Schematic diagram of an Atlantic meridional cross section from North Pole (NP) to South Pole (SP) showing mechanisms likely to affect the thermohaline circulation (THC) on various timescales. 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. 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. 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. 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. The climate is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex, and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium.

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