We sometimes think of the climate of certain other parts of the world as being "better" than ours. But the fact is there is no such thing as a "good" climate; there are merely different climates, each with its own individual characteristics.
We judge climate subjectively according to our experience in the past, our personal likes, dislikes and habitual activities, our conditioning, and even according to our inherited genetic makeup.
Moreover, climate can be studied on a wide variety of different scales. When we speak of "climate" as implied by the context of the previous paragraph, we think of the climate of a region or a country. But distinctive climates may exist inside a single building, and are present in the variations in temperature and humidity over a single field of corn.
Meteorologists have words to describe and differentiate these separate categories.
The term microclimate is used in the context of the climate of the atmosphere close to the ground - the zone in which plants and smaller animals live. Anyone leaving the exposed countryside and walking into a forest or into dense woodland on a hot summer's day cannot but be agreeably surprised by the cool shady conditions he or she encounters there.
A forest microclimate of this kind is influenced by the height of the trees, by the amount of coverage provided by the branches, and also depends on whether the trees are deciduous or evergreens; the size, the density and even the texture of the individual leaves are all important.
The yield of a field of crops, or the extent to which insects thrive or die away, is often determined by the microclimatology of their immediate environment. Vegetation of any kind, indeed, creates its own microclimate.
On a somewhat larger scale there is the mesoclimate, the climatic characteristics of an area anything from five to 100 miles in diameter. The meteorological properties of valleys, or of large cities, fall into this category.
And when we look at the kind of weather conditions experienced over a very large region, a country, or even an entire continent, we have wandered into the realm of the macroclimate; we are concerned with the macroclimate when we speak of the "temperate zones " of the world, or of a "Mediterranean" or a "tropical" climate.
The very largest scale of all involves the study of the global climate, where attention nowadays is focused on the possible consequences of man-induced changes to the composition of our atmosphere.