Spencer Weart, 2007, “The Discovery of Global Warming”: Chapter: Climatology as a Profession;

http://www.aip.org/history/climate . Available as book: H ARVARD U NIV . P RESS , 2003.

__At the middle of the 20th century the study of climate was a scientific backwater. People who called themselves “climatologists” were mostly drudges who compiled statistics about weather conditions in regions of interest—the average temperatures, extremes of rainfall, and so forth.

__Climatology could hardly be scientific when meteorology itself was more art than science.

__(Aside)…..meteorology was scarcely seen as a field of science at all, let along a science firmly based on physics. Meteorology, one academic practitioner complained to another in 1950, “is still suffering from the trade-school blues.”

H.H. Lamb, Meteorological Office Bracknell, Berkshire (UK), “The New Look of Climatology”, NATURE, Vol. 223, September 20, 1969, pp.1209ff;

Definitions of climate and climatology have varied. That (still widely) definition of climate as “average weather” must surely be regarded as quite inadequate. Climate comprises the totality of weather experienced at a given place. As long ago as 1845, Alexander von Humboldt defined climatology as a division of meteorology taken in its broadest meaning as the physics of the atmosphere and the causes and relationships of atmospheric phenomena.

Mary Ann Smythe, 1990, interviewing John Steele, Andrew Solow, Peter Brewer (Wood Hole Oceanographic Institute); “The Oceans’ Role Could Be Decisive”, in: Ceres/The FAO Review, No.25, Vol. 22, Sept/Oct 1990, p.22-26

__Oceans act as flywheel to weather and climate.

__The top few feet of the ocean hold as much heat as the entire atmosphere.

It is the oceans’ timescale that is going to determine whether climate change will be a rapid or a slow process.

Spencer Weart, 2007, “The Discovery of Global Warming”: Chapter: Climatology as a Profession;

http://www.aip.org/history/climate . Available as book: H ARVARD U NIV . P RESS , 2003.

__ Typical was the situation at the U.S. Weather Bureau, where an advisory group reported in 1953 that climatology was “exclusively a data collection and tabulation business.” Not much money or administrative attention was committed to such work, nor were the intellectual prospects enticing.

__Still, scientists regarded the field (as one practitioner complained) as “the dullest branch of meteorology.”

__ Attempts to make physical models of the simplest regular features of the planet’s atmosphere (for example, the trade winds) failed……(T)his failure was hardly surprising, since meteorologists did not have an accurate picture of what they were trying to explain.

Spencer Weart, 2007, “The Discovery of Global Warming”: Chapter: Climatology as a Profession;

http://www.aip.org/history/climate . Available as book: H ARVARD U NIV . P RESS , 2003.

Meteorology itself had always been divided. The climatologists who gathered weather statistics and analyzed them were intellectually remote from the theorists, who worked up mathematical models based on physical principles rather than observations. Both often looked down on practical forecasters, who in turn had little faith in the professors’ abstractions. Among all three types of meteorologist, very few worked on questions of long-term climate change.

Klaus Hasselmann, 1990, “Ocean Circulation and Climate Change”, Paper presented at Bolin – 65 Symposium, Friiberghs, Herrgard, 20-23 May, 1990, to be published in Tellus. (SSN 0937-1060), p. 1-37 (3).

In the time-scale range from a few weeks to thousand years, the dynamics of climate is strongly controlled by the oceans.

B.R.Stanton, 1991, “Ocean Circulation and Ocean-Atmosphere Exchanges”, Climate Change, Vol. 18: p.175-194

__The atmosphere and ocean must be considered as one system when studying long-term climate change.

The upper 3m of water has the same heat capacity as the whole of the atmosphere. Hence the heat required to raise the temperature of the atmosphere by 1ºC can be obtained from cooling the upper 3m of water by the same amount.

Victor Conrad, 1946, Methods in Climatology, Harvard University Press, (Introduction)

__Climatography describes the climate, climatology explains it. Climatography prepares the raw material supplied by observation; it is the foundation of climatology. This seems a vicious circle, because it is hardly possible to make a climatography without a knowledge of climatology.

__Climate may be explained: Climate is the average state of the atmosphere above a certain place or region of the earth’s surface, related to a certain epoch and considering the average and extreme variations to which the atmospheric state is subject.

__It is therefore the principle and fundamental aim of climatological methods to make the climatological series comparable.

E.T. Stringer, 1972, Foundation of Climatology, San Francisco, (Indtroduction)

__Weather is an everyday experience; climate is an abstract concept.

__Meteorology and climatology should not be defined a completely separate fields, since they are both interested in the same phenomena.

__Climatology thus does not belong wholly within the fields of either meteorology or geography. It is a science –really an applied science – whose methods are strictly meteorological, but whose aims and results are geographical.

A.S. Monin, 1986, An Introduction to the Theory of Climate, Dordrecht

A statistical ensemble of states of the atmosphere-ocean-land system during a time period several decades long is called climate.