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Glossary of Terms

Weather
Weather is the smaller, short-term scale of daily atmospheric changes – a rainstorm, winds, etc. Weather changes every day, and weather patterns shift from year to year. Weather is different from climate. While weather patterns are variable, climate defines the limit of those variations. Climate is longer term, and describes a region’s average weather over the period of a long time.

For the most part, climate is supposed to remain fairly stable. For example, in the standard climate of the northern Atlantic Ocean, hurricanes do not typically travel far up the upper east coast of the United States; the polar caps are not supposed to melt greatly during even the summers; and most of the Midwest is generally favorable to growing corn, soybeans, and wheat.
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“We have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change… no longer than a decade at most.”
- James Hansen, NASA climate researcher
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