Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here with a classic episode
Speaker 1: from our archives. In this one, we wanted to really
Speaker 1: clear up the differences between two related but separate concepts,
Speaker 1: weather versus climate. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here. You
Speaker 1: might remember when in Republican Senator James Inhoff of Oklahoma
Speaker 1: set out to refute the quote hysteria over global warming
Speaker 1: by tossing a snowball around inside the US Capital. The
Speaker 1: obvious implication was, how could the climate be changing that
Speaker 1: radically from humans burning fossil fuels and pumping greenhouse gases
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere, since we still have snowfall and chilly
Speaker 1: temperatures on a winter day. But even if you're not
Speaker 1: a U. S. Senator from an oil producing state, you
Speaker 1: might be wondering how it is that scientists can predict
Speaker 1: climate trends over many years but can't predict what the
Speaker 1: weather will be three weeks from today. Reason is that
Speaker 1: weather and climate are two very different things. Basically, whether
Speaker 1: it is what happens today or tomorrow or this week,
Speaker 1: it's the day to day variations. Climate, meanwhile, happens over
Speaker 1: many years. It's the combined long term average of weather events.
Speaker 1: Scientists look at climate in terms of fixed thirty year periods.
Speaker 1: Right now, for example, scientists are comparing the daily temperature
Speaker 1: to the period that started in nine and ended in one.
Speaker 1: They'll shift forward ten years and start comparing temperatures to
Speaker 1: the period between, and so on. Scientists rely on thirty
Speaker 1: year periods because it's an amount of time that's long
Speaker 1: enough to produce meaningful comparisons, but just short enough that
Speaker 1: any changes that occur will be subtle without being imperceptible.
Speaker 1: Twenty years might not show enough change, and fifty years
Speaker 1: might be too drastic. To make sense of those, thirty
Speaker 1: year periods help us put the weather on a particular
Speaker 1: day in the right context. Comparing the temperature on December
Speaker 1: the same day a hundred years ago wouldn't provide that
Speaker 1: much useful information because the climate was too different then,
Speaker 1: but comparing it to the average of the temperature readings
Speaker 1: for every December five between, when the climate conditions were
Speaker 1: pretty much constant, makes it possible to say whether a
Speaker 1: given December five is an unusually cold or warm day.
Speaker 1: We spoke with Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and
Speaker 1: oceanic studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He explained,
Speaker 1: or trying to compare apples to apples when it comes
Speaker 1: to prediction, whether in climate are also very different. Weather forecasting,
Speaker 1: Martin explains, is based upon observation of conditions that are
Speaker 1: already occurring in real time in the atmosphere. Because those
Speaker 1: conditions only exist for a short time. Whether it can
Speaker 1: be reliably forecast only over relatively short periods of ten
Speaker 1: to fourteen days at most, though Martin said that's theoretical,
Speaker 1: My confidence ends at day eight. Envisioning climate, in contrast,
Speaker 1: is much more low resolution. Scientists are trying to project
Speaker 1: what the trend will be over a long period, not
Speaker 1: what the weather will be like on a specific day
Speaker 1: fifty or a hundred years from now. That involves gathering
Speaker 1: and crunching huge amounts of data in powerful computers and
Speaker 1: doing modeling. We also spoke with Jeffrey S. Duke's director
Speaker 1: of the Climate Change Research Center at Purdue University. He said,
Speaker 1: in one sense, climate does not affect weather. It's a
Speaker 1: description of the weather over a long period. You could
Speaker 1: turn that around and say that climate provides you with
Speaker 1: information about how likely you are to get a given
Speaker 1: type of weather at a given time of year. But
Speaker 1: historically the climate has been determined by the weather over
Speaker 1: long periods. He continued. In another sense, though, climate for
Speaker 1: a given location is determined by a bunch of factors,
Speaker 1: such as the latitude and position on the planet, which
Speaker 1: affects how it is influenced by the circulation of the
Speaker 1: atmosphere and oceans, and the daytime heating of continents. Climate
Speaker 1: is also influenced by the composition of the atmosphere, the
Speaker 1: transport of water from soil to air by plants, and
Speaker 1: other factors. On a given day, the sum of all
Speaker 1: these influences determines the weather, but as some of these
Speaker 1: larger scale factors change over time, they will drag the
Speaker 1: weather and the climate along with them. In recent years,
Speaker 1: some of the sharp distinction between weather and climate has
Speaker 1: blurred slightly as scientists have used increasingly sophisticated models and
Speaker 1: accumulated knowledge and an effort to figure out the extent
Speaker 1: to which some specific weather events, say a hurricane, a
Speaker 1: heat wave, or a monster snowstorm, is actually a function
Speaker 1: of climate change driven by humans releasing greenhouse emissions into
Speaker 1: the atmosphere. By running thousands of computer simulations, they can
Speaker 1: conduct what if experiments, seeing how the atmosphere would behave
Speaker 1: if you removed one factor or another. Although such analysis
Speaker 1: is still a work in progress, Martin thinks that eventually
Speaker 1: it will be possible to determine the extent to which
Speaker 1: specific weather events are influenced by climate change. Some of
Speaker 1: that research is already bearing results. The National Oceanic and
Speaker 1: Atmospheric Administration presented a paper in December in which they
Speaker 1: concluded that three extreme weather events in that year's record
Speaker 1: global heat, extreme heat over Asia and unusually warm waters
Speaker 1: in the Bearing Sea would not have been possible without
Speaker 1: human caused climate change. Today's episode is based on the
Speaker 1: article weather in Climate, What's the Difference? On how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com written by Patrick J. Kaiger. Brain Stuff
Speaker 1: is production of Our Heart Radio in partnership with how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Clang.
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