12: Global Climate and Climate Change
- Page ID
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Introduction
In the past few chapters, we have examined multiple weather phenomena, including their causes, characteristics, and effects. The weather is the instantaneous state of the atmosphere around us, as depicted in Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\). It consists of short-term variations, occurring over minutes to days, in variables such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, air pressure, cloudiness, radiation, wind, and visibility. Due to the chaotic, short-term nature of weather, its predictability is limited to days.
Although the weather can be unpredictable, the climate is more predictable. The weather on a particular winter day in San Jose may be colder than on the same day in Lake Tahoe, but, on average, Tahoe’s winter climate is significantly colder than San Jose’s. Climate, then, is the long-term average of weather. A good climate is why we choose to vacation in Hawaii in February, even though the weather is not guaranteed to be ideal every day.
Climate can be thought of as the average weather that varies slowly over decades or centuries. It includes statistics, such as the probabilities or frequencies of extreme weather events. For climate, the states of the atmosphere, ocean, ice, land surface, and biosphere are important. Climate is potentially predictable for extended time periods if the forcing is known, because the principle of energy conservation controls Earth’s average temperature. In short: ‘Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.’
Thus, weather and climate are related, but they differ in the time scales of changes and their predictability. In this chapter, we'll explore the factors that shape a region's climate and the various climates found worldwide. We'll also analyze factors that may be affecting our climate and how climate change impacts our future.
- Explain the controlling factors of global climate.
- Describe the various global climates and biomes classified using the Köppen Classification System.
- Analyze Earth’s climatic past and how scientists measure and collect climate data.
- Describe the causes of short-term and long-term climate change.
- 12.1: Regional Climates
- This page covers the factors influencing climate using the acronym LACEMOPS, detailing elements like latitude, air masses, and ocean currents that shape climate zones and biomes, including tropical moist climates and various vegetation types. It categorizes different climate zones, such as semi-arid deserts, moist subtropical, Dry Summer Subtropical, Humid Continental, and Polar climates, highlighting their distinct characteristics in temperature, precipitation, and adaptations of vegetation.
- 12.2: Proxies
- Measurements with modern instruments (the instrumental record) are available only for roughly the past century. This is insufficient to describe the full natural variability of the climate system, which makes attribution of observed changes difficult. We want to know if the changes observed in the recent past are unusual compared to pre-industrial climate variability. If they are it is more likely that they are anthropogenic, if not they could well be natural.
- 12.3: Past Climate Changes
- Weather and climate are related but they differ in the time scales of changes and their predictability. Weather is the instantaneous state of the atmosphere around us. Temperature, precipitation, humidity, air pressure, cloudiness, radiation, wind, and visibility vary from day to day and over weeks and months. Weather predictability is limited to days. Climate is the statistics of weather over a longer period. It can be thought of as the average weather that varies slowly over periods of mont
- 12.4: Causes of Climate Change
- Weather and climate are related but they differ in the time scales of changes and their predictability. Weather is the instantaneous state of the atmosphere around us. Temperature, precipitation, humidity, air pressure, cloudiness, radiation, wind, and visibility vary from day to day and over weeks and months. Weather predictability is limited to days. Climate is the statistics of weather over a longer period. It can be thought of as the average weather that varies slowly over periods of mont
- 12.5: Recent Climate Change
- Although Earth’s climate is currently changing rapidly relative to past changes, in most regions where we live changes are slow enough that we do not notice them directly during our daily lives. In this chapter we will discuss some observations from the past 100 years and data from regions that are particularly sensitive to climate change, where the most dramatic effects have occurred.
- 12.6: Solutions
- Climate change is a difficult problem to solve because our modern society was build with fossil fuel burning as an energy source. We still depend strongly on fossil fuel energy for everything from driving our cars and washing our laundry to charging our cell phones and heating our homes. In order to stabilize climate, however, we’ll need to move to near-zero carbon emissions in the long run. Thus, the challenge is to decarbonize our economy.
- 12.7: Exercises
- Some exercises to review the topics covered in this chapter.
Thumbnail: Higher latitudes are warming faster than the tropics. Change in Average Temperature in Fahrenheit by NASA is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0