So, increasing the longwave forcing has a huge effect on climate, since there is a lot more heat that needs to be moved poleward. This increase in the poleward flow has a large effect on weather.
This probably isn't what you are looking for, but it is the physical difference between weather and climate. Everything else is an operational definition and doesn't really capture the essential part that climate drives weather, not vice versa so that changes in weather patterns are caused by climate change. Places have a wet climate because of the large-scale flows, the large scale flows aren't caused by the wetter climate. Or, if you prefer, the average weather doesn't change first, climate (in the sense of the planetary energy transport) does.
As a rough rule of thumb a climate is determined by taking the mean weather conditions over a period of 30 years or more. Many climate records are updated on a monthly basis and as such, last month’s weather will now be incorporated into the climatic record, this means that the current climate is determined by both very recent weather and historic weather as well and is therefore dynamic and constantly changing.
For arguments sake let’s say that December was an unusually cold month, when the December data are incorporated into the climatic record the effect will be to reduce the overall average global temperature. But, because there will be at least 359 other months worth of data, the effect is going to be very small indeed.
If it were that climates were determined by just ten years worth of data then the difference that a single month could have would be multiplied three-fold.
In determining whether the climate is changing we need to compare recent conditions with a static baseline from history. Different baselines are used but generally they’re either 1951 to 1980 or 1961 to 1990. If there’s a difference between the current climate and the baseline then we can determine that the climate is changing.
What we deem to be the current climate is constantly changing, if we’re going to determine if the climate is indeed changing we need to use fixed reference points and so monthly or annual means over a 30 or more year period will be used, from this it will be established if there are any discernible trends.
In this respect, a generic definition of climate is going to give you something that is continually being revised but for analytical or statistical purposes it’s something that is represented by a series of numbers.
Even something over such a long time-scale as the Milankovitch cycle influences are always going to affect the weather first. Then as the weather becomes incorporated into the climatic data, the cyclical influence becomes more apparent in the climate record. The same is true for the short term cycles and one-off events.
Hi Darwinist Climate is the action of heat and pressure variations Weather is the reaction to climate changes and what we see is the result Day to day variations in atmospheric energy release The way the tropopause and the ground and oceans exchange positive and negative energy Like how a tornado forms by electrons passing through the ground from lightening strikes. When you hear a reference to atmospheric and ocean currents their talking about the flow of energy both positive and negative The KISS method works for me. Action. Reaction, Result Cheers and have a good one what ever it is.
Edit gnup58 The tropopause is were the troposphere flow goes from vertical to north ,south direction
so what sort of blocking effect would this have on our first magnetic field line http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/5/2/3#...
Weather is the day-to-day state of the atmosphere, and its short-term (minutes to weeks) variation. Popularly, weather is thought of as the combination of temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, visibility, and wind. We talk about the weather in terms of "What will it be like today?", "How hot is it right now?", and "When will that storm hit our section of the country?"
Climate is defined as statistical weather information that describes the variation of weather at a given place for a specified interval. In popular usage, it represents the synthesis of weather; more formally it is the weather of a locality averaged over some period (usually 30 years) plus statistics of weather extremes.
Climate is the average weather condition at a specific place for a long period of time including extremes of temperature,precipitation and humidity.weather changes from day to day it is not fixed
You "are not going to get anywhere" with liar-deniers of that type regardless of ANYTHING you EVER do here !!! Maybe after another hundred or thousand wasted Qs and As here that will finally sink in? Why is this so hard to understand? The inherent inability of you, or any of the rest of us, to "get anywhere" is the WHOLE reason why these moron-level liar-deniers are here AT ALL !!!
When they lied and cheated in school, they flunked.
When they lied and cheated at work they were fired, or passed over for promotions.
When they lied and cheated on their spouses or partners they were dumped or at least downgraded.
Yahoo Answers is their golden opportunity for psychological revenge.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology...
