GW 2.1 Weather and Climate & 2.2 The Temperature Record

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Last updated 4:02 AM on 4/27/26
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6 Terms

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Weather

  • Short-term conditions in the atmosphere

    • Temperature

      • Usually changes by tens of degrees between the day and night

      • Changes up to a hundred degrees between summer and winter days

    • Precipitation

    • Humidity

    • Cloudiness

  • Highly variable in many places

  • Routinely changes hugely on a few day timescale as weather systems pass through from West to East

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Climate

  • Long-term average of weather conditions over many years

  • Long-term changes in temperatures caused by humans in most places are less than a couple degrees

  • You only notice it if you very carefully record the temperature and other variables at a regular interval over many decades

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What were the “Snowball Earth” episodes?

  • A few times many hundreds of millions of years ago, Earth got so cold that the entire ocean and most of the and were covered with ice!!

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What are isotopes and why do we care about them?

  • Isotopes = different versions of the same atom with slightly different masses

  • They tell us a lot about ancient climates!

  • The temperature or the amount of ice on the planet can slightly affect how isotopes w/ different mass get incorporated into things like the shell of tiny animals in the ocean

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What has happened to Earth’s temperature over the last 50 million years?

  • Earth has gotten A LOT colder over the past 50 million years

    • Greenhouse gas levels (including carbon dioxide) have been decreasing

    • This is not really relevant to how we would survive and thrive if the climate diverted away from this trend and warmed today

      • Most humans have only been around for 50K years which isn’t really perceptible on the scale

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Zachos Curve

  • Gives nice overview of what the climate has been like on Earth for the last millions of years

  • As we get closer to the present, there are more ways to get ancient climate data

    • Ex: study bubbles of air trapped in old ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica → they give indications of temp + concentrations of gas such as carbon dioxide and methane

<ul><li><p>Gives nice overview of what the climate has been like on Earth for the last millions of years</p></li><li><p>As we get closer to the present, there are more ways to get ancient climate data</p><ul><li><p>Ex: study bubbles of air trapped in old ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica → they give indications of temp + concentrations of gas such as carbon dioxide and methane</p></li></ul></li></ul><p></p>