An inconvenient distinction

Ran across “Sean Hannity’s America” on Fox News the other night, and Sean was blathering away about how all the great scientists on Earth – the ones who really count – are refuting claims of global warming.

Sean went on to make the same mistake so many do – not recognizing there is an inconvenient (for them) distinction between “weather” and “climate.”

Time to recycle my blog post of 28 February 2007:

Hume-idity & snow jobs

My friend Richard, in a phone chat Saturday, was complaining about snow, ice and zero temps in Akron, Ohio. I hated to tell him I had my central air running here in South Carolina.

We were talking about the “weather.”

The right-wing and particularly Fox News are trying desperately to convince folks that “global warming” is a tree-hugger hoax.

Fox anchor Brit Hume just can’t get enough of those “it’s snowing, there’s global warming” jokes. On a recent show, he reported that a theater had canceled the showing of Al Gore’s “An Inconventient Truth” due to snow, then reacted to his own joke with a hee, hee and a yuck, yuck.

Hume was talking about the “weather.”

These naysayers neglect to tell their followers and/or audiences that there is a difference between “weather” and “climate.”

The 14 February 2007 edition of the Progress Report, Center for American Progess, explains the two terms:

“To understand why the current cold snap across the United States is occurring during a global warming trend, one must first understand the distinction between climate and weather.

“Climate is the ‘composite or generally prevailing weather conditions of a region, as temperature, air pressure, humidity, precipitation, sunshine, cloudiness and winds, throughout the year, are averaged over a series of years.’ In other words, climate refers to recorded history.

“Weather, on the hand, is current events; it refers to the ‘state of the atmosphere at a given time and place.’ Weather is a snapshot of the climate at any one instant. Although the two are related, their relationship is indirect. ‘The chaotic nature of weather means that no conclusion about climate can ever be drawn from a single data point, hot or cold. The temperature of one place at one time ... says nothing about climate, much less climate change, much less global climate change.’” LINK