The climate 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 review covers the observational evidence on climate phenomena and the governing equations of planetary-scale flow and presents the key concept of a hierarchy of models for use in the climate sciences. Recent advances in the application of dynamical systems theory, on the one hand, and nonequilibrium statistical physics, on the other hand, 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

气候是一个强迫性，耗散性，非线性，复杂且异质的系统，无法达到热力学平衡。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。这篇综述涵盖了有关气候现象的观测证据和行星尺度流的控制方程，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，动态系统理论和另一方面的非平衡统计物理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。