Rex Trulove
It is amazing how, on a yearly basis, so many people say that recent weather events prove or disprove global warming. This contention is totally absurd and there is a solid reason for this. It isn’t even hard to understand, even if a person has only a basic understanding of the weather.
First, it is important to understand that regardless if people believe in catastrophic global warming or not, nearly everyone with a small understanding of weather and climate-related phenomenon agrees that the climate is changing. Our world is dynamic and continuously changing so the climate must change. The only way that the climate wouldn’t change is if there was no climate. However, climate change doesn’t mean global warming or global cooling, it just means that the climate is changing.
This understood, there is a question about whether or not the global climate is getting warmer or if it is getting cooler. An honest look at data, including rock core samples, leads to the conclusion that the global climate is indeed warming up. As near as scientists can figure out, this has been going on for at least 10,000 to 11,000 years. If the global temperatures weren’t increasing, most of North America and Eurasia would still be under a mile of ice. Plotted over that period, the rate of increase has been more or less steady, with some periods when the global climate got rapidly warmer and other times when it got abruptly cooler.
There isn’t much contention about any of this.
So doesn’t this mean that this past winter proves that the earth’s climate is abruptly cooling down? The answer is no. The weather this winter neither supports nor denies global warming or global cooling. How can this be? This is the really easy to understand part.
Weather is the air temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, precipitation, and air pressure in a given location at a given time. It is what we experience when we step outside.
Climate is the average of the weather over a long period of time, usually a century or more.
Thus, this past winter, with colder and snowier than normal conditions in North America and warmer than normal conditions in Europe has very little to do with climate. The period of time is far too short to have an appreciable impact on the average of the weather over the course of the past century.
If there was a snowstorm in July in Phoenix, Arizona or Miami, Florida, it still wouldn’t have much impact on climate because of the timeframe that is involved. It would be evened out when it was averaged over at least 100 years.
In fact, many people have noticed that here in the northern US, the winters have been getting longer, colder, and snowier for most of the past decade. This still has minimal impact on the climate. This is merely a cooling trend in the weather, not in the climate.
So what does the weather this past winter show? This winter shows very little except how marvelously designed our planet is, with checks and balances and self-regulation. If it was colder and snowier in North America at the same time that it was warmer than normal in Europe, the net ‘change’ is close to zero because the two offset each other.
In fact, this is how the weather has been functioning since people first started recording it and no doubt long before that. When there are floods in one area, there are droughts in another. When there is abnormally warm weather in one place, there is abnormally cold weather in another. These balance each other out, just as the earth was designed to do.
We can even go a step further. The above and below normal weather is well within the normal fluctuations of this planet. In other words, the weather has been unusual only when compared to the recent past. The same sort of changes have been recorded before in the past and there isn’t much doubt that they will be experienced again in the future.
None of this lends credence to global warming or global cooling, even though so many people try to equate the weather of the past 6 months with the climate of the past century. Weather and climate aren’t the same things. People who try to draw such a connection don’t have a firm grasp of what “climate” is.
This is a little bit of information for you to think about the next time you hear someone, even a self-proclaimed expert, saying that the winter of 2018-2019 proves or disproves global warming or cooling. It does nothing of the sort.
Great article, Rex. Most people don’t understand that there is a big difference between climate and weather.
The period between 900 and 1200 AD, give or take a few years, were much warmer than it is today. After that temps started to decline until about 1880 when it started to rise again. The last few years have been quite flat.
The worst-case scenarios show, at most, a 2°C increase by 2100. This is actually a good thing. Cold kills more people than warm and crops grow better when it’s warm. Less starvation.
You are quite right. Trying to equate the weather with climate is an idea that is pushed by the media, but it holds no water. The weather in a given year, in a given location, at most affects the climate by 1%, if that. Weather is also a lot more than temperature.
The media also loathe to report that many of the world’s biggest, most known deserts are shrinking and getting greener. What we know about the climate is somewhat similar to what an ant, standing under a Saturn-V rocket, understands about the workings of the rocket and the craft that is on top of it.
GReat analogy. The media will tell you that thousands of scientists believe in catastrophic climate change. What they don’t tell you is that these scientists are not meteorologists or climatologists. About 10 years ago I heard that there were only about 80 people in the USA who held PhDs in climatology.
That wouldn’t surprise me even a little. They also won’t mention that well over 31,000 scientists, and the number is growing, have disagreed specifically with the anthropogenic climate change model. These are real scientists and they have to prove their credentials before they can even sign the paper.
For that matter, no science degree is necessary for a person to call themselves climatologists, though a few do have that degree. It is one reason I rarely admit to being a climatologist. I wasn’t specifically trained in it and don’t hold a PhD or doctorate.