Independent (UK): The difference between climate and weather is one of scale. Climate is what happens over decades, centuries and millennia, whereas weather occurs on the human timescale of hours, days and weeks. Climate is what you expect, and weather is what we get, and this is the rub when attributing any single extreme event, such as a flooding or a drought, to global warming. As events in Cumbria have shown, with its record 24-hour rainfall, the weather is full of surprises. This is because it is …