Sunday, February 21, 2010

Obama on Warm Weather in Vancouver

The global warming skeptics have made a great deal out of the big snowstorm that socked the east coast recently, as if winter snow in the northern hemisphere is somehow unusual. Last week, I once again tried to explain that weather and climate are not the same, and pointed out that it has been unseasonably warm in Vancouver.
As Think Progress reports, Barack Obama also noticed that it's warm in Vancouver:
I want to just be clear that the science of climate change doesn’t mean that every place is getting warmer. It means the planet as a whole is getting warmer. But what it may mean is, for example, Vancouver which supposed to be getting snow during the Olympics, suddenly is at 55 degrees and Dallas suddenly is getting seven inches of snow.
Once again, weather and climate are not the same. Weather is what’s happening in a specific place at a specific time and changes moment by moment, sometimes dramatically. Climate encompasses the entire planet and changes slowly and incrementally.
The earth is a big object. It takes a lot of energy to change the earth's overall temperature, even by a couple of degrees.

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