Circulation of the atmosphere and the ocean, as discussed in Section 4.1, are maintained by something like a heat engine for which solar radiation and terrestrial radiation are high and low temperature heat bathes, respectively. Therefore, I suppose that the factors which control these energy exchanges are important as factors of climatic changes.
First, solar radiation that arrive at the earth changes by the following factors:
Next, the fraction of solar radiation absorbed by the earth can change by the following factors:
Terrestrial radiation is largely determined by temperature of the atmosphere and of the surface, and, related to it,
Discussions about these factors follow. Since this article is a part of a book of Quaternary science, I concentrate on such variations that can be important at its time scale.
In addition, I am going to list up randomly such factors that often appear in discussions of climatic variation even though they do not directly relate to radiative balance. I omit detailed discussion of these except the item (k). In order to understand role of each factor, please refer to Section 4.1.
These seem to be external causes (relatively speaking):
And these seem to be internal causes (relatively speaking):