Climate Change Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the distribution of weather patterns over periods, ranging in decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions, or in the distribution of weather around the average conditions. Climate change is caused by factors that include oceanic processes, variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics and volcanic eruptions, and human-induced alterations of the natural world; these latter effects are currently causing global warming, and "climate change" is often used to describe human causes.