Photograph by Martin Rollins.

Thanks to Maria Konnikova on the New Yorker‘s website for this post showing how one’s personal experience, for example with weather, can impact one’s perception of broader range of phenomena, such as climate change:

The winter of 2010 was brutal. In February, three blizzards smashed into the mid-Atlantic in the span of three weeks, burying the region under record amounts of snow. Thousands of people lost power; grocery-store shelves were stripped bare; cars were abandoned on highways; even the federal government shut down. The first two blizzards, which were Category 3 winter storms, paralyzed cities from Washington, D.C., to New York and became known, collectively, as the Snowmageddon. Lisa Zaval, a researcher studying perceptions of global warming, told me that she noticed that the storm also had a “strange side effect: an increase in skeptical remarks about global warming.” News reports, she said, expressed disbelief in the phenomenon, while blogs like If Global Warming Is Real Then Why Is It So Cold? began to pop up. “People seemed to be taking the extreme cold weather as evidence against global climate change,” she said. Continue reading →