… When we encourage people to look to the weather for evidence of climate change, we’re inadvertently asking them to retreat from the pursuit of a more global understanding. …
Making sense of the weather and what it means about our changing climate may entail studying it in aggregate, attending to patterns rather than the flux of feelings. We might, for example, look to the group of Shinto priests who spent centuries recording the timing of ice melt on Lake Suwa, inadvertently recording the progression of global warming in the process, not that they knew it. Or we might simply strive to see beyond our own immediate contexts, remembering that even when they’re instructive, local weather patterns are puzzle pieces rather than pictures. CONT.
Jacob Brogan, Slate