World Meteorological Organization Quotes

climate is not the weather—a distinction often missing in popular discussion. The weather anywhere varies constantly in ways both predictable and unexpected—through the day (it’s usually warmer at 4 pm than it is at 4 am), across days (as when a front passes through), with the seasons, and from year to year. On the other hand, a location’s climate is the average of its weather over decades. In fact, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization defines climate as a thirty-year average, although climate researchers will sometimes discuss averages over a period as short as ten years. So changes in the weather from one year to another do not constitute changes in climate.

The disaster also has a social etiology, which no meteorological study, medical autopsy, or epidemiological report can uncover. The human dimensions of the catastrophe remain unexplored. This book is organized around a social autopsy of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Just as the medical autopsy opens the body to determine the proximate physiological causes of mortality, this inquiry aims to examine the social organs of the city and identify the conditions that contributed to the deaths of so many Chicago residents that July. If the idea of conducting a social autopsy sounds peculiar, this is largely because modern political and medical institutions have attained monopolistic roles in officially explaining, defining, and classifying life and death, in establishing the terms and categories that structure the way we see and do not see the world.

In addition to starting the ball rolling on an international convention, the Villach and Toronto conferences had another major upshot, this one quite unintended. Many governments, including that of the United States, did not like the scientific community taking the reins on policy entrepreneurship. Thus, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body established in 1988 under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, was created (with US backing) for governments to assess anthropogenic climate change based on the latest science. Note the word Intergovernmental.