Scientists: Americans Are Becoming Weather Wimps

[Purveyor]

By SETH BORENSTEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) - We've become weather wimps.

As the world warms, the United States is getting fewer bitter cold spells like the one that gripped much of the nation this week. So when a deep freeze strikes, scientists say, it seems more unprecedented than it really is. An Associated Press analysis of the daily national winter temperature shows that cold extremes have happened about once every four years since 1900.

Until recently.

When computer models estimated that the national average daily temperature for the Lower 48 states dropped to 17.9 degrees on Monday, it was the first deep freeze of that magnitude in 17 years, according to Greg Carbin, warning meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That stretch - from Jan. 13, 1997 to Monday - is by far the longest the U.S. has gone without the national average plunging below 18 degrees, according to a database of daytime winter temperatures starting in January 1900.

In the past 115 years, there have been 58 days when the national average temperature dropped below 18. Carbin said those occurrences often happen in periods that last several days so it makes more sense to talk about cold outbreaks instead of cold days. There have been 27 distinct cold snaps.

MORE...

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20140109/DAB7I7DG2.html

[liberal_at_heart]

1. It also used to be acceptable to hold up in your house until a bad storm passed.

Now people have more pressure to go to work regardless of weather, and most of us don't keep enough groceries in the house to outlast a storm.

[SheilaT]

2. I would say that the need to go to work no matter what has been around

since at least the 1970's. It has always depended somewhat on the job you held.

I was an airline employee back then, and we were expected to make it into work no matter what. Once, and only once did I not make it in. That was during the President's Day Blizzard in 1979.

It does matter a great deal what you've experienced recently, as in the past ten years or so. Which brings me directly to this question: What is wrong with Santa Fe? I've lived here since summer 2008, and people here behave as if until about then the climate was identical to that of San Diego, only maybe milder. In the fall, the first time the temperature drops to 60 degrees, the locals are shivering and saying, "Oh, my God! It's so cold!" Chilly, yes. OMG it's so cold, no.

Of course, I'm a really strange person because I like cold, have no problem with snow (although plowing the streets is always desirable), and even like rainy days.

I think that one thing I know about weather is that it changes. Over time, there will be more variations and more extremes, even in "normal" times. But times are rarely normal. The weather and even the climate is always changing. Weather does it quickly, on a short time scale, climate tends to be more slowly and over a long time frame. Either way, within living memory things were always different: colder, hotter, wetter, drier.

[Common Sense Party]

3. Isn't Santa Fe's elevation about 7200 feet?

People think the climate there used to be like San Diego?

That's weird.

I agree. We grew up in the Midwest, and I don't remember the family ever hunkering down, waiting for a cold storm to pass. My dad went to work, no matter how cold it was outside.

[SheilaT]

4. Yep. We're a right around 7,000 feet, depending on exactly where you live.

It's easy to get locals to talk about an epic cold spell back in the 1970's or whenever it was. But they always behave as if cold weather is new and unexpected.

Now, I get that most people aren't crazy about the cold. But to always act as if it's brand new is just bizarre. Makes me want to move back to Minneapolis.

[hatrack]

10. Odd - we were in NM last year for a winter vacation

It was -14 in Taos, and we weren't particularly surprised, at least after the first 30 seconds out of the hotel. It was dead calm with blazing sunshine, and not all that unpleasant, really.

But then again, I'm one of those weirdos like you and kind of like cold.

[bananas]

5. When I was a kid, we had to walk 10 miles to school, through snow 10 feet deep, up hill, both ways.

[Art_from_Ark]

6. And the frostbite I got from doing that

has made me extra-sensitive to the cold now

[Rstrstx]

7. They're exactly right

Back in the 70s or 80s if the media had hyped up this last so-called megasuperdoomsdayaftertomorrow freeze as some sort of cataclysmic event they would have been laughed at. I think the term they would have used for it back then would be something like "January".

[Yo_Mama]

8. I think it's TV hype

Seriously, since you got cable and all the channels, the focus of weather discussion has been towards hysteria, and the modern habit of using wind-chill adjusted temps as if they are actual temps is just one example.

This weather is not actually abnormal at all. It's rare, but usual at intervals.

[SheilaT]

11. There's a lot to be said for that.

Hyping the weather, especially any deviation from a perceived normal, is right up there with the kind of wall to wall coverage that happens when some over-the-hill pedophile former child music star (Michael Jackson, in case it's not obvious) dies.

The best thing about not having a TV is to what extent I miss the absurd coverage of truly unimportant things. Meanwhile, real issues get completely ignored.

[madokie]

9. 4 winters ago

we had an ices storm here like I'd not seen in a long time. Took many trees down, people were out of power for weeks, it sucked. The winter after that we had 2 plus feet of snow and another ice storm. We never get 2 feet of snow here, or used to not anyway. Last winter was almost like a not winter as it was so warm the whole season.
This one is shaping up to be a doozy though.
f* jim inhofe