Climate: The very basics

I know, this is a biology blog. But, well, all organisms live on Earth and have always been influenced by climate (how do you think humans managed to spread across the Earth?). In this series, we will look at the history of Recent climate (since 1 Ma ago) and its future (and perhaps later, I’ll do the entire history – I’ve already done the Neoproterozoic anyway). In this post, I just want to introduce the very basics of climate science, the prerequisites that you need to know to understand the rest of the series; chances are you already know all the info in this post.