🌡️ Climate and change

Weather is what the sky is doing right now, sunny, rainy or windy, and it can change from hour to hour. Climate is the usual pattern of weather in a place over many years. So a single cold day is weather, but a place being cold most winters is its climate.

Certain gases in the air act like a cosy blanket around the Earth. They let sunlight in to warm the ground, then trap some of that heat instead of letting it all escape back to space. This natural blanket keeps our planet warm enough for life. Without it, Earth would be frozen solid.

Over the last hundred years or so, people have burned huge amounts of coal, oil and gas for energy. That adds extra heat-trapping gases to the air, thickening the Earth's natural blanket, so the planet slowly warms. The good news is that people all over the world are working on cleaner ways to power our lives.

Nature keeps its own records. Deep layers of ice hold tiny bubbles of ancient air, tree rings show which years were wet or dry, and old rock and mud hold clues too. By reading these natural diaries, scientists can work out what the weather was like thousands of years before any thermometers existed.