Long-term climate change

Abstract

The surface of the Earth is a three-dimensional system that is dominated by water that can exist in three phases: solid, liquid, and vapor. At any point in the evolution of the Earth’s climate, randomly varying factors such as winds, ocean currents, air masses, cloud formation, volcanic eruption, the spinning of the Earth, and other factors produce daily, monthly, and yearly fluctuations in the weather in various regions. If we average out these fluctuations over the whole Earth over a period of time, we can attempt to attribute a climate to the Earth over that time period. There is no universally accepted procedure for doing this.