Climate and Weather, the ongoing conversation
Weather has been described as a continuous conversation with climate.
Each day, every day all over the planet weather and climate are constantly in discussions.
Climate is what we expect to occur based on years of data collected from weather stations around the globe. These are often referred to as normals or averages. We expect January to be cold and snowy across Southwestern Pennsylvania and July to be warm and sunny.
Weather is what we get in spite of what the averages tell us to expect. On any given day across our region temperatures can be plus or minus 20 degrees from our expected averages. On those few days when we experience extreme weather our temperatures can be 40 degrees higher or lower than the expected average.
January in Uniontown has an average low temperature of 20 degrees and a high of 40 degrees. A mild January day can see a temperature of 60 and a cold January morning can be in the teens. The extremes are a low of 22 degrees below zero and a high near 80. The extremes are rare but they do occur and when they occur with any frequency climate scientist蘑菇视频 start to worry.
Today many of our weather scientists are worried about new patterns of day-to-day weather bringing about significant changes in these averages. In our area fall seems to be arriving later, so too with winter, and winters seem milder even though the past two weeks might have some dispute this. Even with a changing climate we will still experience cold snaps and snowstorms. Weather is not going away it is just changing its arrival, length of stay and intensity.
Across the planet, these changes in weather are upending long term averages. The pictures tell so well the story: the fires, the storms, the hurricanes, the floods and, of course, the melting glaciers and rising seas.
Some still deny, a few still call it a hoax. A recent article in the 蘑菇视频 by columnist Cal Thomas approached our changing climate from a different perspective; calling into mind the idea of our planet not being in such dire straits as the world蘑菇视频 climate scientists seem to be pushing the warmer agenda. The source was a website called the climate depot and when I checked it out the first thing at the top of the page was how to donate to the site.
A lot of the articles and the message was the opposite to what we are coming to accept as factual that Mother Earth is warming and a warmer planet is producing more energy in our atmosphere and thus more fuel for more storms and more intense storms.
One of the authors cited on the website is Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish statistician, author and political scientist. I remember reading his book 鈥淐ool It鈥� published in 2007 that made a case for global cooling. In the decades from the 40s thru the early 70s the earth was going through a cooling phase believed to be caused by the same CO2 that is at play in our atmosphere today. Only then it was limiting the amount of sunlight where today it蘑菇视频 the same gas but it is now the Greenhouse Effect causing the warming by trapping the heat.
Daily we see articles and scholarly journals reporting on the climate issue. Extreme weather events in 2021 cost the United States 688 lives and 145 billion dollars according to NOAA. We had 20 separate billion dollar weather events. All of which are now part of the discussion between weather and the climate making for new averages and what we can expect as the new normal weather.