Journal ArticleDOI
Abrupt climate change
Richard B. Alley,Jochem Marotzke,William D. Nordhaus,Jonathan T. Overpeck,Dorothy M. Peteet,Roger A. Pielke,Raymond T. Pierrehumbert,Peter B. Rhines,Thomas F. Stocker,Lynne D. Talley,John M. Wallace +10 more
TLDR
Policy-makers should consider expanding research into abrupt climate change, improving monitoring systems, and taking actions designed to enhance the adaptability and resilience of ecosystems and economies.Abstract:
Large, abrupt, and widespread climate changes with major impacts have occurred repeatedly in the past, when the Earth system was forced across thresholds. Although abrupt climate changes can occur for many reasons, it is conceivable that human forcing of climate change is increasing the probability of large, abrupt events. Were such an event to recur, the economic and ecological impacts could be large and potentially serious. Unpredictability exhibited near climate thresholds in simple models shows that some uncertainty will always be associated with projections. In light of these uncertainties, policy-makers should consider expanding research into abrupt climate change, improving monitoring systems, and taking actions designed to enhance the adaptability and resilience of ecosystems and economies.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change
TL;DR: Range-restricted species, particularly polar and mountaintop species, show severe range contractions and have been the first groups in which entire species have gone extinct due to recent climate change.
Journal ArticleDOI
Early-warning signals for critical transitions
Marten Scheffer,Jordi Bascompte,William A. Brock,Victor Brovkin,Stephen R. Carpenter,Vasilis Dakos,Hermann Held,Egbert H. van Nes,Max Rietkerk,George Sugihara +9 more
TL;DR: Work in different scientific fields is now suggesting the existence of generic early-warning signals that may indicate for a wide class of systems if a critical threshold is approaching.
Journal ArticleDOI
Successful adaptation to climate change across scales
TL;DR: In this article, the authors outline a set of normative evaluative criteria for judging the success of adaptation at different scales and argue that elements of effectiveness, efficiency, equity and legitimacy are important in judging success in terms of the sustainability of development pathways into an uncertain future.
Journal ArticleDOI
Tipping elements in the Earth's climate system
Timothy M. Lenton,Hermann Held,Elmar Kriegler,Elmar Kriegler,Jim W. Hall,Wolfgang Lucht,Stefan Rahmstorf,Hans Joachim Schellnhuber,Hans Joachim Schellnhuber +8 more
TL;DR: It is explained how, in principle, early warning systems could be established to detect the proximity of some tipping points, and critically evaluate potential policy-relevant tipping elements in the climate system under anthropogenic forcing.
Journal ArticleDOI
Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change
TL;DR: A forum to review, analyze and stimulate the development, testing and implementation of mitigation and adaptation strategies at regional, national and global scales as mentioned in this paper, which contributes to real-time policy analysis and development as national and international policies and agreements are discussed.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The NCEP/NCAR 40-Year Reanalysis Project
Eugenia Kalnay,Masao Kanamitsu,Robert Kistler,William D. Collins,D.G. Deaven,L. S. Gandin,M. Iredell,Suranjana Saha,Glenn H. White,John S. Woollen,Yuejian Zhu,Muthuvel Chelliah,Wesley Ebisuzaki,Wayne Higgins,John E. Janowiak,Kingtse C. Mo,Chester F. Ropelewski,Julian X. L. Wang,Ants Leetmaa,Richard W. Reynolds,Roy L. Jenne,Dennis Joseph +21 more
TL;DR: The NCEP/NCAR 40-yr reanalysis uses a frozen state-of-the-art global data assimilation system and a database as complete as possible, except that the horizontal resolution is T62 (about 210 km) as discussed by the authors.
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Deterministic nonperiodic flow
TL;DR: In this paper, it was shown that nonperiodic solutions are ordinarily unstable with respect to small modifications, so that slightly differing initial states can evolve into considerably different states, and systems with bounded solutions are shown to possess bounded numerical solutions.
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Climate change 2001: the scientific basis
John Theodore Houghton,Y. Ding,David John Griggs,M. Noguer,P. J. van der Linden,X. Dai,K. Maskell,C. A. Johnson +7 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an overview of the climate system and its dynamics, including observed climate variability and change, the carbon cycle, atmospheric chemistry and greenhouse gases, and their direct and indirect effects.
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Trends, Rhythms, and Aberrations in Global Climate 65 Ma to Present
TL;DR: This work focuses primarily on the periodic and anomalous components of variability over the early portion of this era, as constrained by the latest generation of deep-sea isotope records.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Pacific interdecadal climate oscillation with impacts on salmon production
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify a robust, recurring pattern of ocean-atmosphere climate variability centered over the midlatitude North Pacific basin over the past century, the amplitude of this climate pattern has varied irregularly at interannual-to-interdecadal timescales.