Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Boxes
- 1 INTRODUCTION
- 2 RADIATION AND THE EARTH'S ENERGY BALANCE
- 3 THE ELEMENTS OF THE CLIMATE
- 4 EVIDENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
- 5 CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE
- 6 THE MEASUREMENT OF CLIMATIC CHANGE
- 7 STATISTICS, SIGNIFICANCE AND CYCLES
- 8 THE CAUSES OF CLIMATIC CHANGE
- 9 MODELLING THE CLIMATE
- 10 PREDICTING CLIMATE CHANGE
- Bibliography
- Glossary
- Index
5 - CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Boxes
- 1 INTRODUCTION
- 2 RADIATION AND THE EARTH'S ENERGY BALANCE
- 3 THE ELEMENTS OF THE CLIMATE
- 4 EVIDENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
- 5 CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE
- 6 THE MEASUREMENT OF CLIMATIC CHANGE
- 7 STATISTICS, SIGNIFICANCE AND CYCLES
- 8 THE CAUSES OF CLIMATIC CHANGE
- 9 MODELLING THE CLIMATE
- 10 PREDICTING CLIMATE CHANGE
- Bibliography
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments – there are consequences.
Robert G. Ingersoll, 1833–1899Identifiable consequences of climate variability and climate change provide a measure of the significance of climatic events in our lives and the world around us. In many disciplines failure to understand how a changing climate may have influenced outcomes can lead to partial or inaccurate interpretation of past events. So identifying the most important consequences provides a checklist of the issues which require more research and are central to predicting what future changes may occur and what their impact could be.
The analysis of the consequences of past climate change falls naturally into the two areas identified in Chapter 4. First, there is the long-term and often dramatic fluctuations that occurred before the start of the Holocene, some 10,000 years ago. Then there is the Holocene with its relatively stable climate. This stability means the consequences of climatic shifts are intertwined with other events and so the central issue is whether they have played a significant part in human economic and social development. This separation does not mean there are no periods of great climatic stability before the last ice age. Indeed, as implied in Section 4.2 there may well have been vast periods of geological time when the climate was far more benign than in recent millennia. Here, however, the distinction helps to distinguish between interpreting the impact of long-term climate change on many earth sciences, and the more immediate issues of understanding how current climatic fluctuations may now influence our lives.
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- Information
- Climate ChangeA Multidisciplinary Approach, pp. 116 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001