Climate change is a change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns when that change lasts for an extended period of time (i.e., decades to millions of years).

Climate change may refer to a change in average weather conditions, or in the time variation of weather around longer-term average conditions (i.e., more or fewer extreme weather events).

Climate change is caused by factors such as processes, variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics, and volcanic eruptions.

Certain human activities have also been identified as significant causes of recent climate change, often referred to as global warming.

Loss of biodiversity or biodiversity loss refers to either.

the ongoing extinction of species worldwide or.

In ecology, resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a perturbation or disturbance by resisting damage and recovering quickly.

Such perturbations and disturbances can include stochastic events such as fires, flooding, windstorms, insect population explosions, and human activities such as deforestation, fracking of the ground for oil extraction, pesticide sprayed in soil, and the introduction of exotic plant or animal species.

Disturbances of sufficient magnitude or duration can profoundly affect an ecosystem and may force an ecosystem to reach a threshold beyond which a different regime of processes and structures predominates.

Human activities that adversely affect ecosystem resilience such as reduction of biodiversity, exploitation of natural resources, pollution, land-use, and anthropogenic climate change are increasingly causing regime shifts in ecosystems, often to less desirable and degraded conditions.

Interdisciplinary discourse on resilience now includes consideration of the interactions of humans and ecosystems via socio-ecological systems, and the need for shift from the maximum sustainable yield paradigm to environmental resource management which aims to build ecological resilience through "resilience analysis, adaptive resource management, and adaptive governance".

Social science is a major category of academic disciplines, concerned with society and the relationships among individuals within a society.

It in turn has many branches, each of which is considered a "social science".

The main social sciences include economics, political science, human geography, demography, psychology, and sociology.

In a wider sense, social science also includes some fields in the humanities such as anthropology, archaeology, jurisprudence, history, and linguistics.

The term is also sometimes used to refer specifically to the field of sociology, the original 'science of society', established in the 19th century.

A more detailed list of sub-disciplines within the social sciences can be found at Outline of social science.

In physics, energy is the property that must be to an object in order to perform work on – or to heat – the object, and can be converted in form, but not created or destroyed.

The SI unit of energy is the joule, which is the energy transferred to an object by the mechanical work of moving it a distance of 1 metre against a force of 1 newton.