What does climate change mean?

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Climate change is not always dealt with accurately. This can lead us to confuse extreme weather events with climate change. Climate change is not only anything you can read about in scientific or specialised literature, since now you can hear about it in the street. In addition, apart from talking about what the weather is like, you can hear people speaking about the new data confirming the climate change while having a drink.

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But do we really know what we are talking about or do we only repeat what we have heard? Obviously, we accept the information we obtain from different sources without wondering whether it is true or not. This leads us to making many mistakes.

You only have to listen to the news on the radio or on TV in order to realize that many terms are not used accurately. An example is the use of the terms ‘weather’ and ‘climate’. We are used to listening to expressions like “Such event could not take place due to adverse climate conditions”. Whereas the term “weather” refers to the state of the atmosphere at any given time, the term “climate” refers to all the weather states which have taken place in a region over a long or short period of time.

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Concerning the media, you can notice that the news regarding weather is usually dealt with in a catastrophic or alarmist tone. Any meteorological event, such as intense snowfalls, strong rainfalls or extreme heat waves, is immediately attributable to a man-made weather change. But you cannot forget that some natural causes can influence on climate variations.

Most scientists agree that in the last few years the global temperature in our planet is increasing. Although we can agree or not on the human beings' degree of involvement in this process, the scientific community is sure about it. In this way, we will have to change our actions that have been damaging the environment for a long time, and find out new ways of sustainable development for the life on our planet.