Today’s climate change is man-made. The consensus in the climate science community is unequivocal, but in order to determine just how exceptional current climate change is, we have had to contextualise the present on a much longer time scale. To do this, scientists working in paleoclimatology (the study of past climate) use information from both natural and documentary sources from around the world.
Climate variability depends on both natural and anthropogenic factors. The former include a wide range of time scales, ranging from millions of years (tectonic movements) to tens of years (solar and volcanic activity). In contrast, anthropogenic factors only occur on a human scale, and much more intensively in the most recent decades of the industrial period.
