Climate Change

Question 1

Climate change

Answer 1

a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and that is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods

Question 2

Predicting climate change data

Answer 2

pollen records
herbarium specimens
written accounts and paintings
forestry, hunting and fisheries records
repeat photography

Question 3

Forecasting global climate change

Answer 3

• Extrapolate from the past
– assume all other conditions stayed the
same
• Extrapolate across sites (space-for-time substitution)
– assume no other differences between sites
• Experimental manipulations
– simplistic, but accurate for those conditions
• Physiological models
– mechanistic, but require lots of data
• Bioclimaticmodels
– correlative, but most data available