change is very real and needs to be addressed, scientifically. Don't bail on the mountains of science to make points in a small article about a regional high o…

It's not just about heat!

The thing that's emblematic of climate change is not any one extreme — not that it's A's hottest X, B's coldest Y, C's wettest Z — but rather that it's all of these extremes simultaneously, and that they're all more extreme than they were in the past. At the same time that A is having its hottest X, B is having its coldest Y, and C is having its wettest Z, and it's a heat record for A, a cold record for B, and a wetness record for C. Simultaneously breaking weather records in multiple places, regardless of which exact records are being broken, is a prediction and sign of climate change.

It's not just about heat!

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