Is Global Warming a Myth? Not to Neil deGrasse Tyson Zeeshan Aleem - Policy.Mic
go to original January 27, 2015

Neil deGrasse Tyson breaks down the differences between weather and climate change. (National Geographic)

The idea that the world teeters on the brink of catastrophe due to man-made global warming should be a matter of consensus, but it's not. And one of the most frequent and brutish talking points that fuels climate-change denial is the idea that extreme snowstorms shouldn't be happening if the world is growing hotter.

That misconception is based on a major confusion over the difference between the weather and the climate, one that astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson dismantled with one strikingly elegant analogy about walking a dog.

"Weather is what the atmosphere does in the short term, hour to hour, day to day," Tyson says. "Weather is chaotic, which means that even a microscopic disturbance can lead to large-scale changes. That's why those 10-day weather forecasts are useless."

"Climate is the long-term average of the weather over a number of years," he says. "It's shaped by global forces that alter the energy balance in the atmosphere, such as changes in the sun, tilt of the Earth's axis, the amount of sunlight the Earth reflects back to space and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the air. A change in any of them affects the climate in ways that are broadly predictable."

Tyson likens the distinction to the way that dog moves while being walked by a man. The dog's next steps are highly unpredictable, but the range of its wandering is predictable. The key to figuring out its long-term trajectory is to "keep your eye on the man, not the dog."

Read the rest at Policy.Mic

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!