_ _ _ _ _
New Trends Attributed to Climate Change
From Weather
Reports to Literature
The significance of
weather reports have change overwhelmingly since television started to devote
whole channels to covering the weather from minute to minute. One would watch
the news and afterwards see the weather report for the next day and accept
whole heartedly whatever was told and did not, under any circumstance, get
upset if the weather lady did not get it 100% right. Today, on the other hand,
most people do not leave the house without checking the weather on their
phones, for most it is on the home screen at all times, refreshing itself every
time there is a slight change. And if one is told to take an umbrella, and then
it does not rain, public outrage follows. The following essay will dissect how
there is a tone of over-exaggeration when it comes to weather reports in the
past years including an analysis of the phenome that climate change has turned
into, ending in highlighting those trends that climate change is responsible
for in the past decade.
The contemporary man
has decided that it wishes to control the one thing it never will: the weather.
Recognizing that there is a sudden increase in being updated 24/7 demanded an
appropriate response, and that came in the form of over exaggerations to
enforce the idea that we are truly out of control. No matter what one uses to
stay informed, there is, however an increase in weather reports being
broadcasted in primetime television. One does not watch the news and then hears
whether there will cloudy with a chance of rain, instead, they are bombarded
with the information of something, let it be cold or hot, that is
“record-breaking”. The reader might not be acquainted with this definition in
the form of weather reports: the record is always checking the same day a year
earlier, sometimes multiple years might be added (in case there is no
significant change between 2014 and 2015, for example), and comparing whether
or not the temperature has increased or decreased exponentially. One website in
particular, Climate Signals, allows Americans to use “The Tracking Climate
Change tool” as it provides “updates daily to offer a snapshot look at the US
ratio between hot and cold temperature records as it stands for the period of
the last 365 days”[1]. It
says, to quote, that “in the past 365 days in the U.S. there were 2.98 high
temperature records for every low temperature record”[2].
The need to be update includes the knowledge of comparison between previous
years or simply the previous month.
The following examples highlight the change in jargon
when discussing the weather. The first is a recent example, appeared on WBUR
News’s website (covering the area of Boston), the article is entitled “Forecast:
Record-Breaking Cold Possible Saturday”[3]. The
order of words is remarkable: it first denotes that it will be
“record-breaking”, then whether it is cold or hot, because it could be both,
and then it emphasizes that it is just a possibility. That one small word
erases the chance of angry comments, it also highlights that for the weather to
be news, as in, news worthy of our time it has to be above all
“record-breaking”, outstanding, unusual or all of the above. Within this same
article the writer provides the report for the upcoming days as well,
differentiating between Thursday and Thursday evening, pointing out there might
be rain in the latter[4].
It would have been just as easy to include this information within the report
of the first one, but for the sake of avoiding contradiction between a sunny
afternoon and a rainy evening, they were kept separate. Second example is from
the summer of 2017, more precisely in Australia. This example is outstanding as
the cold weather swept through a big region and even resulted in snow in July.
What is interesting to point out within the article, entitled “Record breaking
cold weather hits Australia’s south east”, is one sentence: “[w]e were warned
of a cold weekend and it certainly came to pass with widespread frost across
inland areas”[5].
The use of the word “warned” recalls biblical proportions, highlighting that
there was notice and nobody listened. Most have a difficult time believing
weather reports, as it has been noted in this essay before, and this distrust
is partly due to the average of precision provided. One is “warned” to avoid
something, to remain vigilant of something, to be alert, and as the article
highlights, these warnings were overlooked. This cold wave hit others, among
them South America, which also reported it as “South America faces Record
Breaking Cold Wave”[6].
One of the reasons it might have been overlooked is that “our warming climate,
record highs have begun to outpace record lows, with the imbalance growing for
the past three decades”[7]. Whatever
the reasons, these articles keep highlighting that even if they accurately
predict weather patterns, those are overlooked by the people.
The average man is
reduced to having a hard time choosing an outfit when leaving the home, but
others need the weather reports because it has a direct impact on the work they
do. A small blog entitled Mother of a
Hubbard has an entry that describes how in 2014, despite the cold, the
vegetables managed to survive. In the entry they write: “According to our
closest National Weather Service office in Jackson, Kentucky, we’ve set a
record for the number of times that temperatures have fallen to 0° F (-18 ° C)
or below in the month of January”[8].
Immediately a few details stand out. First, there was a record set again, breaking
a previous one; second, they are reliant on a Weather Service office, not just
the daily app on their phones. The importance of being aware of the weather is
not debated by this paper, nonetheless, the term “record-breaking” was embedded
in the title of this simple blog entry as well, which entails that there is a
new and somewhat mandatory jargon when it comes to reporting the changes in
temperature. Another testament to this trend is an official article by NASA,
which tried to be creative with the use of the same expression: “2016 Climate
Trends Continue to Break Records”[9].
