Climate change is not a recent phenomenon; it has been occurring for billions of years. Climate science aims to figure out the forces that change climate over the seasonal (winter to summer) to geological (ice age to hothouse). It incorporates the investigation of the physical, chemical, and biological processes that drive changes in the weather and basic environmental conditions.
Over the past century, human influences have increasingly been playing a prominent role in some of these fundamental processes. Here in ‘Climate Basics,’ we step through the theories and measurements that have led scientists to conclude that industrial emissions (and other large human endeavours) have become leading causes of climate change.