ESS221 Chapter 4 Past Climate Change
Channel: Richard Knight
Date: 23/04/2020

This talk is about how past changes in climate might have affected biodiversity. It is useful to study this, because it is only by looking at the past that we can get a clear picture of how future climate change might affect biodiversity. 



Firstly, climate change is nothing new. The earth’s orbit around the sun is not constant, and such factors as the earth’s tilt, and the obliquity and eccentricity of the orbit may affect the amount of radiation hitting the earth’s atmosphere. The precession of the earth and other orbital factors have long periods of change (10 000 to several hundred thousand years) affect the earth’s climate in a very dramatic way.