When trying to understand climate change, the most important thing is to understand what climate is. Despite how simple this may seem, differentiating climate from weather can sometimes be a difficult problem. 

     However, this online article sums up this problem pretty well: "The difference between weather and climate is that weather consists of the short-term (minutes to months) changes in the atmosphere" (NASA, 2005). 

     What does this mean? Weather is all about the short term conditions, while climate talks about long-trends. 

"Today is cloudy," or "the next few days will be sunny" are examples of weather statements.

"In Canada, winters are cold" is a statements about Canada's climate. It is a generalized statements developed from long-term tracking of Canada's winter temperatures. 

When we talk about climate change, we're not talking about things like "It didn't snow this week because of global warming". We instead are talking about how human factors are influencing the long-term patterns in the Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere.