Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by moron:
quote:
Originally posted by deano:
Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.
I gather then, for some climate 'scientists', weather is, unfortunately, not only not clearly causally connected but far from correlationally related to climate.
Sucks to be them.
That's not what scientists are saying.
Weather is a series of specific events, local in time and space. Each weather event is, of course, causally related to previous weather events - as well as factors such as topography (hence higher winds on high ground, more rain on rising slopes), ocean currents and physical parameters (eg: temperature), even butterflies fluttering their wings on another continent.
Climate is the average of weather events, averaged over time and/or geography. You can say the British climate is wetter and colder than the Spanish climate, based on average rainfall and temperature measurements. You can say the global climate for 2001-2010 was warmer than the global climate for 1951-1960 based on temperature measurements.
Climate and weather are, of course, inter-related. But, any given weather event cannot be said to be caused by a change in climate, nor can it be held up as evidence that climate is changing.
To take an analogy from other areas of science. A gas in a flask has a set of properties (eg: temperature and pressure). It is also composed of a vast number of individual molecules zooming around inside. We know that if we raise the temperature the average speed of those molecules increases. But, if we just followed one of those molecules we wouldn't see that change - sometimes it would move quickly, at other times it would bounce off something and lose a lot of energy and slow down until smashed by another molecule and speeding up again. The molecule velocity is related to the gas temperature, but the relationship is complex involving a large number of causal events (collisions with other molecules/container wall). That doesn't mean we aren't correct in saying if you increase gas temperature the pressure increases for a fixed volume, nor that the average speed of molecules has increased.
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Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
Posts: 32413 | From: East Kilbride (Scotland) or 福島 | Registered: May 2001
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