I’m not a climate-change skeptic. I completely believe the science and care very much about the issue. But I cannot honestly claim that I can physically sense that things are getting hotter. I have to put my trust in the data because there’s too much small-scale variation for me to be able to perceive firsthand the larger trend.
My parents (also not climate-change skeptics by any stretch) do claim they can tell the difference. However, I am skeptical of their claim. We moved into the house where they still live in Orange County, CA in 1987, when I was 5. It’s about 20 minutes from the ocean as the crow flies, which helps, but the house has poor insulation and no central AC. There are 4 bedrooms, 2 on each side of the hallway. They made a doorway between the two on the left (which face the shady backyard) to make a suite; their actual bedroom is the only one of the four with only one exposure, and the adjoining dressing room had the only window AC unit in the house when I was growing up. My room had no shade and faced the front yard and the street. Coastal SoCal does get cool at night, so during the summer and fall we’d open all the windows and turn on the attic fan at sundown and it would mostly be tolerable. But there was always at least one heat wave every year where that wasn’t enough, and my parents would close their doors and turn on the AC. If I bitched loudly enough, they’d let me sleep in the dressing room on those nights.
They spent their weekdays at the office and weekends we were all constantly on the go, so they didn’t spend much time in the house during the day. But I did. Starting in middle school (1995), they let me stay home alone after school and during the summer. I loved the freedom, privacy, and solitude. But the heat, oh gawd, the heat. Fortunately I was more of a reader than a TV-watcher, because I could do the former while shut up in their dressing room with the AC running. But opening the door to go to the bathroom or get a snack from the kitchen felt like opening the door to the oven. Finally when I was in high school, I persuaded them to let me get my own window unit for my bedroom, and I used it regularly from about July to October.
Global temperatures have been rising at an unprecedented rate since a little before we moved into that house. But for my parents, the tipping point came when they began their slow retirement phase-out plan some five or ten years ago by shutting down the business on Fridays. Suddenly, they were experiencing what I had experienced as a latchkey kid twenty years earlier: what it was like to hang out in that kiln of a house during the heat of the day in the middle of the summer. They haven’t actually installed central air yet, but they’ve bought window units for every room of the house. They are, of course, technically correct that it’s hotter now than it was then. But if you look at the numbers, the actual increase isn’t really large enough to be perceptible to a person with no measuring instruments besides his own skin. (Fun fact I just learned while Googling: while most of the hottest years on record have occurred within the last decade, one of the top ten was 1998–the summer before I started high school, and the last summer I was without AC in my own room.)
Meanwhile, since my high school graduation in 2002, I’ve lived in ten different dormitory and apartment buildings in Boston/Cambridge MA, the Netherlands, and San Diego/Orange County/Los Angeles CA, before finally buying a house in Pasadena a year ago. I spent another year in the midst of that living with my folks again in 2011/2012, when I broke up with my live-in boyfriend and started law school. Summers everywhere are hot; on the east coast they’re humid too. Living in the top floor of an apartment building means being a lot hotter than your downstairs neighbors. Ditto having south/west facing windows vs. your neighbors across the hall. Living right on the beach is infinitely cooler than living just a few miles inland (but every few miles counts.) Some years are hotter than others. That’s all I can really say for sure from my direct observations alone.