Climate
Climate is the long-term average pattern of weather in a region, typically measured over 30 years, including temperature, precipitation, and seasonal variation.
Definition
Climate is the usual weather a place experiences over many years, conventionally averaged over $30$ years, including typical values and extremes of temperature, precipitation, humidity, and wind, and it is shaped by latitude, altitude, distance from the ocean, ocean currents, prevailing winds, and mountain barriers. It reflects the long-term state of the coupled atmosphere-ocean-land-ice system, set by the global energy balance of incoming sunlight, planetary albedo near $0.3$, and greenhouse forcing, and redistributed by atmospheric circulation cells and ocean currents; internal variability such as El Nino and the North Atlantic Oscillation adds year-to-decade fluctuations on top of that, while Milankovitch orbital cycles pace the much slower glacial cycles over tens of thousands of years.
Example
Charlotte has a humid subtropical climate with warm, sticky summers and mild winters, while a desert city like Phoenix has a dry climate with very little rain, and North Carolina spans three climate zones from the humid Piedmont and Coastal Plain to the cooler, wetter mountains, where Mount Mitchell averages more than $10^\circ C$ colder than Charlotte. El Nino winters tend to be wetter and cooler across the southern United States including North Carolina, while La Nina winters run drier and warmer, because the shifted Pacific warm pool relocates the subtropical jet stream.
Key Insight
Climate is what you pack for a trip, while weather is what you actually get when you arrive, and two places at the same latitude, such as Seattle and Minneapolis near $47^\circ$ north, can have very different climates depending on how close they sit to a moderating ocean. Climate also carries memory that weather lacks, since the ocean takes decades to centuries to fully respond to a change in forcing, meaning today's climate still reflects past emissions and today's emissions commit the future to warming that has not yet appeared.