Is the recent cold due to weather or climate change? Most of us
consider "climate" to be the long term "weather" or a sort of average
over many years whereas "weather" is the short term pattern.
However, there could be a sudden long term change so that what we see
as weather becomes "climate". Consider that the heat capacity of the
atmosphere is small compared to that of the oceans. In the long
natural warming period from about 1880 till the late 1990s, the ocean
had time to warm up. It took that long due to its large heat capacity
but this long time to heat is often reffered to as "thermal Inertia".
Similarly, it will take a long time to cool down as the suns activity
decreases. However, as the suns activity decreases, the atmosphere
cools rapidly due to its low heat capacity. This cooling is primarily
due to radiation into space
OTOH, warming should not rapidly occurr if the oceans are cooler than
the atmosphere because the atmosphere then loses heat to the oceans by
conduction and convection.
If one looks at the sunspot activity that has been tracked since the
1700s, you see a direct corellation between activity and temps with
low temps in the mid to late 1800s rising until the late 1990s the
same as sunspot activity. We have latelly been seeing historically
low sunspot activity and we also see historically low temps. If this
is a long term solar pattern, one would expect that the cooler temps
actually are the result of "Climate change".