Climate is very different from weather, but many people get mixed up with these two phenomenons. It is crucial that we differentiate between these two terms, especially if we wanted to broaden our knowledge more in Climate Change.
Weather
“It is hot, cold, cloudy, dry, sunny, etc…”, these words refer to weather. So it is the state of the atmosphere. Weather refers to day-to-day temperature and precipitation activity.
Climate
On the other hand, climate is the term for the statistics of atmospheric conditions over longer periods of time. When used without qualification, “weather” is generally understood to mean the weather of Earth.
Climate Change
Climate change, however, is a change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns when that change lasts for an extended period of time (i.e., decades to millions of years).
Climate change may refer to a change in average weather conditions, or in the time variation of weather around longer-term average conditions (i.e., more or fewer extreme weather events).
Grading Climate Journalism
Due to the misleading stories written in many news outlets today, Scientists are now “grading climate journalism”. Scientists want to stop all the misleading information on Climate Change.
The Guardian mentioned that Climate Feedback intends to change that. It brings together a global network of scientists who use a new web-annotation platform to provide feedback on climate change reporting.
Now, it is easier to know whether you can trust an article about Climate or not, especially that Climate Feedback provides a 5 scale rating. Most importantly, it backs up the target article with Scientific studies and research, so that you know whether the information was true or not.
Accurate Information
Climate Feedback mention on their website that accurate information is the foundation of a functioning democracy.
They add: “To be properly informed, citizens need access to journalism of the highest accuracy and the tools to evaluate the credibility of what they read”.
The project, they say, aims to achieve both of these goals by:
1) bringing the expertise of the scientific community into the world of online journalism
2) providing readers with top-level “credibility ratings” for a broad range of online news articles.