The worthwhile part of your question is where to draw the line within the gray zone in between weather (local and short term) and climate (regional or global and long term). Trevor is a highly knowledgeable climate scientist (overall the best we have here probably), and his point makes good sense: Anything happening on a time scale of >30 years is definitely climate, not weather. Obviously, day to day or even season to season fluctuations are weather. The difficulty, as your question does accurately portray, is how to best classify the medium term cycles, El Nino, droughts, solar fluctuations, etc. Subtle feedbacks between long term climate change and these medium term cycles, does not mean that the medium term cycles drive ("force") the climate change. Nor does the obvious impact of the medium term patterns on short term weather invalidate the now solidly established scientific conclusion that (though to a still quite hazy extent) long term climate change also impacts the frequency and intensity of short term weather events.
Suppose someone were to come up with a nifty catch-all term to encompass the various medium term phenomena. Would this make it easier to discuss climate change with the anti-science dupes here? There are few certainties in life, but that one qualifies. We can say confidently how the denial industry, and their 4th level copy-cats here would react: with the same mish mash of disinformation, trickery and internally contradictory BS they have been using for decades, and, here at YA, sabotaging the global warming category with. In the clumsy semi-literate voice of the Wattsup copy-pasters here, the in-between category would be "proof" that socialistic conspiring greedy scientists are moving the goal posts and changing the rhetoric in order to advance their "warmist" agenda. The in-between category would be cited as proof that everything is natural, that because cyanide is a useful nutrient, naturally absorbed by humans in small quantities, that therefore steadily increasing additive doses of it are nothing to worry about (e.g. that CO2 is harmless at all levels and in all contexts).
There is no "winning" the bogus "debate" that the 2+2=5 nitwits are addicted to. Semantics cannot be an antidote to systematic deliberate lying. We can only continue to demonstrate the validity of science, history, reason and honesty against anti-science, denial and deceit. And to "get anywhere" we CANNOT avoid calling spades spades.
Edit: The notion of Sagebrush "evaluating scientifically" even the difference between his posterior orifice and a hole in the ground is ludicrous. These are the F student clowns who never managed to understand the difference between percentage and percentage of percentage, or between mean and variance, or how to write English in grammatically correct complete sentences.
The standard time frame for determining climate is a 30 year period. Weather on the other hand is what you see today, tomorrow or maybe a week at a time or more.
By the same token, we have determined the climate is changing based on over 30 years of rising global average temps and rising CO2 levels.
many areas have had 2 fairly warm winters in a row. i would say one or two is weather, nut 3 or 4 in a row would indicate the winters are changing and hence climate change.
Climate change has of course been predicted to produced odd bits of weather like a blizzard where it rarely snows, rain where it rarely rains etc. GW/climate change is a proven fact now and this past summer we were inundated with heat waves, prolonged drought, torrential rains, increasing desertification etc etc.
99% of all scientists accept global warming while 95-97% of all climatologists are convinced the current acceleration of GW is human emissions with the majority of the world's climate organizations in agreement. 100% of the world's governments agree with this as well and they all have climate change strategyies in place to protect their people and their way of life.
Anyone who is still in denial is weak minded indeed.
weather is the state of the atmosphere with respect to wind, temperature, cloudiness, moisture, pressure, etc.
Whereas climate refers to the composite or generally prevailing weather conditions of a region, as temperature, air pressure, humidity, precipitation, sunshine, cloudiness, and winds, throughout the year, averaged over a series of years.
I would usually use this quote as an offhand response to this question, but on this occasion it seems quite apposite.
“Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.” (Mark Twain )
‘Weather’ is our momentary experience, and ‘climate’ is the range of experience that we expect.
The problem is that ‘climate’ is constantly changing with time. Within my lifetime I might regard ‘climate’ to be synonymous with ‘normal’ over that relatively short time frame. But I don’t think that ‘climate’ can be considered in a fixed timeframe like this.
What was ‘normal’ 100 years ago is not the same as what was ‘normal’ 1500 years ago. We know that we have had protracted warm and cool periods in our post-glacial history... and a person’s lifetime experience within those periods would yield quite different views of what the ‘climate’ was for a given location.
I know that a 30 year average is the conventional response to your question... but when we are considering ‘anthropogenic climate change’ we need a reference point which we can use to determine whether or not the climate has deviated from what it ‘should’ be... and a 30 year average simply isn’t adequate for this purpose.
