THAT’S WEATHER, NOT CLIMATE
This week, authorities have given us things like:
“July 2023 is set to be the hottest month ever recorded in human history.”
“July isn't even over and it's projected to be the hottest month humanity has ever experienced.”
“The North Atlantic just reached its highest temperature in recorded history just two days after the Mediterranean Sea reached its highest temperature in recorded history.”
I love this. These folks consistently tell us how passionate they are about precision and language and truth. And these aren’t just people using the most sophisticated instruments ever developed and employing elaborate calculations based on those instruments’ outputs to derive exact numbers, to the hundredths of a degree, and doing so all across planet earth. No. These are also the folks concerning themselves with educating the world about what is said to be one of the most significant periods in the history of our species and the planet and how their exact and critical science speaks to that.
And we’ve been hearing correspondences between scientists and lay persons on these themes for decades now, with these same experts consistently rectifying lay misconceptions and errors of scale. They highlight the distinctions between weather and climate, for example. But experts, spokespersons, reporters, and climate activists alike seem happy using phrases like “recorded history” and “human history” and "the [worst/highest/biggest/fastest] [heat/rainfall/melt/flood] humanity has ever experienced". How, I would so love to know, is that different than misusing the label climate to describe what is most certainly weather?
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