Many people are suggesting that the current long spell of very cold weather in the UK means that global warming has ended.
This ill-informed thinking highlights how much confusion there is about: :
The difference between weather and climate.
Weather is caused by disturbances within the atmosphere, but climate is controlled by external influences, such as the distribution of oceans and continents, the extent of ice and snow-cover, variations in the amount of energy from the sun, and changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
Climate is the underlying average, or if the climate is changing it is the underlying trend, whereas weather is the noise in the system.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/Just_5_Questions_Weather-vs-climate20100628.html
The effects of a changing climate is the reason why the UK is experiencing a prolonged period of “noisy” cold weather at the moment . This is the result of changes to the extent of ice at the poles which in turn is seriously shifting the air currents that circulate around our planet. Looking higher into the atmosphere is increasingly being used to predict our weather patterns.
Thu, Mar 28, 2013
Climate Change, UK Climate Change, American Climate Change