BrainStuff Classics: What's the Difference Between Weather and Climate?

When concepts are as intertwined as weather and climate, it can be easy to mix them up. Learn the difference, and why it matters so much in discussions about the environment, in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atmospheric/weather-and-climate-whats-difference.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here with a classic episode
from our archives. In this one, we wanted to really
clear up the differences between two related but separate concepts,
weather versus climate. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here. You

(00:24):
might remember when in Republican Senator James Inhoff of Oklahoma
set out to refute the quote hysteria over global warming
by tossing a snowball around inside the US Capital. The
obvious implication was, how could the climate be changing that
radically from humans burning fossil fuels and pumping greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere, since we still have snowfall and chilly

(00:45):
temperatures on a winter day. But even if you're not
a U. S. Senator from an oil producing state, you
might be wondering how it is that scientists can predict
climate trends over many years but can't predict what the
weather will be three weeks from today. Reason is that
weather and climate are two very different things. Basically, whether
it is what happens today or tomorrow or this week,

(01:07):
it's the day to day variations. Climate, meanwhile, happens over
many years. It's the combined long term average of weather events.
Scientists look at climate in terms of fixed thirty year periods.
Right now, for example, scientists are comparing the daily temperature
to the period that started in nine and ended in one.

(01:28):
They'll shift forward ten years and start comparing temperatures to
the period between, and so on. Scientists rely on thirty
year periods because it's an amount of time that's long
enough to produce meaningful comparisons, but just short enough that
any changes that occur will be subtle without being imperceptible.
Twenty years might not show enough change, and fifty years

(01:49):
might be too drastic. To make sense of those, thirty
year periods help us put the weather on a particular
day in the right context. Comparing the temperature on December
the same day a hundred years ago wouldn't provide that
much useful information because the climate was too different then,
but comparing it to the average of the temperature readings
for every December five between, when the climate conditions were

(02:12):
pretty much constant, makes it possible to say whether a
given December five is an unusually cold or warm day.
We spoke with Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and
oceanic studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He explained,
or trying to compare apples to apples when it comes
to prediction, whether in climate are also very different. Weather forecasting,

(02:34):
Martin explains, is based upon observation of conditions that are
already occurring in real time in the atmosphere. Because those
conditions only exist for a short time. Whether it can
be reliably forecast only over relatively short periods of ten
to fourteen days at most, though Martin said that's theoretical,
My confidence ends at day eight. Envisioning climate, in contrast,

(02:55):
is much more low resolution. Scientists are trying to project
what the trend will be over a long period, not
what the weather will be like on a specific day
fifty or a hundred years from now. That involves gathering
and crunching huge amounts of data in powerful computers and
doing modeling. We also spoke with Jeffrey S. Duke's director
of the Climate Change Research Center at Purdue University. He said,

(03:18):
in one sense, climate does not affect weather. It's a
description of the weather over a long period. You could
turn that around and say that climate provides you with
information about how likely you are to get a given
type of weather at a given time of year. But
historically the climate has been determined by the weather over
long periods. He continued. In another sense, though, climate for

(03:38):
a given location is determined by a bunch of factors,
such as the latitude and position on the planet, which
affects how it is influenced by the circulation of the
atmosphere and oceans, and the daytime heating of continents. Climate
is also influenced by the composition of the atmosphere, the
transport of water from soil to air by plants, and
other factors. On a given day, the sum of all

(03:59):
these influences determines the weather, but as some of these
larger scale factors change over time, they will drag the
weather and the climate along with them. In recent years,
some of the sharp distinction between weather and climate has
blurred slightly as scientists have used increasingly sophisticated models and
accumulated knowledge and an effort to figure out the extent

(04:19):
to which some specific weather events, say a hurricane, a
heat wave, or a monster snowstorm, is actually a function
of climate change driven by humans releasing greenhouse emissions into
the atmosphere. By running thousands of computer simulations, they can
conduct what if experiments, seeing how the atmosphere would behave
if you removed one factor or another. Although such analysis

(04:40):
is still a work in progress, Martin thinks that eventually
it will be possible to determine the extent to which
specific weather events are influenced by climate change. Some of
that research is already bearing results. The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration presented a paper in December in which they
concluded that three extreme weather events in that year's record

(05:00):
global heat, extreme heat over Asia and unusually warm waters
in the Bearing Sea would not have been possible without
human caused climate change. Today's episode is based on the
article weather in Climate, What's the Difference? On how stuff
works dot com written by Patrick J. Kaiger. Brain Stuff

(05:21):
is production of Our Heart Radio in partnership with how
stuff works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang.
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