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Transcript
Thanks for the question. It’s a good one. I know it can be a little bit confusing, but it’s also quite simple once we break it apart.
Weather is really the things we feel, the things we’re used to – rainfall, winds, maybe a hurricane if you live in that part of the world.
Climate is the things that move much slower and they are much bigger. So the easy ones to think about are things like sea level rise caused by the climate, which is warming slowly if you look around the whole globe. But it also includes things like the Gulf Coast of the United States gets some number of hurricanes per year, and Northern California doesn’t. So they have different climates when it comes to tropical cyclone frequencies and intensities.
The key thing is that the climate, even though it is changing slowly, controls a lot about the intensity and frequency of weather in your area – sort of the stuff you feel and also how that’s changing.
We have to consider both together when we’re thinking about climate change and how the impacts of climate change are going to change. So many of us are used to using apps to understand today’s weather, tomorrow’s weather, the weather in a week, and maybe even in some cases the weather in two weeks. Those aren’t climate. But what that looks like in your area or how that may be changing over time is determined by the climate.
Now the industry around weather is robust. There’s a lot of weather companies, like the apps you’re used to using, who are packaging lots of different data sources from public and private providers including themselves and giving you the weather.
Fewer of us are doing climate, and really focusing on climate than how the weather layers on top of the changing climate and how the weather is therefore changing in many ways.
So I hope that clears it up and I’ll look forward to seeing you again.