The question is very interesting and it makes me think of all the things we don’t know, as opposed to what we do know. We don’t know what caused the little ice age, or the medieval warm period... but clearly the ‘climate’ during each of them was quite different. We don’t know what causes the oceans’ phase changes (PDO, ENSO, NAO etc) but we know they will change ‘climate’ (the range of what we expect) for a period. We know that there is some sort of correlation between sunspots and weather, but don’t yet adequately understand it. We know that there’s some sort of significance of the earth’s position in the solar system relative to the other bodies, but again we don’t know much other than some correlation is observable, and there are many more things that appear to exert an influence on climate that we simply don’t yet understand... if we did, then we might be able to successfully model ‘climate’... which currently we can’t.
We are currently simply unable to determine just what the climate is supposed to be (as opposed to what it has been for a 30 year prior span)... so how can we know how much we have changed it?, or indeed, if we have changed it at all?
Thank you for the thought provoking question.
weather is a daley changes of the topical weather, and and climat is different from weather like the different in the states like florida or California or Mediterranee climat or Aegean sea climat
Now I know the standard answers; climate is the average of weather; what you expect when weather is what you get etc, indeed, I often post this link in response to 'weather' questions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQlHaGhYoF0
That's not what I am asking.
What I am asking is the difference between events that change the weather and those that change climate. At what point do you decide that an event is changing climate rather than weather?
For example; the differences between day and night; surely no one would claim the rotation of the Earth on its axis was causing climate change, would they?
Or how about the seasons? Sure, you can talk of an area having a winter climate and a summer climate, but would you call this climate change? After all, the seasonal changes are just the result of a short term cycle oscillating between two extremes. You wouldn't say the climate was changing, would you?
How about other short term cycles such as the 11yr solar cycle or the El Nino/ La Nina which has an effect on global average temperatures as well as weather changes. If any small effects from these average out over relatively short periods, surely these are best described as changes in weather rather than climate, after all, it is not the averages that are changing. To describe short term cycles as causing climate change effectively renders the term meaningless!
Yet, as we look at longer and longer cycles, there must come a point where this no longer holds true. What about the Milankovitch Cycles; long term changes as a result of variations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun? Wouldn't it be equally meaningless to describe an Ice Age as a bit of a cold snap? Similarly with any changes as a result of our orbit around the galaxy. These would not be best described as 'weather'!.
Perhaps our reference is a human one; the typical lifetime of an individual, in which cycles either take place so slowly that we do not observe any effect, or so quickly that we see the range of effects several or many times, such that it is the average of these that we are aware of.
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So why this question?
It seems to me that, when people ask questions such as this one;
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=As21M8HNueo.u4OPNPyd1b3ty6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20130112030221AAXD4O3
we are not going to get anywhere unless we can agree on the basics such as what do we mean by 'climate'. Now, consistent with what I have written above, my answer to Ian's question would be that the Sun is not a major player when it comes to GW as its effect is virtually constant. But I wouldn't rule out the possibility that the 11yr solar cycle can affect the weather. Others may disagree, but it serves no one if that disagreement comes down to a difference in understanding of what is meant by weather and climate!
So, where would you draw the line between weather and climate? Which events would you say were climate change and which would you describe as weather?
How do you know there is a climate change without knowing what a climate is? Well, let us let the IPCC define climate. Oh, they really haven't done that either, at least not in a scientific or legal way. But they have defined Climate Change, "A Climate Change is a change in climate." Ha! Ha! These are supposedly college educated Climatologists, and that is the best they can do.
If you ever went to a scientific school, the first thing you would learn is to set a premise or set of premises. If this happens then that must happen it the theorem is correct, as an example. In this Climate Change discussion, there has been no such basic thought coming from the advocate's side. And that is where it has to come from. In their eagerness to pick out pockets and restrict our liberties these con artists have neglected to do the BASICS of science in their quest to scare us.
Weather is what, despite having the most powerful computer in the world, The Met Office cannot predict, even 24 hours ahead.
Climate is what they can predict 100 years in advance, including effects of a warming world down to the fraction of a millimetre sea level rise, square millimetre of Arctic ice, death and destruction to every living thing down to the nearest day.
What a load of bollox.
