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Factors affecting Earth's climate can be broken down into forcings, feedbacks and internal variations. [14]: 7 Four main lines of evidence support the dominant role of human activities in recent climate change: [17]
Anthropogenic climate change is caused by human activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earth's natural processes. [3] Global warming became the dominant popular term in 1988, but within scientific journals global warming refers to surface temperature increases while climate change includes global warming ...
Climate change can also be used more broadly to include changes to the climate that have happened throughout Earth's history. [32] Global warming—used as early as 1975 [33] —became the more popular term after NASA climate scientist James Hansen used it in his 1988 testimony in the U.S. Senate. [34] Since the 2000s, climate change has ...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had been formed by the United Nations in 1988, [29] [30] and it presents reports summarizing the strength and extent of consensus on climate change and its numerous aspects to the member states of the United Nations, with the major reports released at 5-to-7-year intervals starting from 1990.
The main topics of research are the study of climate variability, mechanisms of climate changes and modern climate change. [2] [3] This topic of study is regarded as part of the atmospheric sciences and a subdivision of physical geography, which is one of the Earth sciences. Climatology includes some aspects of oceanography and biogeochemistry.
From ancient times, people suspected that the climate of a region could change over the course of centuries. For example, Theophrastus, a pupil of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC, told how the draining of marshes had made a particular locality more susceptible to freezing, and speculated that lands became warmer when the clearing of forests exposed them to sunlight.
The five components of the climate system all interact. They are the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere. [1]: 1451 Earth's climate system is a complex system with five interacting components: the atmosphere (air), the hydrosphere (water), the cryosphere (ice and permafrost), the lithosphere (earth's upper rocky layer) and the biosphere (living things).
5.3–2.6: Pliocene climate became cooler and drier, and seasonal, similar to modern climates. 2.5 to present: Quaternary glaciation, with permanent ice on the polar regions, many named stages in different parts of the world