There is a difference between weather and climate. Weather is what you see when you look out of the window; climate is the pattern that remains when day-to-day variations are set aside and the long-term average is considered. Weather is about events; climate is about trends. Climate is what we expect to see; weather is what we actually get.
The Met Office's revised predictions on medium-term climate change released this week have been seized upon by sceptics who insist that man-made global warming caused by excess CO2 in the atmosphere is an invention of over-zealous environmentalists. Global warming is "at a standstill", headlines have crowed, and the danger posed by greenhouse gases is more seriously questioned than ever. If only it were so simple.
What the Met Office's latest computer model actually says is that the global temperature may rise at a fractionally shallower rate over the coming five years than had been predicted. But we can still expect more above-average warmth than the world has experienced in the previous 50 years. Climate change is, then, no less of a grim reality than it was and there is no reason to conclude that it has "stalled".
