For me, climate is the totality of temperature, humidity, winds … and the relationship between them, both locally and globally across the planet. That’s why I find it strange when (even scientists) talk about global warming when I would rather be talking about climate change.
Answer
Yes! This is a very fair comment where you are more than right.
The term global warming does not come out of thin air, of course, but it certainly does not encompass the entire process. Because there are more greenhouse gases, the greenhouse effect is enhanced, which in short means that more energy remains locked up in the atmosphere due to human action. The most direct consequence of an increase in energy is an increase in temperature, as energy is always ultimately dissipated as heat. The climate is of course a far too complex system that is full of positive and negative feedbacks, so that such a simple comparison does not work.
Basically it means that more energy will create a more unstable system with a sharp increase in variability. When you combine the average temperature of all past decades, you can get a distribution curve where you see that most years are around the average and the further away you go from the average, the fewer years there are that have this average temperature. This applies in both the warmer and the colder direction.
Now with climate change, this distribution curve changes. The average will indeed be higher, which is why climatic warming is still often used, but there will be far fewer years that are effectively on the average and many more years that are further from the average. This means that there will be more extremely warm years, but also extremely cold years. Of course, this new curve cannot be predicted perfectly, but it is even possible that, despite the so-called global warming, an extremely cold year in the coming century will still be colder than an extremely cold year in the past century.
Apart from the temperature, there is indeed much more that will change, for example the amount of precipitation, again there will be more periods with extremely high precipitation, but also extremely little precipitation.
Now in recent years you mainly hear climate change / climate change in scientific circles and that is indeed a much more correct term.
And it explains much better why climate change is still happening even after we’ve had an extremely cold winter or something like that.
Answered by
ir. Michiel Hubeau
Ecophysiology, more specifically the water and sugar transport through plants and trees and the effect of climate change.
http://www.ugent.be
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