climate change

This term is primarily used in scientific, political, and environmental discourses to describe the systemic alteration of Earth's weather patterns. While it can refer to natural fluctuations over geological time, in contemporary usage it almost exclusively refers to anthropogenic global warming and its ecological consequences.

Because it describes a broad, ongoing phenomenon rather than a single event, it is treated as an uncountable noun. It is rarely pluralized unless referring to different types of climatic shifts across various planetary eras or different theoretical models of change.