Why do so many people confuse climate with weather?

Question

I've seen so many questions and answers by people who can't seem to understand the difference, and most seem to be believers in global warming at that. Is that significant?

Answer 1

I'd say both sides seem to use that erroneous argument pretty equally. See the silly "global warming stopped in 1998" statements often posted here.

It's a human mistake. Climate is about numerical scientific data. Global climate is about large numbers of measurements all over the globe averaged together, and you need to look at something like 5 year averages, since individual years jump around, due to weather conditions. Good example:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif

It's hard for persons who are not scientifically trained to relate to that data. But everyone relates to the weather.

Unfortunate, but human.

EDIT - Tomcat is right, it's not quite so simple, in some cases.

Answer 2

Are we expected to accept that the two are not tightly coupled and not intimately related?

The climate simulations use a very coarse time and space scale and try to predict trends over long times.

Weather simulations use a fine deatail time and space scale and try to predict the detailed state of the system over short times. If we could extend the weather simulation to long times to predict climate then we would. The problem is that we can't. The errors accumulate and the state of the system becomes highly erroneous the farther out we go.

Another way to say this is that for large complex coupled nonlonear systems, the errors in the estimate in the state of the system grow very fast the farther out we go in time.

There is no solid mathematical basis to say that we can predict the long term trends with a gross model of the system without being able to predict the true state of the system in the short term.

That is why the climate models must decouple themselves from the weather model, otherwise they would suffer the same problem in uncertainty.

Is this decoupling OK? People try to test this by seeing if they can predict past climate changes based on the initial data only. The problem here is that we know that they in fact had the data for what actually happened. So this data could have influenced the model. But that doesn't mean it's wrong.

Answer 3

There is nothing to be confused.If any one listen to BBC or CNN TV news one can easily differentiate. Weather is daily report of the atmospheric changes on the other hand climate is the results of study and research of at least 30 years' day to day weather reports.

Answer 4

As smart as some people think they are about climate and weather, we all still have a lot to learn. Take for instance El-Nino, is it climate or weather? It effects both, and it's mechanism is still somewhat of a mystery.

Answer 5

Climate can mean many things, so it is easy to confuse them. Climate can be used to talk about an office, or global temperatures. When you move someplace distant from where you once lived, they tell you not to exercise strenuously until you acclimate to the local weather.

I believe in global warming. I don't think we had anything to do with it, nor that we could have prevented it, though.

Answer 6

i m quite a regular reader of this section. and i think i hvn't find any such mistake by people of this group. Their might be some confusion of the terminologies used. e.g. when we are talking about temperature with respect to day to day its weather and the same temperatures if we talk in terms of annual averages or decades it become climate.

Well, i think global warming is an observable phenomenon. no doubt exists in this regard.

Answer 7

Probably because most people have realised that if the majority of scientists on the planet are saying something it might just be because they are right.