General Article Can we really measure the climate?

Topic Selected: Climate Change
This article is 10 years old. Click here to view the latest articles for this topic.

Average temperatures or temperature ranges are often used as a simple proxy for climate. In combination with some description of rainfall, they encapsulate the essentials: in the Mediterranean it is typically hot and dry in summer and cooler and wetter in winter, and a continental climate is hot and dry in summer and cold with snow in winter, for example. But quantifying climate more precisely is fraught with difficulty.

Records kept over the years give us historical figures to make comparis...

Would you like to see the rest of this article and all the other benefits that Issues Online can provide with?

Sign up now for a no obligation FREE TRIAL and view the entire collection