4. Sharayah McDonald- Reading Response 2

 When I was completing last week's reading, pages 100-126, there was a section in particular that stood out to me. This was the section that differentiated weather and climate, which I feel get mixed up a lot. Weather is driven by the sun's energy and the planet's rotation, and is atmospheric changes that occur below 30,000 feet. Water in the atmosphere transports heat from the sun, and on the way produces weather. By contrast, repetitive patterns of weather over decades and centuries is climate. Climate is a product of 2 factors: long term patterns in circulation of atmosphere and oceans, and topography (the slow changing shape of the land surface). Because of this, climate patterns depend on geography. 

The reason why this stood out to me is I feel like this distinction is very important, yet few people understand it and are apt to discredit climate change because of this. Climates do change, as the book says, and they have changed in the past causing many life forms to go extinct. However, the ice ages that punctuate cycles of geological time come and go over tens of thousands of years. The speed that humans are changing the planet does not match the speed of change of natural organisms. Life-forms change, but natural selection takes place over many generations. Humans have drastically altered the planet over the past 150 years, or since the Industrial Revolution. The natural world cannot react fast enough to avoid major damage, so to fix it we must rely on human institutions, which are selfish as well. 

I have seen firsthand how people mix up the definitions of climate and weather to claim that climate change is not real. "If climate change is real, why is it snowing today?". Former President Donald Trump has used this argument many times during speeches and on Twitter. In one of his more famous tweets in 2019, he wrote, "Be careful and try staying in your house. Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn't be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!" In another Tweet from 2018, he wrote, "Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS- Whatever happened to Global Warming?" In this situation, Trump is clearly confusing weather and climate, and is doing so to discredit environmental scientists and global warming. Weather has the potential to become climate, but over a very long period of time. Climate change scientists must observe global trends and changes from hundreds of years in time, not simply a snow storm that was affecting one part of the world during one year. 


https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-01-21-trump-alludes-to-winter-storm-to-mock-climate-change 

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