the.com/climate
the planet's mood, decided by chemistry you can't argue with
means The long-term pattern of weather conditions in a place — averaged temperature, rainfall, wind, and the rest — over decades rather than days.
from From Greek 'klima,' meaning a slope or inclination — specifically the supposed tilt of the Earth toward the sun. Ancient geographers divided the world into 'klimata,' bands of latitude they believed shared the same slant of sunlight and therefore the same warmth. It traveled through Latin 'clima' into Old French and English, where the idea of a sun-angled zone gradually softened into the broader sense of a region's weather, and finally into the modern science of long-term conditions.
- slow giant
- Oceans absorb over 90% of trapped heat
- frozen archive
- Ice cores hold air bubbles 800,000 years old
- tipping points
- Some changes flip fast and stay flipped
- CO2 record
- Levels now highest in millions of years
- weather's boss
- Weather is mood, climate is personality
holocene climate optimum — period of peak warmth 9,000-5,000 years ago when global temperatures were 0.5°c warmer than pre-industrial baseline
younger dryas impact — sudden 1,200-year cold snap 12,800 years ago in northern hemisphere, possibly triggered by comet or asteroid collision
little ice age — cooling period 1300-1850 that froze rivers in europe and caused widespread crop failures across the northern hemisphere
pliocene warm period — 3.3-3 million years ago when co2 was 400 ppm and sea levels were 25 meters higher than today