From Science Matters

 By Ron Clutz

Brian C. Joondeph asks in his American Thinker Article When Did Changing Weather Become Climate Change? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

What’s the difference between weather and climate? Let’s ask the expert class, the governmental National Weather Service.

Weather is defined as the state of the atmosphere at a given time and place, with respect to variables such as temperature, moisture, wind speed and direction, and barometric pressure.

Climate is defined as the expected frequency of specific states of the atmosphere, ocean, and land, including variables such as temperature, salinity, soil moisture, wind speed and direction, and current strength and direction. It encompasses the weather over different periods of time and also relates to mutual interactions between the components of the earth system (e.g., atmospheric composition, volcanic eruptions, changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun, and changes in the energy from the sun itself).

That’s a mouthful, a typical governmental explanation. Simply put, weather is short-term, meaning days or a few weeks, while climate is long-term, meaning years, centuries, or longer. [Comment: I prefer a baseball analogy: Weather is like the batter swinging in the box, and climate is the batting statistics, hits, walks, RBIs etc.]

It’s sunny and unseasonably warm where I am today, but a week ago, it was snowy and unseasonably cold. A climate warrior might label the former as global warming, the latter as global cooling, or the composite as climate change. A rational person would call it weather.

The United Nations (UN) defines climate change,

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Such shifts can be natural, due to changes in the sun’s activity or large volcanic eruptions. But since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

The first sentence is undeniably true. The Great Lakes were once covered by mile-thick ice sheets that disappeared when the glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago. This is not long ago, considering the Earth’s 4.5-billion-year age.

Somehow, the climate cooled and warmed long before any significant human activity existed. And how many additional times did this happen in the past 4.5 billion years?

But the UN believes humans are the “main driver of climate change” since the 1800s, not explaining how climate changed so drastically 10,000 years ago to melt a mile-thick ice sheet during a time of minuscule human activity.

The UN relies on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that reports in a scary fashion,

Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion—such as continued sea level rise—are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.

Is today’s climate “unprecedented”? Do they know the temperatures hundreds of thousands of years ago? They should, as this data is readily available, published in the prestigious journal Science.

Researchers reconstructed global mean surface temperature using data assimilation, integrating geological data with climate model simulations. They discovered that “the Earth’s temperature has varied more dynamically than previously thought.”

Today’s global temperature is low. It was last this cold 300 million years ago. According to the chart, Planet Earth has been cooling for the past 50 million years. Any man-made warming would be helpful now.

Scientists should know better, as should corporate media.
But obviously, they don’t.

I reference a few articles from this year in The Guardian, a two-hundred-year-old British newspaper considered a “newspaper of record in the UK” (along with the London Times), much like The New York Times in America. As a British newspaper, the Guardian has observed climate change firsthand, reporting on it cooling, then warming, then cooling again.

Another record is the recent (in geological terms) history of the Thames River. Between 1309 and 1814, it froze at least 23 times. There was a “frost fair” in 1608 when the river froze for over six weeks.

What caused this freeze? London’s activity in the 1600s was mainly overcrowding, disease, and crime, not air conditioners, internal combustion engines, and backyard grills.

More recently, the river froze over in 1963 and again partially in 2021. This seems to be normal cyclic climate change, far from the “man-made global warming” the UN and IPCC warn about.

The Guardian ran two stories this year without a bit of irony. In February of this year, their headline was “What will Spain look like when it runs out of water? Barcelona is giving us a glimpse.” In October, the new headline was “Spain floods: number killed passes 150 as scientists say climate change ‘most likely explanation’ – as it happened.”

From running out of water to flooding, all within a few months. It’s dry, then it’s wet. It’s cold, then it’s warm. And vice versa. It’s also normal. But The Guardian wants it both ways. It’s all climate change, in their view.

A month ago, the paper wrote, “Spain’s deadly floods and droughts are two faces of the climate crisis coin.” In other words, all forms of weather are climate change.

CNN wants it both ways, too. In December 2023, it ran a headline, “Winter is here, but it’s losing its cool.” One year later, without a bit of irony or introspection, it reversed itself with this headline, “It’s about to get dangerously cold, even for winter.”

