climate change

  CLIMATE CHANGE    Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. These shifts may be natural, but since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels (like coal, oil, and gas), which produces heat-trapping gases. Climate is often defined loosely as the average  weather  at a particular place, incorporating such features as  temperature ,  precipitation ,  humidity , and  windiness . A more specific definition would state that climate is the mean state and variability of these features over some extended time period. Both definitions acknowledge that the weather is always changing, owing to instabilities in the  atmosphere . And as weather varies from day to day, so too does climate vary, from daily day-and-night cycles up to periods of  geologic time  hundreds of millions of years long. In a very real sense,  climate ...