Shifting baseline makes it difficult to grasp “normal”
By Cayte Bosler
Once fish were so plentiful in American waters that Indigenous populations simply placed baskets in the rivers as a means to catch enough to sustain their kin, according to The River of Life: Sustainable Practices of Native Americans and Indigenous Peoples.
When asked, fishermen in the 20th century would claim that the bounty of fish they caught had “always been so,” despite records indicating declines in total fish catch and even the fish size, without knowledge of how fish existed in their respective environments in previous generations. In 1995, Daniel Pauly coined this “shifting baseline syndrome,” to mean that a generation of people without connection to the history of a place tend to perceive the environmental condition of their time as “normal.” That many communities look only to the recent past to base their future expectations.
This can be so with temperatures, too, on the rise in the United States, with the Northeast warming the fastest. “Over the past decade, extreme heat events have grown 90 times more common, according to one study,” David Wallace Wells explains in his op ed “Can You Even Call ‘Extreme’ Heat Deadly Anymore.” A child alive now may accept warmer-than-average summer days as “normal” with no perspective to gauge what scientists label “extreme” in a longer time span.
For a deeper analysis on increasing air temperatures and how summer is lengthening in the Northern Hemisphere, read about record highs in New York expected this summer. This previous article focused on temperature analysis for Saranac Lake.
For a tiny window into these changes over time, we turn to a graph, showing the same analysis for Lake George, Indian Lake, Old Forge and Burlington, Vt.:
Edit as of 6/27/2022: The Saranac Lake temperatures were previously displayed incorrectly due to an error in the coordinates used to obtain the data. The current graph now reflects the accurate data for past temperatures for the region.
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Thank you very much for the article.
I believe there is an error in the Saranac Lake temp data in this article. This graph indicates the average summer temp between 1980 to 2020 for Saranac Lake ranged from about 72 to 74 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 5 degrees warmer than at Burlington and Lake George which doesn’t make sense because Saranac Lake is at a much higher elevation. The summer temp graph by Climate Reanalyzer for Saranac Lake in a previous article (https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/stories/mapping-summer-temperatures-across-the-adirondacks#respond) indicates that average summer temps at Saranac Lake from 1980 to 2020 ranged from about 63 to 66 degrees which agrees with climate data from other websites such as weather spark.
I believe there is an error in the temp data for Saranac Lake in your article “Mapping summer temperatures across the Adirondacks” on June 17, 2022. In your graph of Average Summer Temperatures Adirondacks, you show that the average summer temps for Saranac Lake ranged from 72 to 75 degrees from 1970 to 2020 which was was 5-6 degrees F warmer than for Burlington and Lake George, which is highly unlikely since Saranac Lake is at a much higher elevation than Burlington and Lake George. I would expect that the average summer temps for Saranac Lake to be similar to those at Indian Lake (63 to 66 degrees), which is at a roughly similar elevation as that of Saranac Lake.
In a previous article on June 13 (https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/stories/record-summer-high-temperatures) that compares summer average temps for Saranac Lake with those of NYC, the graph indicates that the average summer temps for Saranac Lake from 1970 to 2020 ranged from 63 to 65 degrees (which seems reasonable) and temps for NYC during that period that ranged from 72 to 74 degrees. Average summer temps that range from low 60s to mid 60s for Saranac Lake is what is typically found on other climate websites such as Weather Shark.
It appears that you mistakenly used NYC average summer temp data to represent Saranac Lake.
Todd Miller
Thanks for pointing that out Todd. The graph is now updated.
Ehhhh, where is the data from?
I knew a man who did temp collection for the NWS in the 50’s and 60’s.
I asked him what he di when he was gone for a week here and there.
“OH I just make it up”.