Short answers, pulled from the story.
Climate is the long-term weather pattern in a region, typically averaged over 30 years, while weather refers to individual day-to-day events. The distinction is summed up by the phrase: climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.
A 30-year period is the standard because it is long enough to filter out short-term anomalies such as El Nino-Southern Oscillation, yet short enough to reveal longer climatic trends. The World Meteorological Organization uses this span to define climate normals as the arithmetic average of an element like temperature.
The Koppen climate classification is one of the most widely used schemes for categorizing the world's climates, first developed in 1899. It was originally designed to identify the climates associated with certain biomes.
Paleoclimatology is the study of past climate across Earth's history, beginning with the time of the planet's formation. Because few direct observations existed before the 19th century, scientists infer ancient climates from proxy variables such as ice cores, lake bed sediments, tree rings, coral, pollen, and rocks.
According to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, average global air temperature passed 1.5C of warming over the period from February 2023 to January 2024. Scientists have identified Earth's Energy Imbalance as a fundamental metric of the status of global change.
Climate models use physics equations to simulate the transfer of radiative energy between the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and ice. They balance incoming short wave radiation against outgoing long wave infrared radiation, and any imbalance changes the average temperature of the Earth.
A location's climate is affected by its latitude, longitude, terrain, altitude, land use, and nearby water bodies and their currents. Nearly constant factors such as the proportion of land to water sit alongside dynamic ones like ocean currents, vegetation cover, and atmospheric greenhouse gases.