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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.
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).
It is developed in phases to foster the climate model improvements but also to support national and international assessments of climate change. A related project is the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) for global coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation models (GCMs).
The three types of kinematic change are variations in Earth's eccentricity, changes in the tilt angle of Earth's axis of rotation, and precession of Earth's axis. Combined, these produce Milankovitch cycles which affect climate and are notable for their correlation to glacial and interglacial periods , [ 57 ] their correlation with the advance ...
The model predicts an Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity of 1.9 °C, at the lower end of the range of GCM predictions. The model's surface temperature distribution is overly-symmetric, and does not represent the northern bias in location of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. The model generally shows lower skill at low latitudes.
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 ...
Some models can reproduce the 100,000-year cycles as a result of non-linear interactions between small changes in the Earth's orbit and internal oscillations of the climate system. [ 29 ] [ 30 ] In particular, the mechanism of the stochastic resonance was originally proposed in order to describe this interaction.
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.