We analyze recent global temperature reconstructions over several centuries in time based on calibrations of temperature patterns against global networks of long instrumental and “proxy” data (natural archives such as ice cores, corals, and tree rings), focusing on long-term climatic variations in the Middle East. The pattern of global warming of the past century does not show a strong influenc...

Recent observations and model simulations have highlighted the sensitivity of the forest-tundra ecotone to climatic forcing. In contrast, paleoecological studies have not provided evidence of tree-line fluctuations in response to Holocene climatic changes in Alaska, suggesting that the forest-tundra boundary in certain areas may be relatively stable at multicentennial to millennial time scales....

Data describe, models explain. Both are required to document and understand the past variations of Earth’s climate, and to help address the present problem of assessing climate change that may result from human activities. Models (for the most part conceptual as opposed to numerical) have long been applied for understanding climate variations during the Quaternary. Indeed, over a century ago, i...

This report concerns a study which was conducted for SKB. The conclusions and viewpoints presented in the report are those of the authors and do not necessarily coincide with those of the client. Summary Knowledge about climatic variations is essential for SKB in its safety assessments of a geological repository for spent nuclear waste. There is therefore a need for information about possible f...

Although continents were coalesced into the single landmass Pangea, Late Triassic terrestrial tetrapod assemblages are surprisingly provincial. In eastern North America, we show that assemblages dominated by traversodont cynodonts are restricted to a humid 6° equatorial swath that persisted for over 20 million years characterized by "semiprecessional" (approximately 10,000-y) climatic fluctuati...

The Colorado River system exhibits the characteristics of a heavily over-allocated or 'closing water system'. In such systems, development of mechanisms to allow resource users to acknowledge interdependence and to engage in negotiations and agreements becomes necessary. Recently, after a decade of deliberations and environmental assessments, the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (GCD...

This paper examines the impact of climate change on children's health, in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. Twenty one years climatic data were collected to analyse climatic conditions in the province. The study also employs 12 years hospital records of clinically diagnosed climate-related ailments among children under 13 years to examine the incidence, spatio-temporal, age and sex variatio...

Identification of loci or genes under natural selection is important for both understanding the genetic basis of local adaptation and practical applications, and genome scans provide a powerful means for such identification purposes. In this study, genome-wide simple sequence repeats markers (SSRs) were used to scan for molecular footprints of divergent selection in Eucalyptus grandis, a hardwo...

Predicting species distributions with changing climate has often relied on climatic variables, but increasingly there is recognition that disturbance regimes should also be included in distribution models. We examined how changes in rainfall and disturbances along climatic gradients determined demographic patterns in a widespread and long-lived tree species, Callitris glaucophylla in SE Austral...

In studying indigenous climate knowledge, two approaches can be envisioned. In the first, traditional knowledge is a cultural built-in object; conceived as a whole, its relevance can be assessed by referring to other cultural, economic, or technical components at work within an indigenous society. In the second, the accuracy of indigenous climate knowledge is assessed with western science knowl...