Climate is the long-term weather pattern in a region, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorological variables that are commonly measured are temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, and precipitation. In a broader sense, climate is the state of the components of the climate system, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere and the interactions between them. The climate of a location is affected by its latitude, longitude, terrain, altitude, land use and nearby water bodies and their currents.
Jet streams are fast flowing, narrow, meandering air currents in the atmospheres of the Earth, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. On Earth, the main jet streams are located near the altitude of the tropopause and are westerly winds. Jet streams may start, stop, split into two or more parts, combine into one stream, or flow in various directions including opposite to the direction of the remainder of the jet.
Climate variability includes all the variations in the climate that last longer than individual weather events, whereas the term climate change only refers to those variations that persist for a longer period of time, typically decades or more. Climate change may refer to any time in Earth's history, but the term is now commonly used to describe contemporary climate change, often popularly referred to as global warming. Since the Industrial Revolution, the climate has increasingly been affected by human activities.
Transience or transient may refer to:
Robert C. Balling, Jr. is a professor of geography at Arizona State University, and the former director of its Office of Climatology. His research interests include climatology, global climate change, and geographic information systems. Balling has declared himself one of the scientists who oppose the consensus on global warming, arguing in a 2009 book that anthropogenic global warming "is indeed real, but relatively modest", and maintaining that there is a publication bias in the scientific literature.
State of Fear is a 2004 techno-thriller novel by Michael Crichton, his fourteenth under his own name and twenty-fourth overall, in which eco-terrorists plot mass murder to publicize the danger of global warming. Despite being a work of fiction, the book contains many graphs and footnotes, two appendices, and a 20-page bibliography in support of Crichton's beliefs about global warming. Climate scientists, science journalists, environmental groups, and science advocacy organizations have disputed the views presented in the book.
The Second Assessment Report (SAR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 1995, is an assessment of the then available scientific and socio-economic information on climate change. The report was split into four parts: a synthesis to help interpret UNFCCC article 2, The Science of Climate Change, Impacts, Adaptations and Mitigation of Climate Change, Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change. Each of the last three parts was completed by a separate Working Group (WG), and each has a Summary for Policymakers (SPM) that represents a consensus of national representatives.
Apocalypse is a genre of revelatory literature, or a large-scale catastrophic event.
A circumpolar vortex, or simply polar vortex, is a large region of cold, rotating air; polar vortices encircle both of Earth's polar regions. Polar vortices also exist on other rotating, low-obliquity planetary bodies. The term polar vortex can be used to describe two distinct phenomena; the stratospheric polar vortex, and the tropospheric polar vortex. The stratospheric and tropospheric polar vortices both rotate in the direction of the Earth's spin, but they are distinct phenomena that have different sizes, structures, seasonal cycles, and impacts on weather.
Warm, WARM, or Warmth may refer to:
Joseph J. Romm is an American researcher, author, editor, physicist and climate expert, who advocates reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming and increasing energy security through energy efficiency and green energy technologies. Romm is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2009, Rolling Stone magazine named Romm to its list of "100 People Who Are Changing America", and Time magazine named him one of its "Heroes of the Environment (2009)", calling him "The Web's most influential climate-change blogger".
Climate is the long-term weather pattern in a region.
References to climate change in popular culture have existed since the late 20th century and increased in the 21st century. Climate change, its impacts, and related human-environment interactions have been featured in nonfiction books and documentaries, but also literature, film, music, television shows and video games.
Polar amplification is the phenomenon that any change in the net radiation balance tends to produce a larger change in temperature near the poles than in the planetary average. This is commonly referred to as the ratio of polar warming to tropical warming. On a planet with an atmosphere that can restrict emission of longwave radiation to space, surface temperatures will be warmer than a simple planetary equilibrium temperature calculation would predict. Where the atmosphere or an extensive ocean is able to transport heat polewards, the poles will be warmer and equatorial regions cooler than their local net radiation balances would predict. The poles will experience the most cooling when the global-mean temperature is lower relative to a reference climate; alternatively, the poles will experience the greatest warming when the global-mean temperature is higher.
The climate of South Africa is determined by South Africa's situation between 22°S and 35°S, in the Southern Hemisphere's subtropical zone, and its location between two oceans, Atlantic and the Indian.
Resilience, resilient, or resiliency may refer to:
An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming is a 2008 book by Nigel Lawson. In it, Lawson claims that, although global warming is happening, the science is far from settled. He opposes the scientific consensus as summarized by the IPCC. He also argues that warming will bring both benefits and negative consequences, and that the impact of these changes will be relatively moderate rather than apocalyptic. The book has been rejected by climatologists, including IPCC authors Jean Palutikof and Robert Watson as unscientific.
The history of the scientific discovery of climate change began in the early 19th century when ice ages and other natural changes in paleoclimate were first suspected and the natural greenhouse effect was first identified. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change Earth's energy balance and climate. The existence of the greenhouse effect, while not named as such, was proposed as early as 1824 by Joseph Fourier. The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838. In 1856 Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated that the warming effect of the sun is greater for air with water vapour than for dry air, and the effect is even greater with carbon dioxide.
Global warming is the ongoing increase in global average temperature that is causing climate change.
Clifford F. Mass is an American professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. His research focuses on numerical weather modeling and prediction, the role of topography in the evolution of weather systems, regional climate modeling, and the weather of the Pacific Northwest. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, past-president of the Puget Sound American Meteorological Society chapter, and past chair of the College of the Environment College Council.
