In the history of earth’s climate, there were many abrupt climate change events.These events had great influence on the
evolution of the earth’s surface system. With the continuous development of global warming,the climatic environment,which human
being lives in, is experiencing the great changes. How to understand and recognize these changes, especially like abrupt climate
change, is the scientific foundation for countermeasures to climate change and keep the sustainable development on.In this paper, we
discussed the scientific issue of abrupt climate change from the viewpoint of the earth system. It is pointed out that it is not suitable to
understand abrupt climate change only in atmosphere, we must take it account as the change of earth system as a whole.