"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." -- Mark Twain
Weather reporters, especially on television, too often confuse "average" with what "should" be. They generate great enthusiasm when the daily temperature is 5 degrees above average, and show a lament when it's 5 degrees below "what it should be."
Reality check: Average is a calculation based on a range. If the temperature on any given day were always the same, there would be no average. Rather, it would be a constant. And in the real world temperature is never constant.
Another definition: Weather and climate are not the same thing. Weather is a daily aspect of what the atmosphere is like, and it changes with seasons. Climate is what conditions are like over a yearly time frame or longer.
At this season -- this time of year, December in North America -- snow and cold weather is common in the Northern United States and Canada., but almost never in South Florida and islands of the Caribbean at any time of year. That's climate.
Those who are climate change deniers point to cold and snowy weather in December as evidence or "proof" that climate change doesn't exist.
Weather changes daily and with the seasons. Over a very long time frame, climates can and do change. Proof of this is the disappearance of glaciers over a period of 50 years or more, as shown in photographs taken from satellites or even by tourists with hand-held cameras.
The issue is not whether the world's climate is changing, but how much people contribute to it.
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