Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode 140, A History of Earth's

Climate. I'm your host, James Fodor. So in this long-awaited episode, we're going to start

talking about climate change. So in this episode, we're going to discuss the history of

Earth's climate. So we're going to go back right to the beginning of of Earth's climate so we're going to go

back right to the beginning of the Earth's climate well not quite to the beginning

we'll start about a billion years ago and work forwards looking at what's

been happening to the Earth's climate particularly focusing on temperatures as

well as CO2 concentrations over the past billion years, and then we'll look at increasingly

higher resolution at the last million years, at the last 20,000 years, the last 2,000 years,

and the last 200 years. We'll look at major trends, as well as the ways that we are able to

estimate climactic changes over such long periods of time.

And this is all important for getting a better understanding both of the operation of Earth's climate system, but as well as to get a background baseline of the variability of the climate

prior to human influences.

Recommended pre-listening is episode 90 climate systems, which will provide some important background information.

So let's make a start and get into talking about the history of Earth's climate.

But before we do that, let's make sure we understand what we're talking about and give a definition of climate.

So I've talked about this before, but climate is the long-term patterns of

weather in a region. In this case, we're talking about global climate, so long-term weather

patterns across the globe. And when we talk about weather patterns, you can think of that as

the values of certain meteorological variables over long periods of time, so years to decades.

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