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