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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

You are confusing weather and climate.

> You are confusing weather and climate.

As a non-native english speaker, I wasn't aware these were different things, and you didn't clarify. Could you explain the difference insofar as it's related to this conversation? The dictionary didn't help much; they still look like synonyms to me.

Weather[1]

1 : the state of the atmosphere with respect to heat or cold, wetness or dryness, calm or storm, clearness or cloudiness

Climate[2]

1 : a region of the earth having specified climatic conditions

2 : a : the average course or condition of the weather at a place usually over a period of years as exhibited by temperature, wind velocity, and precipitation b : the prevailing set of conditions (as of temperature and humidity) indoors a climate-controlled office 3 : the prevailing influence or environmental conditions characterizing a group or period : atmosphere

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weather

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/climate

They are clearly not synonyms. At the very least, notice this difference in your two definitions.

1. A single data point.

2. The average of many data points

There's no single data point here. You put a thermometer in the air, it takes a finite time to take a measurement, it's actually averaging over time.

And then you record one data point. Really, if you're going to be a pedant then at least make an effort.

Weather refers to short-term changes in atmosphere while climate is how we define long-term weather patterns in an area. [1]

Saying "climate change is more complex" because you're having a cool summer is wrong, because global warming is a climate-level change and a cool summer is weather. You cannot look at moment to moment or even season to season weather to describe climate change. Climate is usually described in long term trends, e.g., "For the last 50 years, global temperature rose at an average rate of about 0.13°C (around one-quarter degree Fahrenheit) per decade-almost twice as fast as the 0.07°C per decade increase observed over the previous half-century." [2] This is a typical description of climate change, explaining a trend over decades.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_we...

[2] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/videos/history-earths-...

Edit to add, before I put my foot in my mouth: climate does inform weather, so you will see, for example, people saying that the Siberian heatwave are probably influenced by human climate change. Based on the original article, what they're saying is that this event would have been nearly impossible without human contributions.

Weather is the state of atmospheric affects today. E.g. rain, snow, wind, storm etc are weather.

Climate is a set of sustained climatic conditions. E.g. Mediterranean summers being hot and dry is climate. Boston winters being very snowy is climate.

Climate can only be observed in the order of years and decades. Weather is observed in the order of hours/days.

Shortly put, "weather" is short-term, localized state of atmosphere (e.g. "There will be rain tomorrow in NYC"), whereas "climate" is long-term, more extensive environmental conditions (hence "average" and "over a period of years").

Scientists first use the term "global warming", and then when the denialists point to localized temperature decrease as counterevidence (totally ignoring the global part), we adopt the term "climate change". And now the skeptics say the reason we switched the term is because it's wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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