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To give you a taste of the Science Special issue Charley has drawn our
attention to here is the introduction essay to the issue. An illustration
did not copy.

Martin

*Once and Future Climate Change*
>
> *Science 2 August 2013: *
>
> *Vol. 341 no. 6145 pp. 472-473 *
>
> *DOI: 10.1126/science.341.6145.472*
>
>
>
> Anthropogenic climate change is now a part of our reality. Even the most
> optimistic estimates of the effects of contemporary fossil fuel use suggest
> that mean global temperature will rise by a minimum of 2°C before the end
> of this century and that CO2 emissions will affect climate for tens of
> thousands of years. A key goal of current research is to predict how these
> changes will affect global ecosystems and the human population that depends
> on them. This special section of *Science* focuses on the current state
> of knowledge about the effects of climate change on natural systems, with
> particular emphasis on how knowledge of the past is helping us to
> understand potential biological impacts and improve predictive power.
>
> Four News stories focus on past and future impacts of climate change and
> the techniques that researchers are using to study them. Gibbons examines
> the role of climate variability in hominin evolution in Africa, and Pennisi
> profiles an effort to use sediment cores to document that variability.
> Kintisch explores whether coastal wetlands will be able to outclimb rising
> seas. And Pennisi offers a snapshot on the use of historical photographs to
> study climate impacts.
>
> Four Reviews discuss recent research on the current and future effects of
> climate change as informed by our understanding of changing climates in the
> paleorecord. Diffenbaugh and Field review the physical conditions that are
> likely to shape the impacts of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems,
> showing that they will face rates of change unprecedented in the past 65
> million years. Norris and colleagues review the Cenozoic history of oceanic
> change; despite some short-lived past analogs, the oceans will also
> experience more rapid change than ever before. Turning to ecology, Blois
> and colleagues discuss how climate changes can affect biotic interactions
> and how these insights might inform our understanding of future
> interactions. Moritz and Agudo discuss the prospects for species survival,
> weighing the evidence for persistence versus catastrophic decline.
>
> Three Reviews focus on more specific impacts of climate change. Its
> influence on infectious disease is considered by Altizer and colleagues,
> who use examples from a wide range of host-pathogen systems to assess
> whether we are close to a predictive understanding of climate-disease
> interactions and their potential future shifts. Wheeler and von Braun
> assess the prospects for human food security, with particular attention to
> potential impacts on food supply in the world's more impoverished countries
> . Finally, Post and colleagues take a regional focus, reviewing the
> ecological consequences of current sea ice decline in the polar regions,
> the part of the world where the reality of changing climate is perhaps at
> its most stark.
>
>
>
>
> *
>
> *
> * *
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>


-- 
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Martin Weiss, PhD
Senior Scientist
New York Hall of Science
mweiss at nyscience.org
cell   347-460-1858
desk 718 595 9516

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