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Climate variability can also result from external forcing, when events outside of the climate system's components produce changes within the system. Examples include changes in solar output and volcanism. Climate variability has consequences for sea level changes, plant life, and mass extinctions; it also affects human societies.
Radiative forcing (or climate forcing [2]) is a concept used to quantify a change to the balance of energy flowing through a planetary atmosphere. Various factors contribute to this change in energy balance, such as concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and changes in surface albedo and solar irradiance.
Natural forces cause some variability, but the 20-year average shows the progressive influence of human activity. [2] Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth’s climate system.
Over the years, the definitions of climate variability and the related term climate change have shifted. While the term climate change now implies change that is both long-term and of human causation, in the 1960s the word climate change was used for what we now describe as climate variability, that is, climatic inconsistencies and anomalies. [28]
[28] [42] Lockwood and Fröhlich, 2007, found "considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth's pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century", but that "over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth ...
The climate system will show internal variability both in the presence and absence of forcings imposed on it. This internal variability is a result of complex interactions between components of the climate system, such as the coupling between the atmosphere and ocean. [16] An example of internal variability is the El Niño–Southern Oscillation.
According to a 2003 study in Climate Research, the total tornado hazards resulting in injury, death, or economic loss "shows a steady decline since the 1980s." The authors reported that tornado "deaths and injuries decreased over the past fifty years." They state that additional research must look into regional and temporal variability in the ...
Climate variability and change occurs when changes in Earth's climate system result in new weather patterns that remain in place for an extended period of time. This length of time can be as short as a few decades to as long as millions of years.