The Climate System
Greenhouse gases play this role within Earth's atmosphere.
What is absorb and re-emit heat towards the surface to raise the overall temperature?
These are the 3 orbital components that make up the milankovitch cycles.
What are eccentricity, obliquity, and precession?
This is the direct result of Earth's energy budget becoming unbalanced.
What is a change in temperature?
We use these to tell us about Earth's climate past that we were not around to observe.
What are climate proxies?
The average daily weather conditions for an extended time period (usually 30 years).
What is "climate?"
As you move upward through the troposphere, this happens to air temperature.
What is it decreases?
Earth will be more likely to experience an ice age when summer occurs at this point in its orbit.
What is the aphelion point?
This is the part of the energy budget that allows heat to escape directly out to space.
What is the atmospheric window?
We can draw this conclusion about Earth's climate at a time when we find a lot of heavy oxygen stored in ice at the poles.
What is that Earth was very warm?
The short-term condition of the atmosphere (minutes to hours).
What is "weather?"
This climate mode is caused by a weakening of equatorial easterlies, resulting in warm ocean water shifting eastward.
What is El Nino?
This is the reason the milanknovitch cycles have such a big impact on Earth's climate.
What is because they change the amount of energy coming into the Earth system (energy budget)?
This feedback occurs when an initial decrease in temperature results in even more of a temperature drop.
What is a positive feedback loop?
This is how we know that climate models are generally accurate.
What is they include well-understood physical processes and/or they match well with data we have gathered since the 70s?
The energy we receive from the sun.
What is insolation?
This climate mode is caused by a strengthening of equatorial easterlies, resulting in warm ocean water shifting westward.
What is La Nina?
Precession controls this characteristic of Earth's climate.
What is it makes the seasons more or less extreme?
This feedback occurs when an initial decrease in temperature gets cancelled out.
What is a negative feedback loop?
These scenarios can be plugged into climate models to show us how different levels of emissions could result in different temperature changes.
The overarching name for the climate modes that shift sea surface temperatures in the tropical pacific.
What is El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO)?
Hot air at the equator rises and flows in this direction, creating this pressure difference between the two locations.
What is toward the high latitudes, creating high pressure at the poles and low pressure at the equator?
This is why we focus on the Northern Hemisphere when determining glacial and interglacial periods.
What is the positive ice-albedo feedback loops that is triggered by the different phases of Earth's orbit?
This feedback loops plays a major role in determining Earth's energy budget.
What is the ice-albedo feedback?
We have learned these things about Earth's climate by modeling paleoclimate data.
What is is changes over somewhat predictable intervals and/or it has been much hotter and colder than now and/or CO2 is closely linked to temperature, etc.
This organization is housed within the United Nations and is made up of over 1,000 climate scientists from across the world.
What is the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC)?