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I received the above poster for the holidays this year. Imagine if we all aspired to these ideals...

Weather versus Climate: What's the Difference?

(image via NASA)

Somehow in the chaos of the climate debate, skeptics and supporters alike have misunderstood the fundamental distinction of what is actually happening to our planet. If you are one of the many people unclear about the difference between weather and climate then this post is for you.

To illustrate the confusion (or willful misdirection of public discourse), please watch the clip from Fox & Friends below:

One sentence in particular should have jumped out at you. At second 32 co-host Steve Doocy quips, "Yeah that global warming thing is really kicking into high gear, isn't it?" after reporting freezing temperatures across the United States last week. Some (achem, Jon Stewart) are quick to jump at the hosts of Fox and Friends for the way they misinterpret and dumb down issues to push a conservative agenda, but I think this example may speak to a deeper lack of understanding that extends beyond the boundaries of liberal and conservative media wars.

Have you ever wondered about the integrity of the climate debate when you hear reports of a record snowfalls or sub-zero temperatures? Have you ever asked yourself how the climate can be changing and the globe can be warming if it still gets really really cold?

Let's set the record straight...

The essential difference between weather and climate is a matter of scope and timing. Simply put, according to excerpts from an elementary school primer included in this recent UN Dispatch article, weather is "the conditions in the atmosphere in a certain place during a certain time. Weather is always changing." Climate, on the other hand, is "what the weather is generally like over long periods of time, such as years or decades in a particular area. A place that has little rainfall has a dry climate, and a place that has high temperatures has a hot climate."

To further highlight the distinction between weather and climate consider the following quote from How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic, written by blogger Colby Beck and vetted by the climatologists at Real Climate. In his series, Beck outlines the many climate change denial arguments and offers responses to each one. Read his response to a weather-versus-climate oriented objection below:

Objection:

Scientists can't even predict the weather next week, so why should we believe what some climate model tells us about 100 years from now?

Answer:

Climate and weather are really very different things and the level of predictability is comparably different.

Climate is defined as weather averaged over a period of time, generally around 30 years. This averaging over time removes the random and unpredictable behaviour of weather. Think of it as the difference between trying to predict the height of the fifth wave from now that will come splashing up the beach versus predicting the height of tomorrow's high tide. The former is clearly quite a challenge, as your salty, wet sneakers will bear witness to, but the latter is routine and reliable.

This by no means says that it is necessarily easy to predict climate changes, but clearly seizing on the weather man's one week failure to cast doubt on a climate model's 100 year projection is an argument of ignorance.

Now that we've clearly established the meanings of weather and climate it is important to note that, as this Met Office article points out, although some regions have experienced lower-than-normal temperatures recently, it is not cooling everywhere. From Met Office: "North-east America, Canada, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and south-west Asia have all seen temperatures above normal - in many places by more than 5 °C, and in parts of northern Canada, by more than 10 °C." See the map below for the global temperature trends above and below the regional averages:


As it turns out, not only was Steve Doocy substituting weather patterns for climate trends, but even if we do use his logic, parts of the earth were warming during the same period. So the next time you hear your local weatherman remark, "It's going to be another cold one out there today folks!" don't make the same mistake Doocy did. Even if our days are colder (albeit in winter) and snowfalls are higher, the climate is still changing.

Trees For Rent!

If anyone else is looking to lower their carbon footprint this (well at this point, next) holiday season then The Living Christmas Company may spark your interest. Instead of cutting down a tree and discarding it after a two or three week stay in your living room, the guys at Living Christmas Co. will deliver a potted tree of the desired size and species to your doorstep and come back to collect it at the end of the holiday season.

According to this New York Times article, company founder and landscape architect Scott Martin was unnerved by the sight of abandoned trees lying about after Christmas in his hometown of Los Angeles. Now he and his coworkers (mostly laid-off architect friends) don Santa hats, elf ears, and reindeer antlers and deliver trees all across LA. In only two years of operation, The Living Christmas Company has increased its inventory from a handful of trial customers last year to over 400 this season, and they had hoped to finish with around 500.

The carbon savings from this service are pretty obvious: instead of uprooting carbon-sequestering trees, Martin and his colleagues allow them to keep growing, continuing their life cycle (somewhere William McDonough is cheering). In fact, families who become attached to their trees are allowed to label them and welcome them back to their homes the following year.

