Ecological Consequences Of Climate Change

The world's climate is changing, and it will continue to change throughout the 21st century and beyond. Rising temperatures, new precipitation patterns, and other changes are already affecting many aspects of human society and the natural world. In this book, the National Research Council provides a broad overview of the ecological impacts of climate change, and a series of examples of impacts of different kinds. The book was written as a basis for a forthcoming illustrated booklet, designed to provide the public with accurate scientific information on this important subject.

Contemporary climate change is a crucial management challenge for wildlife scientists, conservation biologists, and ecologists of the 21st century. Climate fingerprints are being detected and documented in the responses of hundreds of wildlife species and numerous ecosystems around the world. To mitigate and accommodate the influences of climate ch

The climate record for the past 100,000 years clearly indicates that the climate system has undergone periodic-and often extreme-shifts, sometimes in as little as a decade or less. The causes of abrupt climate changes have not been clearly established, but the triggering of events is likely to be the result of multiple natural processes. Abrupt climate changes of the magnitude seen in the past would have far-reaching implications for human society and ecosystems, including major impacts on energy consumption and water supply demands. Could such a change happen again? Are human activities exacerbating the likelihood of abrupt climate change? What are the potential societal consequences of such a change? Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises looks at the current scientific evidence and theoretical understanding to describe what is currently known about abrupt climate change, including patterns and magnitudes, mechanisms, and probability of occurrence. It identifies critical knowledge gaps concerning the potential for future abrupt changes, including those aspects of change most important to society and economies, and outlines a research strategy to close those gaps. Based on the best and most current research available, this book surveys the history of climate change and makes a series of specific recommendations for the future.

The concepts and concerns regarding the global effects of a continued increase in the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have enjoyed a high visibility in newspapers and scientific journals. This concern is now being translated into big-science projects. These international projects aim to understand better the processes of climate and ecosystem changes and impacts and are being designed under the aegis of the World Climate Research Programme and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. Biological and climatic systems are intertwined in processes leading to impacts and feedbacks and so it has emerged that climatologists, atmospheric scientists, terrestrial and marine ecologists must collaborate in research programmes, else the bases of their future projections are incomplete. This special volume of Advances in Ecological Research brings together eight papers which propose and demonstrate the two major components of current climate change research, future prediction and interdisciplinary approach.

ADVANCES IN ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH V22.

The concepts and concerns regarding the global effects of greenhouse gases have gained increased visibility in newspapers and scientific journals worldwide. Consequently, these concerns are now being translated intobig-science projects in an attempt to better understand the processes and impact of changes in certain biological and climatic systems. This special volume of Advances in Ecological Research brings together eight chapters which propose and demonstrate the two major components of current climate change research: future predictions, and the interdisciplinary approach. The collaborative research efforts of climatologists, atmospheric scientists, terrestrial and marine ecologists are presented in this informative sourcebook with an emphasis on recent international projects designed under the aegis of the World Climate Research and International Geosphere Biosphere Programmes.

Climate change poses many challenges that affect society and the natural world. With these challenges, however, come opportunities to respond. By taking steps to adapt to and mitigate climate change, the risks to society and the impacts of continued climate change can be lessened. The National Climate Assessment, coordinated by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is a mandated report intended to inform response decisions. Required to be developed every four years, these reports provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date evaluation of climate change impacts available for the United States, making them a unique and important climate change document. The draft Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) report reviewed here addresses a wide range of topics of high importance to the United States and society more broadly, extending from human health and community well-being, to the built environment, to businesses and economies, to ecosystems and natural resources. This report evaluates the draft NCA4 to determine if it meets the requirements of the federal mandate, whether it provides accurate information grounded in the scientific literature, and whether it effectively communicates climate science, impacts, and responses for general audiences including the public, decision makers, and other stakeholders.

This is the ninth of the books published by the Roberts Envi-ronmental Center on various aspects of global climate change, analyz-ing and summarizing a selection of the papers published in scientific technical journals over the previous year. It deals with a small subset of the biological and ecological topics that could be covered, but deals with them in enough depth that the reader should come away with a clear view of the magnitude of the potential problems associated with anthropogenic (man-made) global warming from burning fossil fuels and the subsequent climate change. I write this contemporaneously with the 2011 United Nation climate talks being held in Durban, South Africa. The mood in the climate community is not particularly good; climate change has largely been eclipsed by global economic uncertainty in the public mind-enough so that you hardly hear any-thing about it from the Republican candidates who have been debating seemingly weekly all fall, and many of whom in previous years would have been strongly denouncing the very idea of anthropogenic climate change. But to the extent that it is in the public mind, the recent release of the second round of stolen emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia doesn't help their credibility, or the credibility of climate change itself, with the public and the skeptics. Nevertheless, studies of the biological and ecological effects of increasing levels of greenhouse gas, global warming, and climate change are proceeding apace. The 50-some papers that are reviewed here address a wide range of concerns, some of which seem not so threatening in the short term (such as that increasing CO2 concentra-tions are offsetting the adverse effects of temperature in many plant species for the moment) and others somewhat frightening (the in-creasing size of wildfires globally, for example). In the middle are dis-turbing topics such as the shifting of ecological range of many species and a general decrease in biodiversity in many places, accompanied by inevitable extinctions, both in the terrestrial and marine environments, and the uncertain effects of climate change on human migration, This book is intended for non-scientists interested in getting a little more technical information than is possible in the popular media, but less than from trying to read papers in Science, Nature, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists (PNAS) from which many of the underlying papers came. The authors have done a good job of simplifying difficult material without dumbing it down, and most readers will find it understandable and interesting.