In classrooms across the world, students learn that weather is what’s happening at a particular moment, while climate is the long-term pattern. 

And yet, climate is more than long-term weather. That means that researchers who build mathematical models of Earth’s climate have to account for many variables that meteorologists can safely ignore. For example, a slight change in global cloud cover makes relatively little difference to next week’s weather forecast, but such a change could fundamentally alter the climate 30 years in the future. Due to the chaotic nature of the climate system, small differences can cause radically different futures…

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