#13/15 What is climate?
How does planet Earth work?
Climate isn’t weather. A rainy day isn’t poor climate, as long as it isn’t too heavy and falls at the right time and place.
All animals need a favourable climate to live but weather varies between regions. If your culture and survival depend on ice freezing in the winter, you’d prefer it cold. If you grow cereal, you might want seasonal sunshine before harvest, so your crops don’t spoil.
Like biodiversity, a good climate is what best suits the creatures that have evolved to survive in it. It enables animals to make behavioural decisions based on cultural knowledge, and find adequate food where and when they expect it.
An unfavourable or unhealthy climate is chaotic and happens when biodiversity breaks down or we artificially introduce lots of surplus energy. Climate change is the descent into chaos caused by burning dangerous plant energy stored underground millions of years ago. This is the waste energy, processed and buried by animals that are long-since extinct. This extra energy pushes the see-saw, resulting in new extremes of both hot and cold, as well as a change in the overall pattern of heating and cooling of continents and oceans.
Climate change has never been the cause of mass extinction but has often been the symptom of planet-wide changes in animal abundance.
Whether it was bacteria billions of years ago, or plants millions of years ago, the climate only destabilised once there was an over-abundance of certain organisms – things that changed the biosphere so much, ecosystems collapsed.
The most recent period of stable climate on Earth came after an unprecedented diversification of land animals, and culminated in the evolution of humans.
Climate change today, is a symptom of killing wildlife and our species becoming too wasteful.
