What’s the difference between weather and climate? Let’s ask the expert class, the governmental National Weather Service. [emphasis, links added]
Weather is defined as the state of the atmosphere at a given time and place, with respect to variables such as temperature, moisture, wind speed and direction, and barometric pressure.
Climate is defined as the expected frequency of specific states of the atmosphere, ocean, and land, including variables such as temperature, salinity, soil moisture, wind speed and direction, and current strength and direction. It encompasses the weather over different periods of time and also relates to mutual interactions between the components of the earth system (e.g., atmospheric composition, volcanic eruptions, changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun, and changes in the energy from the sun itself).
That’s a mouthful, a typical governmental explanation.
Simply put, weather is short-term, meaning days or a few weeks, while climate is long-term, meaning years, centuries, or longer.
It’s sunny and unseasonably warm where I am today, but a week ago, it was snowy and unseasonably cold. A climate warrior might label the former as global warming, the latter as global cooling, or the composite as climate change. A rational person would call it weather.
The United Nations (UN) defines climate change,
Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Such shifts can be natural, due to changes in the sun’s activity or large volcanic eruptions. But since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.
The first sentence is undeniably true. The Great Lakes were once covered by mile-thick ice sheets that disappeared when the glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago. This is not long ago, considering the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year age.
Somehow, the climate cooled and warmed long before any significant human activity existed. And how many additional times did this happen in the past 4.5 billion years?
But the UN believes humans are the “main driver of climate change” since the 1800s, not explaining how climate changed so drastically 10,000 years ago to melt a mile-thick ice sheet during a time of minuscule human activity.
The UN relies on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reports in a scary fashion:
Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion—such as continued sea level rise—are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.
Is today’s climate “unprecedented”? Do they know the temperatures hundreds of thousands of years ago? They should, as this data is readily available and published in the prestigious journal Science.
Researchers reconstructed global mean surface temperature using data assimilation, integrating geological data with climate model simulations. They discovered that “the Earth’s temperature has varied more dynamically than previously thought.” (PDF here)
Today’s global temperature is low. It was last this cold 300 million years ago. According to the chart, planet Earth has been cooling for the past 50 million years. Any man-made warming would be helpful now.
Scientists should know better, as should the corporate media. But obviously, they don’t.
I reference a few articles from this year in The Guardian, a two-hundred-year-old British newspaper considered a “newspaper of record in the UK” (along with the London Times), much like The New York Times in America.
As a British newspaper, The Guardian has observed climate change firsthand, reporting on it cooling, then warming, then cooling again.
Another record is the recent (in geological terms) history of the Thames River. Between 1309 and 1814, it froze at least 23 times. There was a “frost fair” in 1608 when the river froze for over six weeks.
What caused this freeze? London’s activity in the 1600s was mainly overcrowding, disease, and crime, not air conditioners, internal combustion engines, and backyard grills.
More recently, the river froze over in 1963 and again partially in 2021. This seems to be normal cyclic climate change, far from the “man-made global warming” the UN and IPCC warn about.
The Guardian ran two stories this year without a bit of irony. In February of this year, their headline was “What will Spain look like when it runs out of water? Barcelona is giving us a glimpse.”
In October, the new headline was “Spain floods: number killed passes 150 as scientists say climate change ‘most likely explanation’ – as it happened.”
From running out of water to flooding, all within a few months. It’s dry, then it’s wet. It’s cold, then it’s warm. And vice versa. It’s also normal. But The Guardian wants it both ways. It’s all climate change, in their view.
A month ago, the paper wrote, “Spain’s deadly floods and droughts are two faces of the climate crisis coin.” In other words, all forms of weather are climate change.
CNN wants it both ways, too. In December 2023, it ran a headline, “Winter is here, but it’s losing its cool.” One year later, without a bit of irony or introspection, it reversed itself with this headline, “It’s about to get dangerously cold, even for winter.”
Much like racism, when everything is considered racist, then nothing is. The same is true for climate change. Psychologists call this confirmation bias:
People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.
It is also hubris to believe that we can predict, much less control, the climate. The IPCC readily admits, “The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore, the long-term prediction of future climate states is impossible.”
Yet Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, John Kerry, and other “climate experts” claim to know exactly how many years it will be until the Earth is uninhabitable.
Speaking of Al Gore, I recommend Joel Gilbert’s new film, “The Climate According to AI Al Gore,” where Joel interviews an AI Gore, debunking Gore’s conviction, expertise, and the entire climate emergency of the left.
To the fearmongering, climate-catastrophizing left, it’s all humans’ fault, and with ever-increasing command-and-control diktats, rules, regulations, and taxes, we can affect forces beyond our comprehension and control.
The climate is indeed changing—it always has and always will. Temperatures will likely rise from their current 500 million-year low regardless of what the so-called experts, activists, or any world government agencies say or do.
In their attempts to regulate and tinker with Mother Nature, they may inadvertently destroy everything they are attempting to save—unless that’s the plan.
Read more at American Thinker