Don't live in LA and don't have a tree rental service in your area? No problem. Try doing what my family did last year: we bought a small 3 or 4 foot potted tree and planted it in our backyard after the holiday.

What could be a better way to honor the spirit of Christmas than by celebrating nature instead of taking a little piece of it?

Have We No Shame?

The UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was rocked earlier today by a document known as the "Danish text." The document, apparently drafted by the so-called "circle of commitment" (including the UK, the US, and Denmark) centralizes climate power among rich countries and strips the UN of authority in future climate negotiations. Read the full text here.

John Vidal describes what is at stake in this Guardian article:

The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto Protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.

Developing nations were understandably outraged by not only the implications of this measure but also the secretive fashion in which it was drafted. And in case you are wondering how passionate these countries are about fair and equitable treatment, African nations staged a walkout earlier this year at a climate conference in Barcelona citing a lack of emissions commitments from developed nations.

For me the Danish text is particularly alarming (not to mention damaging to the image and success of the conference in general), because it is such a bold departure from the collaborative essence I believed these talks to value and promote. There is too much riding on this conference to allow these blatant and ill-founded digressions to occur. The mentality embodied in this text is a direct threat to the political and environmental stability of our world. It remains to be seen how this will effect the negotiations moving forward, but if this selfishness and short-sightedness exhibited in this document is not checked at the door during the next week and a half of the climate negotiations, we are all in a hell of a lot of trouble...

Hacked CRU Emails: Smoking Gun or a Shot in the Dark?

Computer Code, via The Matrix

In case you haven't heard by now, a week ago the world's leading institutions of climate research, the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK, was infiltrated by computer hackers.

Soon information from the hacked emails leaked its way onto the internet (first on The Air Vent, a blog devoted to climate skepticism) and ignited the blogosphere. Since then climate skeptics have had a field day, using certain information from the hacked correspondence between premier climate scientists as proof that climate change is an international conspiracy. This incident may have finally unleashed the tension that has been building for months as the UN Climate Change Conference approaches (it begins a week from today, on December 7th in Copenhagen, Denmark).

Opponents to climate legislation have pointed to a few key phrases and to support their claims of climate conspiracy. Juliet Eilperin identified contentious content in this Washington Post article:

In one e-mail from 1999, the center's [CRU] director, Phil Jones, alludes to one of [Michael E.] Mann's articles in the journal Nature and writes, "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

The words "trick" and "hide the decline" are particularly troublesome. But Andrew Revkin of the New York Times reports further:

Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, confirmed in an interview that the e-mail message was real. He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often used the word “trick” to refer to a good way to solve a problem, “and not something secret.”

The folks over at RealClimate, a blog produced by climate scientists and perhaps one of the most interesting and professional climate blogs out there, also responded to the CRU hack (excerpts below, but I highly recommend you read the full post):

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

Despite these explanations, it is easy to see why these comments have sparked controversy, especially for those who have been hunting for cracks in the climate edifice for years...


At a time when Climate Skeptic in Chief, Senator James Inhofe (R - OK), dubbed 2009 "The Year of the Skeptic" because of Congress's inability to pass comprehensive climate legislation and the subsequent decline in the expectation for what can be realistically achieved in Copenhagen next week (This is a separate issue entirely, profiled here), the CRU hack comes as another blow to the climate movement. Watch Inhofe's personal message to Senator Barbara Boxer (D - CA) below (Inhofe is the senior Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Boxer the senior Democrat):

Inhofe has since called for an investigation into what he calls a manipulation of climate research, saying, "The stakes in this controversy are significant, as it appears that the basis of federal programs, pending E.P.A. rulemakings, and cap-and-trade legislation was contrived and fabricated."

Finally, in this eloquent and provocative article, Mark Lynas of The Guardian explains why this incident represents a "dangerous shift in climate denial strategy" and his colleague George Marshall describes how public trust in scientists as unbiased and objective communicators has been tarnished.

