Weather and Climate

There is a phrase which irritates me. ‘Weather is not climate.’ Of course, this is factually true and if someone is using that to clarify the scientific point, that would be one thing. But, it’s most often used in a dismissive sense, i.e. “Weather is not the same thing as climate, wake the fuck up, sheeple.” As if to say ‘Yeah, we’ve had a few years in a row of record heat spells, continent destroying wildfires, snow and ice melting in places snow and ice shouldn’t melt, hurricanes, floods and stuff like that but that’s just weather.”
The weather is to the climate what a raindrop is to the rain, a microcosm to the macrocosm. The weather is screwy, therefore there is something not right with the climate, just as a fever or vomiting indicates an illness. One year is an anomaly. Two years could be a coincidence. When you’re up to three years or more, and we are, it’s a pattern, a pattern in the weather that is signaling to us loud and clear that there is something seriously wrong with the climate.
If the human race does go extinct because we spewed too much carbon into the air (which would be the macrocosmic equivalent of some guy accidentally going to sleep in his car in a hermetically sealed garage, with the motor running) it will be because people took the phrase “Weather is not climate” a bit too literally.