Dr. Tim Ball on: „Generalization, Specialization and Climatology”. Does it mean he explains what climate is?

Actually Tim Ball does not say what climate is, he only refers to climatology and climate science. Is that sufficient to understand, respectively enshrines a definition for the term “climate”. In a recent post at WUWT (29:June2015) that is what he said:

Climatology is the study of weather patterns of a place or region, or the change of weather patterns over time. Climate science is the study of one component piece of climatology. The analogy I’ve used for decades is that climatology is a puzzle of thousands of pieces; climate science is one piece of the puzzle. A practical approach to assembling the puzzle is to classify pieces into groups.
The problem is obvious, what is a “weather pattern”? Tim Ball is silent on it. Is it meaningless? That depends, for laymen not, because it is what they experience every day, for academic work it is utterly nonsense. Why?

  • Weather is the state of the atmosphere. Weather, seen from an anthropological perspective, is something all humans in the world constantly experience through their senses, at least while being outside. There are socially and scientifically constructed understandings of what weather is, what makes it change, the effect it has on humans in different situations, etc. Therefore, weather is something people often communicate about. (wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather)

  • Pattern is something that happens in a regular and repeated way. (merriam-webster dictionary)

Indeed, also weather – as a state of the atmosphere- is a laymen term people often communicate about. That is a very different sphere form scientific research and clear and correct scientific communication. Recently Tim Ball mentioned (25. Feb. 2014 – HERE) that Theophrastus (around 300 BC), a student of Aristotle’s, wrote a book setting out the first rules for weather forecasting recording over 200 empirical indicator. .Although Tim Ball admitted that “we haven’t come very far since. Indeed, I would argue we have regressed“, he use a climate terminology, which is similar superficial as used by main stream weather science.


WUWT (29:June2015): http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/28/generalization-specialization-and-climatology/
Tim Ball  (25. Feb.2014):http://drtimball.com/2014/government-weather-and-climate-forecasts-are-failures/

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