Sunday 18 March 2018

Climate and Weather

Everyone except Donald Trump knows the difference between these, right?  So how to explain it to him?  I thought about it until I felt I understood it myself a bit, then came up with this analogy.  Don’t drill any deeper into it than I have, because it will crumble.

Imagine a broad highway.  It has edges and fairly predictable curves, but not much else in the way of controls.  That’s the climate.
Now imagine you’re driving along this highway.  The lack of controls means you can take any number of paths within the existing edges and curves.  You’re the weather.
Now someone comes along and, unpredictably, moves the edges and reroutes the curves.  That’s climate change.
Most of the time you (the weather) will carry on as you always have. But the more the climate highway gets wider or narrower, bendier or straighter, the more likely you are to crash.

1 comment:

  1. I think we just had some weather change here.
    By the way, scientists are now arguing about the consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) (or climate change, the terms do seem interchangeable, though climate change is probably more appropriate). They can't quite decide whether 97% of them accept AGW or whether it's >99.9%. https://goo.gl/qk6pTu
    Trump is not a scientist. And I rather doubt he could get his head around your analogy.

    ReplyDelete