Has the weather outside these past few years felt normal to you? Then you may be part of a trend of people accepting global warming as the "new normal," according to the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
The Earth's temperature has been consistently warmer than average since February 1985, according to statistics from the NOAA. And the average age of the world's population is 29.4 years, according to the U.N. That means the balance of the population that remembers a time before global warming starting is tipping. People born in the '80s and later may accept the current temperature as normal, because it is all they ever knew; even older people may forget how the weather used to be.
This is dangerous, because if the global population accepts climate change as normal, it may leave people unconcerned about increased drought, heat, and intense weather, and leave them uncooperative with plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions.
"Because the last three decades have seen such a significant rise in global and regional temperatures, most people under the age of 30 have not lived in a world without global warming," Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of the WMO, said.
"On human timescales the changes in our climate can seem gradual, so we will increasingly need to remind the public about just how rapid and unprecedented the changes truly are," Jarraud said.
This shift may be one of the reasons why Americans doubt the existence of climate change. A Tech Times article last month reported that about 57% of Americans do not believe in global warming.
"People have to get used to continuous change in the climate," said Thomas Peterson. Peterson works at NOAA. He is also the president of the WMO Commission for Climatology.
It may be hard to realize the effects of global warming on an individual level. The weather in parts of North America still gets very cold in the winter, for example. People see that it's cold outside where they live, and begin to doubt the existence of global warming. The satiric tumblr https://ifglobalwarmingisrealwhyisitcold.tumblr.com/ collects political cartoons on that theme. But overall, the global average temperature has been increasing every year since 1985.
What might make people finally accept global warming? Extreme weather events, says Peter Thorne, a climate researcher at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, west Norway. He said that while people are unlikely to notice fractional rises in temperature over years, things like draught and tornadoes are more likely to get the notice of people, and spur governments into action.
About 200 governments worldwide are planning to meet at a summit in Paris in 2015 to look for ways to slow the spread of global warming and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
