What’s the difference between weather and climate? Let’s ask the expert class, the governmental National Weather Service.

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.

Image by Grok

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........

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