The article takes a much wider scope when comparing the apparent changes in
weather, covering not just one or two years, but multiple decades. “NASA tracks
temperature and sea ice as part of its effort to understand the Earth as a
system and to understand how Earth is changing”[10],
in this article in particular emphasizing the change in how the ice caps are
melting, saying that “[o]peration IceBridge is a NASA airborne mission that has
been flying multiple campaigns at both poles each year since 2009, with a goal
of maintaining critical continuity of observations of sea ice and the ice sheets
of Greenland and Antarctica”[11]. Whether
or not the news likes to exaggerate, there is a clear change that has to be
addressed and major articles, like the latter example, describe the need to
explain these variations in degrees.
At this point in the essay it is arguable that it is
not solely our wish to know the weather at all times that fuels this new way of
reporting. Many are not attached to the smart devices and many are content with
listening to the radio once a day to see if they will need a sweater in the
evening. What did, however, largely contribute to this over-exaggeration is
climate change. While leaving office, in an interview given to The Daily Show
with Trevor Noah, President Barack Obama said that “[the new administration]
may change policy on climate change, but climate change is still climate
change. It's still happening... reality doesn't go away”[12]. The
urgency to compare and contrast the temperature change over the years is also
fueled by the need to prove or debunk climate change. It is important to
highlight that some are in the business of debunking it because of the misused
lingo that introduced this exponential change in the weather: global warming.
The Collins English dictionary defines it as “an increase in the average
temperature worldwide believed to be caused by the greenhouse effect”[13].
Other definitions include a wider explanation, much closer to the definition of
climate change, but since a lot of people were “cold”, among them high ranking
American politicians that have, as Barack Obama pointed out, refused to
acknowledge the “warning” and helped to spread misinformation over the past two
decades, there was a need to change the terminology.
The birth of the new terminology then created new trends. Climate change
has been evolving into a whole new discipline within literature. The most
striking examples of climate change fiction can be found within the field of
science-fiction. Nonetheless, climate change fiction or simply cli-fi has been the topic not only
sci-fi authors like J. G. Ballard, Kim Stanley Robinson or Susan M Gaines, but other
famous fiction writers like Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood and
Jeanette Winterson[14].
Climate change so far only yielded questions and answering those questions is a
playground for most writers with infinite lines and no rules. But the reason this could develop in the first place
was due to the fact that abnormal changes in climate are devoted a kind of
attention that was unprecedented as this essay has pointed out. A sudden rise
in temperature or decrease is for some reason news worthy. And if it is worth
writing about then it is good for fiction as well. Displacing human beings and
forcing them into situations where the enemy is none other than the weather has
been a growing trend for over a decades now, proof of such are disaster movies
like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Poseidon (2006) or Dante's Peak (1997) to name a few.
In conclusion, our attention to the weather cannot be
disputed, what can is the need for the exaggeration that is emphasized by the
way the weather is reported today. The only way people accept weather reports
is with 100% accuracy, and this has been noted by most, seeking ways to be more
on the point as they were before. With the appearance of calculable climate
change the jargon itself has proven to change, and if it will evolve
furthermore is up for debate. What is not, are the trends that are connected to
the phenomenon of climate change, including movies and a growing number of
readings, all collected under the new term of cli-fi.
Works
Cited
Brook, Benedict. “Record Breaking Cold Weather Hits Australia’s South
East.” News.Com.Au, 3 July 2017, www.news.com.au/technology/environment/record-breaking-cold-weather-hits-australias-south-east/news-story/50906eac539b4fa9303ae95302b7f36b.
Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
Climate Nexus. “Record High Temps vs. Record Low Temps.” Climate Signals Beta, 26 Sept. 2017, www.climatesignals.org/data/record-high-temps-vs-record-low-temps.
Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
Collins
English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014. S.v.
"global warming." Retrieved December 18 2017 from thefreedictionary.com/global+warming.
Epstein, David. “Forecast: Record-Breaking Cold Possible Saturday.” WBUR News, 9 Nov. 2017, www.wbur.org/news/2017/11/09/cold-saturday.
Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
Hille, Karl. “2016 Climate Trends Continue to Break Records.” NASA, NASA, 19 July 2016,
www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/climate-trends-continue-to-break-records. Accessed 19 Dec.
2017.
Petrák, Fanni. “Ismétlődő
emberiség − Jeanette Winterson evolúciós narratívái (Humanity Retold:
Narratives of Extinction in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods)”. A Szubjektum
Színeváltozásai, 110-121,
Americana 2017. PDF.
“South America Faces Record Breaking Cold Wave.” WeatherAction News, 17
July 2017,
weatheraction.wordpress.com/2017/07/16/south-american-faces-record-breaking-cold-wave/.
“The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.” O'Neil, Chuck, director. Season 22,
episode 36, Comedy Central, 12 Dec. 2016.
“The Garden Survives a Record-Breaking January.” Mother of a Hubbard, 31 Jan. 2014,
www.motherofahubbard.com/garden-survives-record-cold/.
[1] Climate
Nexus.
[2] Ibid.
[3] WBUR News, Dec 19. 2017.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Brook.
[6] “South
America Faces Record Breaking Cold Wave.”
[7] Climate
Nexus.
[8] “The Garden
Survives a Record-Breaking January.”
[9] NASA,
July 16, 2016.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] “The Daily Show”, Season 22,
episode 36.
[13] Collins
Dictionary.
[14] Petrák,
112.
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