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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). Scale: Millions of years before present, earlier dates approximate.
This differs from paleoclimatology which encompasses climate change over the entire history of Earth. These historical impacts of climate change can improve human life and cause societies to flourish, or can be instrumental in civilization's societal collapse. The study seeks to define periods in human history where temperature or precipitation ...
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.
Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press. pp. 383–464. ISBN 978-1-107-05799-9. Archived (PDF) from the original on 6 December 2017.
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 ...
An illustration of ice age Earth at its glacial maximum. A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet. [6] Additionally, the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (such as water vapor and methane) are high, and sea surface temperatures (SSTs) range from 28 °C (82.4 °F) in the tropics to 0 °C (32 °F) in the polar regions. [7]
The time from roughly 15,000 to 5,000 BCE was a time of transition, and swift and extensive environmental change, as the planet was moving from an Ice age, towards an interstadial (warm period). Sea levels rose dramatically (and are continuing to do so ), land that was depressed by glaciers began lifting up again , forests and deserts expanded ...
The influence of the East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM) did not extend as far into the interior of East Asia as it does today, causing a much drier climate to occur in the Chinese Loess Plateau relative to the present day. [14] In the Nihewan Basin, a stable and warm climate predominated from 3.58 Ma to 3.31 Ma. From 3.31 Ma to 3.10 Ma, the ...