This is an answer to The Flame Challenge™ 2018 – What is Climate? – by the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University.
Let’s talk about basketball for a second. Ignore the title and bear with me, OK?
I guess most of you play sports, and are at least familiar with how basketball works. Shooting the ball is one of the most important skills, and there is a shot that is worth one point more than the others, the three-pointer. When you are good at shooting 3s, then you can be really unstoppable. I’m not so good at it, but let’s assume you are. Overall you make half of all the 3s you shoot (this would be REALLY good actually). You are the terror of your opponents. You have some friends that are just horrible and barely make any, and there is one kid in school who just seems to make every single one.
This makes sense. Some of you are better than others, and some are worse than others. After playing a game you have probably made a few, and your friend who is pretty bad made only one. But let’s imagine that a new kid comes to school, and you decide to play with him/her to try to get to know them. They make their first 3! So they are 1-for-1 as far as you know. Would it then make sense to assume that they make every single 3 they ever take? No! Of course not, you and I know that would be silly. They could be really bad at it and just got super lucky (but they would never tell you), or more likely they are pretty good. But still, it would be weird to assume that they make every single shot, right?
Well, what is climate? In basketball, there are two different things: your skill at making 3s, and the outcome of a single shot. Everybody makes a shot every once in a while, but you don’t judge how good someone is just on that shot. You have to know more. How good they are depends on if they practice, or if they work hard, or maybe they just have that natural talent. Climate is exactly like that. Climate is not one single event, climate is the overall state of the earths Temperature/winds/storms bla bla. Weather is different from climate, and is just the actual outcome.
So, just like your friend that usually makes every single 3 can sometime miss one, it can sometimes be warm in the winter, or cold in the summer. The climate describes the state of the earth as a system, but not one single day or place. There are a lot of talks about climate change these days, and when they say that they mean that the overall state of the world is changing, but it may not affect you in the same way.