Climate vs Weather - Background Information

April 2012: Article from CNN explaining how March 2012 was the warmest March on record:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/09/us/weather-record-warm-march/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

And a few notes from Ellen:

A key part of the article is this:

“March 2012 will go down as the warmest March in the United States since record-keeping began in 1895, NOAA said Monday.

In addition, the three-month period of January, February and March was the warmest first quarter ever recorded in the Lower 48 states. The average was 42 degrees Fahrenheit, a whopping 6 degrees above the long-term average.A staggering 15,292 warm temperature records were broken, (7,755 record highs and 7,517 record high overnight lows), according to Chris Vaccaro, spokesperson for NOAA. "That's tremendously excessive. The scope and the scale of warmth was really unprecedented, Vaccaro said.”

Also note that they close the article with the following statement:

"Short-term weather patterns such as the one that affected the United States are poor indicators of global climate trends, however. Parts of the world, most notably Eastern Europe, experienced below-average to extreme cold temperatures this winter."

The point – why I am sharing this with you all – is that it is through GLOBAL AVERAGES OVER TIME (i.e. not regional behavior) that we will see the impact of climate change.  We will see shifts in climate patterns and intensifications of trends (wet gets wetter, cold gets colder, etc.).  Some local areas will get warmer, others will get colder (such as Eastern Europe), but this is consistent with what we expect to see in climate change (as opposed to the more confusing term, global warming).