What does a weatherman know about the climate?  This question is posed all the time as an argument by leftist climate activists against any meteorologist who would dare to oppose the “consensus” narrative that humans are causing long-term, disastrous global climate change.

But the argument demonstrates the lack of understanding many have with respect to the discipline of atmospheric science.

Those trained in the math- and physics- based atmospheric sciences (this frequently excludes broadcast weather personalities) are typically qualified to provide insight in the modern field of meteorology and climatology.  After all, climate and weather are two aspects of the same continuum.  As Mark Twain supposedly quipped, “Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.”

The activist’s claim is apparently that a practitioner with decades of experience in the pertinent quantitative and qualitative aspects of the atmospheric science profession, such as observation, modeling, analysis, and forecasting, is somehow unqualified to intelligently challenge, or even simply question, the venerated claims by those who assert catastrophic climatic conditions decades into the future.

Some of the same claimants have also pushed the idea that the supposed expertise in knowing the far-off climate is somehow a qualification to interpret changes in up-close conditions, such as teasing out the human contribution to “extreme” weather that occurs regularly.

But does expertise in prognosticating the yonder climate qualify the prognosticator as a reliable interpreter of the current weather?  The activist’s argument can be thrown right back at them: What does a climate scientist know about the weather?

Both of the questions–what does a weatherman know about the climate; and, what does a climate scientist know about the weather?– are absurd, since climate and weather are obviously interrelated.

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