People defend ‘climate’ as you uses it for 2000 years

Weather and climate are everyday slang words and misleading when used by science. During the last half Century the world has a big problem. Science abuse terms, laymen used since time immemorial: weather and climate. The accusation is that they use the term without properly defining it for their academic work. This creates confusion and prevents adequately responding to the trend of global warming.

In the lay sphere the terms weather is closer connected to every person than his shirt and that for 24 hours and every day throughout his life. Alexander von Humboldt (1769 –1859), the great German naturalist and geographer went even further and defined climate The Intellectuals in those days seemed to have lived closer to nature as climatologists nowadays.

There are probably few people who can explain how the climate affects their organs, but they presumably would agree, describing the aspect as follows:

Climate is the imaginary idea of an individual person, from a possible state of the atmosphere, at one place or in one region, about one short or longer period of time from own experience or narrative of others or e.g. out Guidebooks.
This means: More than 5 billion adults are living on Earth. Everyone has their own view of climate and describes it as it corresponds to his own ideas, for the moment or the given circumstances.

The earliest notions of climate were linked with latitude and astronomy. A. v. Humboldt’s analysis was close to ancient thinking. Antecedents of the concept of climate can be found in Greece by Hippocratic writers, focusing on seasonal change, influencing the occurrence of disease. The Weather and climate are everyday slang words and misleading when used by science. During the last half Century the world has a big problem. Science abuse terms, laymen used since time immemorial: weather and climate. The accusation is that they use the term without properly defining it for their academic work. This creates confusion and prevents adequately responding to the trend of global warming.

In the lay sphere the terms weather is closer connected to every person than his shirt and that for 24 hours and every day throughout his life. Alexander von Humboldt (1769 –1859), the great German naturalist and geographer went even further and defined climate The Intellectuals in those days seemed to have lived closer to nature as climatologists nowadays.

There are probably few people who can explain how the climate affects their organs, but they presumably would agree, describing the aspect as follows:

Climate is the imaginary idea of an individual person, from a possible state of the atmosphere, at one place or in one region, about one short or longer period of time from own experience or narrative of others or e.g. out Guidebooks.
This means: More than 5 billion adults are living on Earth. Everyone has their own view of climate and describes it as it corresponds to his own ideas, for the moment or the given circumstances.

The earliest notions of climate were linked with latitude and astronomy. A. v. Humboldt’s analysis was close to ancient thinking. Antecedents of the concept of climate can be found in Greece by Hippocratic writers, focusing on seasonal change, influencing the occurrence of disease. The Hippocratic treatise “Airs, waters, places” (~400 BC) associates season, prevailing winds, and the quality of the air and water with the physical condition of people’,

During A. v. Humboldt’s lifetime, meteorology was emerging and still at a low level. Now for more than 100 years acknowledged as an academic discipline, they remained incapable to tell what ‘climate’ is, respectively formulate terms, which indicate incompetence, explaining nothing, and are completely useless in scientific research. In the early 20th Century climate was defined as average weather and in the 1930th the thirty-year period from 1901 to 1930 considered as the baseline for measuring climate fluctuations. Several decades later the prominent meteorologist H.H. Lamp regarded the definition of climate as “average weather” quite inadequate, mentioning that until recently climatology was generally regarded as the mere dry-as-dust bookkeeping end of meteorology (FN. 1).

Also the either well-known F. Kenneth Hare wrote in 1979: You hardly heard the word climate professionally in the 1940s. It was a layman’s word. Climatologists were the halt and the lame (FN. 2).

It is naive not to realize that if you define climate as average weather, you have to say clearly what weather is. Weather has to be defined first. Meteorology has always ignored this point or — meanwhile — making nebulous statements about it.

See the next essay discussing the relation between weather & climate.

Footnote 1): H.H. Lamb, “The New Look of Climatology”, NATURE, Vol. 223, September 20, 1969, pp.1209ff;

Footnote 2): F. Kenneth Hare, 1979; „The Vaulting of Intellectual Barriers: The Madison Thrust in Climatology“, Bulletin American Meteorological Society, Vol. 60, 1979, p. 1171 – “Airs, waters, places” (~400 BC) associates season, prevailing winds, and the quality of the air and water with the physical condition of people’,