A summer like the old days - how memory can deceive us

"It was always hot in summer when I was a child" is a common refrain at many regulars' tables, during coffee breaks or harmless shopping chats.

"We've also had heat holidays in the past."

Today, however, the complaint is that we are simply too snivelling and make an unnecessarily big fuss about the high temperatures. Nothing but scaremongering!

Welcome to summer 2023! This is how quickly the most common of all small talk topics, the weather, becomes a political issue.

But what about our memories of the summers of our childhood? Can they really be compared with the current ones or is our memory playing tricks on us?

How do we remember?

Communication psychologist Anita Habel stated the following in an interview with the press department of Psychologists for Future:

"Temperature developments are not important enough for our brain, we find it hard to remember details that didn't play an important role for us."

The memory of the duration of heat periods is also subject to a filter that cannot really be trusted.

"We find it difficult to estimate durations and frequencies, especially when it comes to everyday things like the weather," says the psychologist.

It is different when the memory is linked to an emotion.

"When details represent contrasts to everyday life, we remember them."

For example, if a wedding took place on a particularly hot day, we will remember it forever, but probably not what the weather was like four days later.

Weather is not the same as climate

The fact that the summer of 1975 (incidentally, the year after Rudi Carell released his longing hit "Wann wird's mal wieder richtig Sommer?") saw a heatwave with peaks of over 35 degrees Celsius does not mean that it used to be just as hot as it is today.

Nor do decades-old newspaper headlines and articles reporting record temperatures that are posted up and down on social media disprove climate change.

"A single extreme event is initially only one manifestation of weather," Karsten Haustein from the Institute of Meteorology at Leipzig University told the Science Media Center (SMC). "What changes is the frequency of certain weather conditions, such as heat and precipitation extremes."

When do we start talking about climate change?

Records over a longer period of time, around 30 years, are necessary in order to reliably identify an actual trend.

According to DWD data for June 1991 to 2020, for example, it was on average one degree warmer than between 1961 and 1990.

"A heatwave that would have been an event of the century without climate change is now a normal summer," Friederike Otto from the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University told SMC. "What would have been impossible without climate change are now the new extreme events."

pro.earth conclusion

What simply doesn't count in the case of climate-related weather development is the feeling, because the scientifically verifiable facts speak for themselves. 💚