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Wikipedia: Climate The climate is the weather averaged over a long period of time. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) glossary definition is:
Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the "average weather", or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.
Climate versus weather
In the most succinct words, weather is the combination of events in the atmosphere and climate is the overall accumulated weather in a certain location.
The exact boundaries of what is climate and what is weather are not well defined and depend on the application. For example, in some senses an individual El Niño event could be considered climate; in others, as weather.
When the original conception of climate as a long-term average came to be considered, perhaps towards the end of the 19th century, the idea of climate change was not current, and a 30 year average seemed reasonable (but see note 1). Given the current availability of long-term trends in the temperature record, it is harder to give a precise noncontradictory definition of climate: over a 30 year period, averages may shift; over a shorter period, the statistics are less stable.
Source: wikipedia
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