"llris paper defines the "modern era of science and environmental consciousness" both in a sense and, more specifically, when applied to rhe sub--Antarctic It describes some changes occurring in the sub-Antarctic terrestrial biomc including climate change and the introduction of non-indigenous 'Ihree case studies arc presented that demonstrate how important these changes are in the context of l...

Natural climate change currently acts in concert with human-induced changes in the climate system. To disentangle the natural variability in the climate system and the human-induced effects on the global climate, a critical analysis of climate change in the past may offer a better understanding of the processes that drive the global climate system. In this review paper, we present palaeoclimato...

Inter-annual crop yield variation is driven in large parts by climate variability, wherein the climate components of temperature and precipitation often play the biggest role. Nonlinear effects of temperature on yield as well as interactions among the climate variables have to be considered. Links between climate and crop yield variability have been previously studied, both globally and at regi...

The American Southwest has experienced a series of severe droughts interspersed with strong wet episodes over the past decades, prompting questions about future climate patterns and potential intensification of weather disruptions under warming conditions. Here we show that interannual hydroclimatic variability in this region has displayed a significant level of non-stationarity over the past m...

Climate variability results from a very diverse set of physical phenomena and occurs on a very wide range of time scales. It is difficult to envision a single model, complex as it might be, which could explain, simulate or predict all sources of climate variability. It is therefore simple models, that concentrate on a single or a few phenomena and on some limited range of time scales, that have...

To better characterize the climate variability of the last millennium in the high Andes, we analyzed the pollen content of a 1150-yr-old sediment core collected in a bog located at 3800 m a.s.l. in the páramo in the eastern Cordillera in Ecuador. An upslope convective index based on the ratio between cloud transported pollen from the Andean forest to the bog (T) and Poaceae pollen frequencies, ...

Terrestrial plants are powerful climate sentinels because their annual cycles of growth, reproduction and senescence are finely tuned to the annual climate cycle having a period of one year. Consistency in the seasonal phasing of terrestrial plant activity provides a relatively low-noise background from which phenological shifts can be detected and attributed to climate change. Here, we ask whe...