The human species has been altering the environment over large geographic areas since the domestication of fire, plants, and animals. The progression from hunter to farmer to technologist has increased the variety and pace more than the geographic extent of human impact on the environment. A number of regions of the earth have experienced significant climatic changes closely related in time to ...

There is a direct influence of global warming on precipitation. Increased heating leads to greater evaporation and thus surface drying, thereby increasing the intensity and duration of drought. However, the water holding capacity of air increases by about 7% per 1°C warming, which leads to increased water vapor in the atmosphere. Hence, storms, whether individual thunderstorms, extratropical ra...

Abrupt climate changes of the last deglaciation detected in a western Mediterranean forest record W. J. Fletcher, M. F. Sanchez Goñi, O. Peyron, and I. Dormoy Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, UMR 5805 CNRS EPOC, Université Bordeaux 1, Avenue des Facultés, 33405 Talence, France Laboratoire de Chrono-Environnement, UMR 6249, Université de Franche-Comté, 16 Route de Gray, 25030 Besançon, France R...

Ice-core records show that climate changes in the past have been large, rapid, and synchronous over broad areas extending into low latitudes, with less variability over historical times. These ice-core records come from high mountain glaciers and the polar regions, including small ice caps and the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.

Terrestrial ecosystems have encountered substantial warming over the past century, with temperatures increasing about twice as rapidly over land as over the oceans. Here, we review the likelihood of continued changes in terrestrial climate, including analyses of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project global climate model ensemble. Inertia toward continued emissions creates potential 21st-cen...

Comparison of large-scale temperature reconstructions over the past millennium reveals agreement on major climatic episodes, but substantial divergence in reconstructed (absolute) temperature amplitude. We here detail several research priorities to overcome this ‘amplitude desideratum’, and discuss the relevance of this effort for the prediction of future temperature changes and the meaning of ...

Climate is changing and available evidence indicates that human activities are playing a significant role in bringing about this change. Recent increases in global averaged temperature over the last decade already appear to be outside the normal variability of temperature changes for at least the last thousand years. A number of different analyses strongly suggest that this temperature increase...

Anthropogenically induced global climate change has profound implications for marine ecosystems and the economic and social systems that depend upon them. The relationship between temperature and individual performance is reasonably well understood, and much climate-related research has focused on potential shifts in distribution and abundance driven directly by temperature. However, recent wor...

Climate model simulations available from the PMIP1, PMIP2 and CMIP (IPCC-AR4) intercomparison projects for past and future climate change simulations are examined in terms of polar temperature changes in comparison to global temperature changes and with respect to pre-industrial reference simulations. For the mid-Holocene (MH, 6,000 years ago), the models are forced by changes in the Earth’s or...

arid and semi-arid ecosystems are very sensitivity to changes. fluctuations in climate variables and increasing human activities; result in the changes in hydrological processes of these ecosystems, and consequently, their structures degradation. in this study, hydro-climatic data of the bakhtegan basin for the period of 1972–2011, were analyzed to assess effects of climate variability and huma...