What goes up, must come down. Global warming edition.

I saw this article today about California having record heat AND cold in the same day. Believe it, it is an effect of global warming.

Global warming is an odd thing.

It is calculated on an average temperature. 

For the entire planet.

But it does work as a valid indicator of the current state of thermal affairs, even better than sticking a thermometer in your mouth as an indicator of your body temperature. That's because over the last 4 1/2 billion years, the Earth has settled into a sort of heat balance. Insulated by the vacuum of space, heat in to our atmosphere comes from the Sun and internal radioactive sources and heat out is radiative transfer of infrared into space. 

But into that balance is a bunch of things including the increase of heat from the entropy of human activity around the world. And that heat energy is feeding into the abovementioned heat balance. If you view the current heat balance like a swing in the park, imagine what happens when you push it, pump more energy into it? Yah, it's average height (read "temperature") goes higher. But it also has more energy too, swinging back and forth, up and down, harder than ever before

That's why just focusing on the average temperature, although a good measure, doesn't touch on these changes which we all experience, an increase in the frequency or occurrence of climate events with increasing severity.(ref)

People are confused when they read about sudden changes to extreme cold or sudden severe rainy seasons, they wonder aloud "What happened to global warming?"  But, in fact, these downs are just the other end of the swing ups of extremely high temperatures and droughts.

It's a system in balance and it's being perturbed. What we can do about it and what will be the result is yet to be determined. But we will see the swings continue to climb up. And down.