The weather at any spot is usually defined by max/min temperatures, humidity, precipitation and wind strength/direction. Weather varies hourly, daily, season-to-season and place-to-place. These weather measurements at any place can be averaged over various time periods.
Climate is defined as the average of thirty years of weather. Mark Twain explained the difference: “Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get”.
Weather statistics can be averaged over larger areas, such by region, state, continent or the globe. This is a mathematical abstraction, becoming less accurate and less meaningful as the time or area covered increases. A global average annual temperature which (after debatable adjustments) includes winter in the Antarctic and summer in the Sahara is irrelevant. No one lives in the global average temperature.
Weather and climate have been so politicised that most commentaries are now merely propaganda.
In the Brave New World of global warming alarmists, a long frigid winter is “just weather”, but one stinking hot summer day is “clear evidence of dangerous man-made climate change”.
And despite an un-predicted 17 years of stable global temperature trends, their prophets still chant their doleful dirge: “Unless we have a carbon tax, extreme weather disasters are coming your way soon”.
Viv Forbes,
Rosewood, Qld, Australia
Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, has spent his life working in exploration, mining, farming, infrastructure, financial analysis and political commentary. He has worked for government departments, private companies and now works as a private contractor and farmer.
Viv has also been a guest writer for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Business Queensland and mining newspapers. He was awarded the “Australian Adam Smith Award for Services to the Free Society” in 1988, and has written widely on political, technical and economic subjects.
