Weatherwatch: have you felt the effects of global heating?

For the residents of Eita, on the remote Pacific nation of Kiribati, climate change is obvious. Much of the village has drowned, and Kiribati’s president, Taneti Maamau, is seeking support to save these low-lying islands from sea level rise.

But how many of the other leaders gathered in Glasgow for the Cop26 conference will feel they have experienced the effects of global heating? The answer may depend on what kind of weather they have had in recent years.

Jennifer Marlon, a climate scientist at Yale University, and colleagues asked more than 13,000 US residents whether they had felt the impact of global heating.

Comparing responses with climate data revealed that people who had experienced an unusually high number of hot dry days were far more likely to say they had felt the impact of global heating than those who experienced very heavy rain or snow or unusually hot – but not dry – days. These trends held true regardless of respondents’ political or socioeconomic status.

Describing their findings in the Global Environmental Change journal, Marlon and her colleagues speculate that hot dry weather is more convincing because it tends to last for longer – sometimes months or years – and the economic impact is widely felt.