How to Find Common Ground In the Bitter Climate Debate by : Yale Environment 360
...one day, one month, even a whole season’s worth of weather doesn’t really tell us anything in the bigger picture. It’s just weather, it’s natural variability, it’s the chaos of the atmosphere. So that’s kind of the standard answer to the question — that climate is defined as the average of weather over 30 years or more.
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The third thing I like to tell people is that we do have projections about what the average conditions will be in the future, and so what we can say is that this summer is a picture of what it would be like every summer if we made certain choices regarding our energy sources, and if we reach certain
levels of climate change. So for example this summer we’ve already had 43 days over 100 degrees in Lubbock, which is higher than normal. And if you look in the future this summer is what we’d expect the average summer to be like by the end of the century under lower emissions or by the middle of the century under higher emissions. So we’re complaining about this summer, but this could be the average summer within our lifetimes if we continue to depend on fossil fuels.
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Hayhoe: What we’ve actually seen, at least in West Texas, is an increase primarily in winter temperatures. Our very cold days are getting less frequent and our winter temperatures are increasing in nearly every station we look at across Texas and Oklahoma. We haven’t seen a significant trend yet in our summers.
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