The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject to various external forcings, natural as well as anthropogenic. This paper reviews the observational evidence on climate phenomena and the governing equations of planetary-scale flow, as well as presenting the key concept of a hierarchy of models as used in the climate sciences. Recent advances in the application of dynamical systems theory, on the one hand, and of nonequilibrium statistical physics, on the other, are brought together for the first time and shown to complement each other in helping understand and predict the system’s behavior. These complementary points of view permit a self-consistent handling of subgrid-scale phenomena as stochastic processes, as well as a unified handling of natural climate variability and forced climate change, along with a treatment of the crucial issues of climate sensitivity, response, and predictability.

中文翻译：

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气候变异与气候变化的物理学

气候系统是强迫性，耗散性，非线性，复杂和非均质的系统，它没有达到热力学平衡。该系统在时间和空间的许多运动尺度上均表现出自然可变性，并且受到各种自然和人为因素的外部强迫。本文回顾了有关气候现象和行星尺度流控制方程的观测证据，并提出了用于气候科学的模型层次结构的关键概念。一方面，动态系统理论和非平衡统计物理学的应用方面的最新进展首次被汇集在一起​​，并且在帮助理解和预测系统行为方面相互补充。