No, it's not the new normal
I find myself unemployed after being made redundant. The downtime is nice - it means I get to mess around with things that I've had to put off. This is something I made a few weeks back that seems to fit as my introduction to this subreddit that I didn't know existed until it appeared in my feed this morning.
I want to be clear about who this project is and isn't aimed at. There are a lot of people who understand that data can be used to explain things we observe. I'm one of those people. A lot of the articles I've posted on LinkedIn in recent weeks are aimed at showcasing my skills to potential employers. I know how to interrograte data and torture it until it tells us everything it knows. I also know when I don't have enough data to answer questions. But I'm also fully aware that there are certain groups of people who will not accept facts no matter what incontrovertible evidence you present them with. This is true in many of the fields I work in and study in.
This project is not aimed at climate change deniers. Climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and engaging with people who dispute that is not a productive use of anyone's time. That argument is settled in the science.
This project is aimed at something more insidious I've noticed during the recent UK heatwave: the casual minimisation of climate change by people who broadly accept it's happening but consistently understate what it means. The TV weather presenters who describe record-breaking summer temperatures as the "new norm". The commentators who frame climate change as a matter of warmer holidays and remind people to stay hydrated. The well-meaning people who have absorbed the message that things are getting warmer but concluded that we're simply adjusting to a new stable state. One of the catalysts for this work are the stories in the UK news recently (late June 2026) saying how the UK has broken its June heat record three days in a row in the same tone that is used when a British person breaks the world record for balancing biscuits on their head.
That framing is wrong. And it matters that it's wrong, because it implies adaptation is sufficient - that we're moving to a "new normal" we can plan around - when the evidence points toward something fundamentally different.
The data does not show a step change to a stable warmer state. It shows an accelerating trajectory. There is a significant difference between "it's going to be warmer every summer" and "it's going to be warmer every summer than it was the year before, and that rate of warming is itself increasing." The first is a new norm. The second is not.
This project makes that argument with 190 years of publicly available UK climate data.
Read the findings and play with the data for youself in this GitHub repository. https://github.com/stetho/uk-climate-analysis
But most of all, stop saying that it's the "new normal".
Posted Jul 10, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC