![\"Imagine](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/file-20250110-17-yge7uv.png\")
<\/p>\nSummer 2025 was the UK\u2019s hottest on record, the Met Office announced this week. The news somehow felt both inevitable and surprising. There may have been four separate heatwaves, but for many this summer felt pretty normal. <\/p>\n
This is because of \u201cshifting baseline syndrome\u201d and the way humans notice \u2013 or fail to notice \u2013 temperature change.<\/p>\n
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This roundup of The Conversation\u2019s climate coverage comes from our award-winning<\/a> weekly climate action newsletter<\/a>. Every Wednesday, The Conversation\u2019s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 45,000+ readers who\u2019ve subscribed.<\/a><\/p>\n Academics have been warning about shifting baselines for decades: the idea that each generation takes the climate and ecosystems of its youth as the baseline or \u201cnormality\u201d. <\/p>\n Back in 2020, Lizzie Jones, then a PhD researcher in conservation psychology at Royal Holloway, said this is why parents and grandparents should talk to children<\/a> about the natural world of their youth.<\/p>\n \u201cEven my parents\u201d, she writes, \u201crecall clouds of insects while they learned to drive, regular snowfall each winter and now rare bird species filling their back gardens.\u201d<\/p>\n For people struggling to put environmental changes in context, local anecdotes like these can be more useful than news stories. \u201cOlder people hold a rich library of knowledge about the past,\u201d says Jones, \u201cand how their corner of the world has changed over the course of their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n As time passes, losses accumulate or temperatures creep up. But because we reset our expectations every generation, the change feels ordinary. This is shifting baseline syndrome, and Jones says it leads us to \u201cunderestimate how much the environment has changed\u201d. <\/p>\n She particularly focuses on wildlife changes:<\/p>\n \u201cWhatever you or your generation grew up with is considered normal, but as species continue to go extinct and wild habitats are erased, your children will inherit a degraded environment and accept that as normal, and their children will normalise an even more impoverished natural world.\u201d<\/p>\n Read more: My own grandparents were born near Newcastle more than a century ago. Back then, red squirrels still dominated that part of the world but grey squirrels introduced from America were fast taking over. Skip forward two generations, and I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever seen a red squirrel in the wild. My baseline is that squirrels are grey. <\/p>\n There\u2019s something similar going on with birds in the UK. I grew up in west London and vividly remember as a teenager my first sighting of a bright green parakeet in Richmond Park. My friend Oscar told me a small colony had established themselves in the city\u2019s suburbs. These days, I see these invasive parakeets (originally from the Himalayan foothills, say scientists<\/a>) more than any bird aside from pigeons. They\u2019re loud and annoying and keep taking food from native songbirds. <\/p>\n My children will never know a London without parakeets: that\u2019s their baseline. <\/p>\n The new baseline. Altered perceptions<\/p>\n But it\u2019s easy to spot when a chunky colourful parrot has muscled a tiny blue tit out of its usual feeding spot. It\u2019s a lot harder to notice that the hottest summer day might now be 35\u00b0C rather than 31\u00b0C.<\/p>\n In part, that\u2019s because climate change isn\u2019t just altering the weather \u2013 it\u2019s altering our perceptions. <\/p>\n Matthew Patterson is a climate scientist at the University of Reading. Writing in June last year, after supposedly cold and miserable weather still hadn\u2019t moved the month much below the long-term temperature average, he noted that the UK has warmed so fast<\/a> that: \u201cWe have come to normalise extreme heat, while relatively cold or even average conditions feel unusual and thus newsworthy.\u201d<\/p>\n We\u2019re also prone to very human biases here. Our collective memory of the weather in any given summer is hugely influenced by conditions during the daytime on perhaps ten weekends. Few people notice whether it was abnormally hot or cold at 3am on a Tuesday, but that\u2019s part of the average too.<\/p>\n This may explain why the UK\u2019s record hot summer still came as a surprise: we pay attention to outliers and recent events (August was cooler than July this year), not to the relentless upward creep of average temperatures.<\/p>\n Read more: Lost summers, wilder futures<\/p>\n History offers a sobering lesson in averages and outliers. During the little ice age between the 14th and 19th centuries, average global temperatures cooled by a few tenths of a degree. But that had a huge impact, especially in Europe: failed harvests, frozen rivers, famines and storms. <\/p>\n For climate historian Dagomar Degroot of Georgetown University in the US, this was a case of small global trends masking bigger local consequences<\/a>. \u201cThe comparatively modest climate changes of the little ice age,\u201d he says, \u201clikely had profound local impacts.\u201d<\/p>\n And if less than half a degree can do all that, what might two degrees of warming do in the near future?<\/p>\n Degroot does note that: \u201cPeople who lived through the little ice age lacked perhaps the most important resource available today: the ability to learn from the long global history of human responses to climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n Read more: The little ice age teaches us how vulnerable we are to climate shifts, but we can reimagine the natural world rather than simply mourn its loss.<\/p>\n Back in 2018, Jones (the conservation psychologist), together with her colleagues Christopher Sandom and Owen Middleton of the University of Sussex, asked young people to imagine what a thriving natural world would look like<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cWhat they expressed was a desire to see ecosystems with not just more of the wildlife that\u2019s currently there, but the return of species which have disappeared. There was also an undercurrent of sadness about litter and the present absence of wildlife, and hopes for more sustainable lifestyles in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n This is why the authors say we should not simply accept shifting baseline syndrome, as it would mean \u201cprogressive damage to the natural world, even with our best efforts\u201d.<\/p>\n Instead, they write, \u201cBy broadening our imagination and what we can expect from the environment, we can raise our ambitions for the natural world we leave to future generations.\u201d<\/p>\n While memory loss hides decline, imagination can help reverse it. <\/p>\n
\n Why grandparents should talk to children about the natural world of their youth<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Parakeet](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/file-20250904-56-7kbqz2.jpg\")
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\n NorthSky Films \/ shutterstock<\/p>\n
\n Average months now feel cold thanks to climate change<\/a><\/p>\n
\n Small climate changes can have devastating local consequences \u2013 it happened in the Little Ice Age<\/a><\/p>\n