Much like racism, when everything is considered racist, then nothing is. The same is true for climate change. Psychologists call this confirmation bias,

People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

It is also hubris to believe that we can predict, much less control, the climate. The IPCC readily admits, “The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore, the long-term prediction of future climate states is impossible.”

Yet Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, John Kerry, and other “climate experts” claim to know exactly how many years it will be until the Earth is uninhabitable.

Speaking of Al Gore, I recommend Joel Gilbert’s new film, “The Climate According to AI Al Gore,” where Joel interviews an AI Gore, debunking Gore’s conviction, expertise, and the entire climate emergency of the left.

To the fearmongering, climate-catastrophizing left, it’s all humans’ fault, and with ever-increasing command-and-control diktats, rules, regulations, and taxes, we can affect forces beyond our comprehension and control.

The climate is indeed changing—it always has and always will. Temperatures will likely rise from their current 500 million-year low regardless of what the so-called experts, activists, or any world government agencies say or do.

In their attempts to regulate and tinker with Mother Nature, they may inadvertently destroy everything they are attempting to save—unless that’s the plan.

Previous Post: Corrupting Climate and Weather

An article at The Spectator raises the question Do alarmists know the difference between weather and climate?  The author Charles Moore may also be a man for all seasons like Sir Thomas More.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

A lot of clever people are putting the ‘green’ into ‘greenbacks’

Until recently, those expressing skepticism about climate change catastrophe have been hauled over the coals (or the renewables equivalent) for not understanding the difference between ‘climate’ and ‘weather’. The lack of global warming at the beginning of the 21st century was not to be taken, chided the warmists, as evidence that climate change was not happening. Weather was the passing phenomenon of each day: climate was the real, deep thing.

Now, however, the alarmists themselves have elided the two concepts, using the Australian bush fires as their cue. As Sir David Attenborough puts it: ‘The moment of crisis has come’. They could be right, of course, but how could they really know? In this sense, President Trump is surely justified in warning, at Davos, against the ‘Prophets of Doom’. Prophecy is a different skill from an exact understanding of the here and now.

Mr Trump might usefully have talked about the Profits of Doom too. If the movement can persuade western society that the climate emergency is upon us, there are enormous sums to be made by people who claim to be able to remedy it. Hence the patter now coming out of companies such as Blackrock, BP or Microsoft, fanned by Mammon’s public intellectuals, such as Mark Carney. A lot of clever people are putting the ‘green’ into ‘greenbacks’. A lot of less clever investors are going to get their fingers burnt.

See Also Stoking Big Climate Business

Footnote:  Case in Point:  Green Fraudsters Plead Guilty

Jeff Carpoff, 49, of Martinez, pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. His wife, Paulette Carpoff, 46, pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States and money laundering. According to court documents, between 2011 and 2018, DC Solar manufactured mobile solar generator units (MSG), solar generators that were mounted on trailers that were promoted as able to provide emergency power to cellphone towers and lighting at sporting events. A significant incentive for investors were generous federal tax credits due to the solar nature of the MSGs.

The conspirators pulled off their scheme by selling solar generators that did not exist to investors, making it appear that solar generators existed in locations that they did not, creating false financial statements, and obtaining false lease contracts, among other efforts to conceal the fraud. In reality, at least half of the approximately 17,000 solar generators claimed to have been manufactured by DC Solar did not exist.

“By all outer appearances this was a legitimate and successful company,” said Kareem Carter, Special Agent in Charge IRS Criminal Investigation. “But in reality it was all just smoke and mirrors — a Ponzi scheme touting tax benefits to the tune of over $900 million. IRS CI is committed to investigating those who take advantage and impact the financial well-being of others for their own personal gain.”

“The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of Inspector General (FDIC-OIG) is pleased to join our law enforcement colleagues in announcing these guilty pleas,” stated Special Agent in Charge Wade Walters for the FDIC OIG San Francisco Regional Office. “The defendants conspired with others to create a fraudulent business venture that duped unsuspecting entities, including banks, to invest approximately $1 billion, which the two later used to support a lavish lifestyle.

Source:  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/01/27/dc-solar-owners-plead-guilty-to-largest-ponzi-scheme-in-eastern-california-history/