Your views
The Open University want to know what you think about energy efficiency and renewable energy in the home. Do your bit by contributing to their climate change at home survey. Your ideas might even win you a prize!
About our expert
Sylvia is a climate scientist, with a degree in Natural Sciences and a PhD in Meteorology, and is co-author of the Open University short course Weather and Climate Modelling.
Related programme
This article uses flash animations to illustrate ideas. You'll need the free flash player to view these . If you're on a modem connection they may take a little time to load, please be patient.
We like to talk about the weather, to complain about its variability and to blame the weather forecasters for getting it wrong. But what is 'climate', and how does the weather we experience on a day-to-day basis relate to climate change, a subject which is increasingly dominating our newspapers and television screens? Why is it that we can't make a perfect weather forecast? And how can we hope to predict the climate of the 21st century, when we can't say what the weather will be doing in a week's time?
To start with, what affects the climate of the Earth? Why has the temperature of the Earth stayed approximately the same over very long periods of time, without varying by hundreds of degrees?
The temperature of the Earth can be represented by the level of water in a bucket which has a hole in the bottom and water flowing in from a tap at the top...
Click on the arrow to find out how it works.
The amount of water flowing out of the hole in the bucket is determined by the depth of water in the bucket - the higher the water level, the more water is forced out of the hole, so if you open the tap, the water level rises until the amount of water leaving the bucket is again equal to the amount coming in from the tap.
But how does this relate to the climate?
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