A Note on “Weather and Climate” and “Global Warming and Climate Change”: Their Mutual Interactions

Abstract

Earth’s climate is dynamic, and it is always changing through the natural cycles. What we are experiencing now is part of this system only. Furthermore, general circulation patterns over different parts of the globe are part of this. They are highly region-specific systems. We discussed the differences between weather and climate, global warming and climate change, and their mutual interactions. Furthermore, we discussed some clarifications on these two parameters. In fact, the World Meteorological Organization, an intergovernmental panel on climate change, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change presented definitions for the word “climate change”. However, these institutions rarely adhere to their own definitions. The weather and the climate describe the same thing, the state of the atmosphere, but at different time scales. The weather is what you experience. The climate is the average of the weather patterns in a location over a longer period of time, usually 30 years or more. Climate change refers to long-term patterns of temperature and rainfall that are quite different from averages, namely the climate. Global warming is a component of climate change in terms of the trend in temperature. The rainfall has no trend but presents natural cyclic variation that varies from region to region and country to country, but the global average has no meaning. In the case of Indian temperature data, minimum temperature presented a linearly increasing pattern due to the urban heat island effect, while maximum temperature presented depression during 1931–1960. This is associated with the 60-year rainfall cycle, wherein 1931-1960 is above the average rainfall part of the cycle, which is a wet period. The temperature pattern followed in opposition to the rainfall. In the case of temperature, Australia’s sea surface temperature and surface air temperatures presented a 120-year cycle. The surface air temperature presented a trend of 0.63°C for 1951–2100. 50% of it is global warming, which is given as 0.313°C, which is less than the global average annual temperature trend part of global warming (0.45/0.40°C), and thus the Northern Hemisphere value is higher than the global value. The sea surface temperature hasn’t presented a trend and thus shows zero global warming.