Climate is not weather. Climate is the statistical average of weather in a given region over an extended period of time, usually, by convention, 30 years of data is used to construct a climate report for a given locale. That means every year the climate for a region is determined by dropping the statistics from 31 years ago and adding the most recent year’s stats.
A standard climate report usually includes 30-year averages of temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, plus prevailing winds, precipitation – rain, snow – and atmospheric particle count, such as suspended dust, salt and pollution. However, the average temperature and average precipitation are the two most important elements in a region’s climate report used to decide if you want to move to San Diego’s mild sunny climate that varies little during the year, or Chicago’s four-season wet and cold springs, hot and humid summers, mild autumns and sometimes brutal windy cold winters. The image left is the 30-year average of temperatures across the United States, constructed by taking the average temperature every day for 365 days. That is then added to the twenty-nine previous average yearly temperatures in order to build the temperature climate for a given area.
As mentioned, climate deniers often use the conflation of weather with climate to mislead people, or take the climate data from a single station in a vast timeline, cherry-picking an anomalous cooler year over a 30-year period as proof that the climate is not changing or sea levels are not rising. They willfully ignore the 30-year pattern, which by convention is the climate. It would be like telling a straight-A student who gets a C- in French Literature that they’re not a very good student.
An example is the chart from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA to the right which graphs the average global land and ocean surface temperatures from 1880 through 2015. The middle horizontal line 0 is the average global temperature since the end of the last Ice Age. In another blog I'll explain how ancient temperature timelines are reconstructed since the thermometer was only invented a few hundred years ago. Since 1980 there has been a steady picket-fence rise in global temperature. A climate denier might cherry pick a cooler year, such as 2001-02, or 2011 as "false" proof that global temperatures are not rising. The key is to not only look at the 30-year average but to observe the pattern. Another example of climate deniers misusing data occurred in 2010 when an uncommon mergence of a South Pacific Ocean El Niño-La Niña pattern produced exceptional rainfall over Australia, so much so that sea levels worldwide actually dropped that year. Imagine that? So much rain fail on Australia sea levels dropped! Some climate deniers used that anomalous drop as evidence sea levels are not rising. Once the dust cleared, or I should say the rain cleared and the Australian burden of water flowed back out to sea, global sea levels returned to their rising 30-year trajectory. Why do sea levels rise? The polar ice caps are melting's shown in the image left, a comparison from 1984 and 2016.
Why are the polar ice caps melting? Global temperatures are rising. Why are global temperatures rising? Carbon dioxide CO2 greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are rising. Why are carbon dioxide greenhouse gases rising? Industrial and auto emissions. The point is, year-to-year weather can follow a picket fence pattern, some years might be cooler such as in the mid-1990s and again in the early part of this century, but the overall incline for global temperature, atmospheric carbon dioxide and sea levels over the past 30 years have been ticking up.
As an aside, El Niño or “little boy” is a periodic Pacific Ocean warming every two to seven years usually around December along the eastern South Pacific accompanied with much precipitation as well as warmer temperatures even in northern latitudes, mostly caused by a change in the prevailing South Pacific trade winds west-to-east. Since it commonly occurs in December the Spanish named it “little boy” after the Christ child. La Niña or “little girl” is a periodic Pacific Ocean cooling that might follow an El Niño or might not, caused by South Pacific trade winds reversing direction east-to-west, cooling the ocean temperature. The Spanish named it “little girl” apparently for no other reason than the name was the opposite “little boy”. Either way, extracting data from a single year in order to advance a false claim is disingenuous; it is a suspension of critical faculties in order to deceive.
In the next blog we'll review such things as what drives local weather, and in turn local climate besides the most important driver: the Sun.
John Bershof, MD
John Bershof, MD is a plastic surgeon who has been in private practice for over 25 years. He is the author of numerous medical articles as well as the first textbook of medicine for mobile phones, entitled skynetMD 2005-2015. An essay entitled Gin & Tonics, Clerics, and Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?, which was extracted from one of his future as yet published books was featured in The Antioch Review.
While working on the medical textbook skynetMD for mobile phones, Dr. Bershof, perhaps not too surprisingly became more interested in the backstories of medical history, like who was Lou Gehrig, what is Lou Gehrig's disease, what was his lifetime batting average for the New York Yankees—.340, nineteenth overall—and who invented baseball anyway. Questions such as these piqued Bershof's interest. Having read At Home 2010 by Bill Bryson, his engrossing narrative journeys room-by-room through his Victorian English countryside home, a former rectory, where each room is a chapter about domesticity, about home. It occurred to Dr. Bershof that in similar vein he could take the reader disease-by-disease as jumping off points into human history, science, medicine—his canvas blank, no subject not within reach—and learn a little medicine along the journey.
The ability of a book that is heavily fortified with science and history to connect with a general readership can be challenging; Dr. Bershof through storytelling, humor, jumping off points and personal anecdotes, accomplishes it, written in a language fleeced of the jargon that normally accompanies such narratives. The first two books, The First History of Man published in 2020 and The Second History of Man published in 2021 are available in print, ebook and audio. The Third History of Man is in final stages of editing to be published in 2022, with more volumes to come after that.