While the rest of the world is seeing its agricultural productivity decimated by climate change, the U.S. and Canada are continuing to experience weather that's within the range of "natural variability."
So says a new study in Science from researchers at Stanford and Columbia. If true, this has a couple of kind of crazy-making implications:
1. It's difficult or impossible to attribute recent extreme weather events in North America to climate change. Tornadoes, floods, drought — pretty much all we can conclude from them, say scientists, is that sh*t happens.
2. We know that humans' belief in climate change is linked to perceived warming — even as short-term as the change of the seasons. Could the relatively halcyon climate of North America be contributing to America's supersized ability to disbelieve things? Well, maybe …
