(NEW YORK) — When the weather turns cold, meteorologists and climate scientists almost always get a variation of the same question, “If we had global warming, I don’t think I’d have a jacket on.”
That’s because climate and weather are two terms that go hand in hand but are not the same thing.
ABC News Chief Meteorologist and Chief Climate Correspondent Managing Editor of the ABC News Climate Unit Ginger Zee has heard questions like this for years.
“How can we have sweatshirt weather, or even the first snow, when the whole globe is getting warmer and warmer?”
It’s the same for Marshall Shepherd, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society, who will get questions like, “What are you all talking about — that the climate is changing? It’s snowing right now!”
Weather is the temperature and conditions on one particular day, Zee said — the short-term state of the atmosphere and what it brings.
“If you walk outside and almost every day it’s hot, or almost every day it’s dry, that’s called climate,” Zee said.
People also often refer to climate as “average weather,” which is another misnomer, Shepherd said.
“That’s actually not correct,” he said. “Climate is really more the full statistics of weather, not just average. It’s the highs and lows. It’s frequency. It’s max and min. It’s a lot of things.”
The seasons are governed by the Earth’s tilted axis and its path of orbit around the sun, Shepherd said. The tilted axis means there are times when some parts of the planet are getting less energy from the sun — the main distinction between summer and winter.
Just because the climate is warming overall doesn’t mean there won’t be big swings in either direction, including cold fronts and snow storms in typically warm places or drought conditions in typically wet places and torrential downpours in normally dry climates, the experts said.
“As the globe warms, we are going to have cold and, of course, snow,” Zee said. “Because if that all abruptly stopped, it would be really scary.”
Scientists love their metaphors, especially when it comes to comparing the two terms.
Weather is your mood, and climate is your personality, according to Shepherd and Zee.
Weather and climate can be looked at as the dog and the dog walker, Yarrow Axford, a professor in geological sciences at Northwestern University, told ABC News. The dog can sniff around and tug at its leash, but the dog walker is the one setting the pace and direction.
But that old adage often no longer applies because the climate is changing so quickly, Axford said.
On a long-term scale, the number of overall cold events is declining. The likelihood of extremely cold days has decreased due to human-caused global warming, a 2016 paper published in The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine authored by Shepherd found. The same paper also found an increase in the number of extremely hot days.
The lack of cold events could cause people to pay more attention when they happen, the experts said.
Geography also makes a difference, Zee said. When scientists say the climate is warming, they mean for the entire planet — not in a particular city, state or county, Zee said.
“The point is that climate — all weather days all over the world — on average, is getting warmer,” Zee said.
Shepherd continued, “We’ve got to really expand the average person’s understanding of what climate actually is.”
ABC News’ Dan Manzo contributed to this report.
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