Growster, does that bus float and have a sail so it can cross the pond?
Climate as opposed to weather ...
Weather is short term. If you are talking about effects that are seen over anything less than multiple years, that's weather. An odd analogy would be to compare weather to rolling dice. If you roll three sixes in a row, that might not mean anything if you go back to rolling all of the numbers randomly later on. A single cold wet summer may or may not be part of a change in climate.
Climate (and climate change) refers to effects that occur over many years. Long-term effects or trends pushing mostly in one direction, or a cluster of effects that are linked to a common cause, and occurring persistently over large areas of the globe, that's climate. Roll the dice a hundred times and wind up with fifty of those being sixes, that is a pattern.
I'm a scientist, but not a climatologist. I read a fair amount of climate-related science, and also have observed a lot of climate (and weather) effects over decades. We are losing a tremendous amount of ice from polar regions and from mountain areas that have had snow and ice for millenia. When that melts, the fresh, colder water goes to the oceans, ocean density changes, that changes oceanic currents, including in the Atlantic. Globally, monitoring has identified numerous global hottest-year-on-record in the past few decades. Your cold summer could be just one year, or you could be rolling a string of sixes; are the dice loaded? We are also seeing sea level rise, slowly, world wide. Some small inhabited low-elevation islands are needing to move their populations elsewhere, and coastal areas around the world are seeing worse flooding during storms, and more frequent bad storms. Weather this year, world wide, has seen unprecedented events; bad luck? Or yet another six?
It increasingly appears to me, and many other scientists, that the long term pattern is changing, globally. Yes, my opinion, but informed by a lot of consistent science. Keep your eye on those sixes.
