What Even Is Climate?

Abstract

Although the concept of climate is easy to understand, there is not any uncontroversial definition of it. Most definitions fall back to the simple formulation that `climate is the statistics of weather'. Recent attempts at a definition called versions of this saying vague. Climate is policy-relevant, and discussions on climate and climate change benefit from clarity on the topic. Beyond the policy relevance a definition should also be valid for scientific purposes and for individual views. It has to account for a general concept and individual instances of climate. Here, I try to highlight why the flexibility and the immediacy of the colloquial definition fit the topic. This defence shifts the lack of a clear definition towards the term `weather' and the time-scales separating weather and climate.