Climatology vs Meteorology

This is a common tactic among climate change-denying hack media outlets: they'll interview a meteorologist (never a climatologist) as an "expert" who does not believe in climate change. Their argument, unsurprisingly enough, is always based on meteorology (never climatology) and generally amounts to this: "we can't predict the weather next month, so how can we predict climate next century?"

Well, the answer is obvious: because "weather" and "climate" are different. Weather involves atmospheric conditions at small time intervals over small spaces, while climate involves mean atmospheric conditions over larger intervals of space and time. So for example, we don't know what the weather will be like in Scotland next fall.  We also don't know what the weather will be like in Chad. No meteorologist will claim to predict what the temperature and humidity will be on any given autumn day next year at these two locations.

However, a climatologist can be reasonably certain that next autumn, Chad will be hotter and drier than Scotland. This is because, while we can't predict the weather of either place, we have a fairly good understanding of the climate of each place. It's the same with global climate and time: we can predict the climate in 100 years a lot more easily than we can predict the weather in 1 year.

It should be a red flag to anyone when a news organization bring forward an "expert" in a field different than the one being discussed, whether it's a meteorologist discussing climatology, a politician discussing women's medicine, a priest discussing psychology and human sexuality, etc. If climate change really is a hoax, then surely the climatologists of the world would largely share that opinion, right?

BONUS ASIDE: The PDO that he was talking about? Climatologists account for that in their predictions. But even if they hadn't, then Pacific Decadal Oscillation still wouldn't be a likely culprit. If this really were nothing more than PDO, then long-term temperatures would be following an oscillating pattern centered around a consistent long-term average. That long-term average itself would not show an increasing trend through time, as it does. Also, it wouldn't be a global trend, since PDO is a North Pacific phenomenon.