I recently delivered a public webinar to the Royal Society of Tasmania. In this lecture I presented my recent research into the response of the Southern Ocean to human-caused changes in the atmosphere. The lecture was recorded and you can view it online.
Climate
The BBQ challenge
The greenhouse gas emissions from food can be substantial – but how much do they vary between different types of food? And how do they compare with other emissions, say from driving to a scenic spot for a barbecue?
The difference between climate and weather
The distinction has often been made intuitively. For example this quote from Robert Heinlein “Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get”. This makes sense; we know that winter is colder than summer, and that the UK has a terrible climate.
From this we can draw the following relatively simple definition for weather.
Weather is the here and now; it is the current state of the atmosphere. Is it raining? Is it windy? Weather varies on timescales of minutes to days. Storms, rainbows and sunny days are all examples of weather.
Climate is a bit harder to nail down. We speak of one summer being particularly warm. This suggests that our notion of climate is based on more than a single year’s weather. The exact length of time for climate is unhelpfully fuzzy, but a working definition would be:
Climate is the long-term average of the weather for a particular location and time of year.
Edward Doddridge 