Identify one natural process that may cause sudden climate changes.

AN OVERVIEW OF MECHANISMS

Understanding and simulating abrupt climate change poses special challenges in climate science. Many climate changes are well described as relatively small deviations from a reference state, often assumed to be in equilibrium with external forcing. Powerful simplified conceptual approaches are therefore appropriate and can explain many features in a faithful way. In a linear model, doubling the forcing doubles the response. The linear approach does not hold for abrupt climate change, in which a small forcing can cause a small change or a huge one, so fully nonlinear and transient considerations and simulations are required. In particular, transitions between qualitatively different climate states, as are seen in the paleoclimatic records, require abandoning the “time-slice” perspective in which equilibrium runs of climate models under different forcing are used to try to infer the path of climate change.

Explanation:

Global Warming , Volcanic Eruption