What am I ignoring?
Q.What types of phenomena do climate scientists study, and how do you go about studying those phenomena?
A. * Climate scientists study long-term trends in average meteorological conditions and changes in these averaged conditions from season to season, year to year, decade to decade. They do not generally engage in forecasting or prediction of actual events (e.g., tomorrow’s temperature or precipitation) but rather average conditions (e.g., daily maximum and minimum temperature to be expected on a July day of any year). They do engage in projecting future scenarios of climate, as opposed to forecasting actual future conditions. For example they might project a future climate scenario (say the decade of the 2040s) that had an average daily maximum temperature for September that was 3.5°F higher than the current average daily maximum for September. But they would not predict the sequence of daily maximum temperatures for that decade. The phenomena studied by climate scientists include average conditions of all meteorological variables, such as the change in average conditions of precipitation, temperature, humidity, pressure, wind, and cloudiness, or average occurrences of events such as droughts, floods, heat waves, and storms. Both climatologists and climate scientists study climate change, but the climate scientist would use numerical models to further seek answers to questions such as what variables are changing, how much are they changing, why are they changing, and what are the consequences of these changes.
