Climate change has become a global environmental issue concerned by the international community. Study on climate change has increasingly become a frontier for academics and scholars in all fields. From subjective judgment to objective measurement, CSSCI journal papers collected from the CNKI database in 1996-2016 were used. With the aid of bibliometric tools, it is a new attempt to explore the development thread of domestic climate change research and recent research hot spot within the framework of the climate change subject. It found that the current problems in the field of climate change research in China are as follows: (i) low research level and unbalanced discipline development, (ii) relatively spatially concentrated research institutions and relatively research direction, and (iii) single research perspective of the field of agricultural climate change and lack of agricultural adaptability studies.