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500 million years of climate change Ice core data for the past 400,000 years, with the present at right. Note length of glacial cycles averages ~100,000 years. Blue curve is temperature, green curve is CO 2, and red curve is windblown glacial dust (loess).
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.
Historical climatology is the study of historical changes in climate and their effect on civilization from the emergence of homininis to the present day. It is concerned with the reconstruction of weather and climate and their effect on historical societies, including a culturally influenced history of science and perception. [ 1 ]
The "Composite Plus Scaling" (CPS) method is widely used for large-scale multiproxy reconstructions of hemispheric or global average temperatures; this is complemented by Climate Field Reconstruction (CFR) methods which show how climate patterns have developed over large spatial areas, making the reconstruction useful for investigating natural ...
Pollack, Huang & Shen 1998 "Climate change record in subsurface temperatures: A global perspective". Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1999 "Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: Inferences, uncertainties, and limitations". Briffa 2000 "Annual climate variability in the Holocene: interpreting the message of ancient trees".
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 ...
500 million years of climate change [7] The Phanerozoic eon, encompassing the last 542 million years and almost the entire time since the origination of complex multi-cellular life, has more generally been a period of fluctuating temperature between ice ages, such as the current age, and "climate optima", similar to what occurred in the ...