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 M¢25  Funded By Mahalo ? |  June 18, 2009 06:04 PM

Why does it feel like September and its the middle of June??? Does this have anything to do with Global Warming???

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July 28, 2009 07:24 PM | view on twitter
Not necessarily. The temperature right where you are, today, is "weather". What causes concern is the long-term trends, all over the world, called "climate".

In particular, there is concern that the atmosphere is gradually heating up over the course of the next century or so due to increased carbon in the atmosphere. But that change is only a few degrees over the entire globe, much smaller than the difference between summer and winter, or day and night even on the same day. That's because a lot of other factors go into determining the weather on any single day, and why we distinguish "climate" from "weather": where the water is, what latitude you're at, how the winds go, what the terrain looks like, what the weather was like in nearby places yesterday. No two places have exactly the same weather, but the climate allows you to estimate the average.

It's that average that's climbing. Not by much; only a few degrees. But those small changes are magnified by the effects that go into making weather. Plants that are almost killed on the hottest day of the year may die out entirely if the weather changes just a little. Ice sheets may move a few miles or a few hundred miles. In the worst cases, large-scale effects like the Gulf Stream can shift, radically altering the environment for the fish that live there and the northern climates kept warm by it. So paradoxically, some places get colder even as the whole planet gets warmer.

But that doesn't have a noticeable effect on any particular day in any particular place. It could well be unseasonably cool where you are today, because there's so many large, short-term variations. But the small, long-term variations may have bigger effects when accumulated over decades, and you can't tell about them one way or the other by looking only where you are.


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June 18, 2009 07:24 PM
Probably not. Don't confuse weather with climate. Global Warming/Climate Change has to do with average temperatures over the entire globe. Just because the overall average temperature is increasing, it doesn't mean that there won't be *local* fluctuations in weather that give us below average temperatures for a while.

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