This record presents a formal climate classification framework introducing the Dickinson Climate Classification, a thermodynamically grounded system that treats climate as a state space and partitions it using evenly spaced thermal metrics and dimensionless hydrological metrics. Once that state space is defined, climates do not need to resemble anything that exists today in order to be described. The framework is not a predictive climate model, attribution study, or impact assessment. Instead, it functions as a taxonomic and analytical tool for comparing climate regimes across paleoclimates, projected future warming scenarios, and hypothetical climatic states, as well as the present. This work is released as a preprint to establish a persistent, citable description of the classification system and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International License.