Oh, and just how heated has the discussion gotten? Watch actor-environmentalist Ed Begley Jr. spar with Fox News host Stuart Varney:

Michael Pollan's Secret Remedy

In the video above, Michael Pollan makes the connection between the energy crisis, health care reform, and climate change (although he presents them as separate issues, I would argue that energy and climate can be considered two symptoms of the same problem). What is the thread that ties these issues - some of the most significant challenges of our time - together? The answer is deceptively simple: Food.

Pollan, author of the award-winning book The Omnivore's Dilemma, has made quite a name for himself investigating the complexities, hypocrisy, and corruption of the corporate food system in the United States (Click here for David Kamp's brilliant synopsis of the book from the New York Times Book Review). As the way we produce food in this country becomes more industrialized, Pollan writes, the distance our meal travels from farm to dinner plate becomes longer and more convoluted. And when we lose sight of where our food comes from, we also lose sight of the value of what we use to fuel our bodies (leading to cultural, nutritional, and environmental problems).

In light of this basic explanation of Pollan's work, I pose the following questions: Is it possible to kill three birds with one stone? Is it possible to solve the energy crisis, alleviate the burden on our health care system, and mitigate the effects of climate change by reforming the way we produce, distribute, and consume food in this country?

Complexity is No Excuse for Complacency

We've screwed up. Big time. If this Guardian article is correct, and US lawmakers have really given up hope of going to Copenhagen ready to commit to strict, binding climate change legislation, we've made a very grave mistake.

According to the article, Todd Stern, the State Department's Special Envoy for Climate Change, said, "It doesn't look like [a treaty is] on the cards for December." He offered instead that negotiators were intent on producing a blueprint in Copenhagen that would lead to a binding legal agreement "perhaps next year or as soon as possible."

I'm sorry Mr. Stern, but that is simply not good enough.

US participation at Copenhagen is the keystone of the success of the climate treaty - without bold US support, negotiations will surely fall apart. As is the case in most international negotiations, world leaders look to the United States to set the precedent for action (see how countries compare on their climate positions here). As troubling as this reality may be, it makes perfect sense. Why should other nations commit to emissions standards when the richest country, which also happens to be the world's second-largest producer of greenhouse gasses, refuses to? And as we have already witnessed during the preliminary climate meetings in Barcelona last week, leaders of developing nations are prepared to oppose any negotiations in which developed countries do not promote strict emissions standards.

Given the current US attitude, whatever comes out of Copenhagen this December will at best become another Kyoto Protocol: an international climate treaty (December 1997) that the US refused to ratify and it was thus rendered largely ineffective. Below is the map of countries who ratified the Kyoto treaty (green) and the only one who didn't (red):


To put it bluntly (from the Guardian):

The US shift resets expectations for what will be accomplished at Copenhagen, once billed by the UN as a last chance to avoid catastrophic global warming.

We're the game changers. We're the movers and the shakers. We're the country all other countries look to for guidance and direction, and through our indecision and delay we've let down the international community (not to mention slapped all of these people in the face).

Speaking in Barcelona, Artur Runge-Metzger, the European Commission's chief negotiator, said: "It is a Catch-22 situation. People are waiting for each other so it is difficult to blame anyone. [But] the US position is significant. Clearly the US has been slowing things down." It's as if world leaders are all standing around looking at one another to take the first, definitive step forward. Not only has the US demonstrated an unwillingness to step forward: we've taken a step back.

For Connie Hedegaard, Denmark's Minister for Climate and Energy and COP15 President, failure is not an option:

“If the whole world comes to Copenhagen and leaves without making the needed political agreement, then I think it’s a failure that is not just about climate. Then it’s the whole global democratic system not being able to deliver results in one of the defining challenges of our century. And that is and should not be a possibility. It’s not an option."

She eloquently and accurately frames what is at stake in the video below:



Senator John Kerry (D-MA) said the reduced role for Copenhagen could work out to the world's advantage by giving America, China, and the international community more time to co-ordinate their efforts. But as Hedegaard says, complexity is no excuse for complacency. Just because climate change is a terrifyingly complicated issue, that doesn't mean it's okay to postpone negotiations. In some ways the damage has already been done - we may very well have sacrificed a unique opportunity to form a global pact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by failing to work on this issue domestically in the past year. Of course it is possible for other countries to pick up the banner and propose tough emissions standards in December, but without US support the treaty will fail to mark considerable progress.