Books and book chapters

This book is based on the keynote lectures delivered at the final meeting of the ESF-funded project on Holocene Climate Variability (HOLIVAR), held from 12-15 June 2006 in London, UK (http://www.holivar2006.org/).

Addresses our current understanding of natural climate change, its variability on decadal to centennial timescales, the extent to which climate models of different kinds simulate past variability, and the role of past climate variability in explaining changes to natural ecosystems and to human society over the later part of the Holocene. 

It also highlights the need to improve not only our understanding of the physical system through time but also to improve our knowledge of how people may have influenced the climate system in the past and have been influenced by it, both directly and indirectly. 

ISBN 978-1-4051-5905-0

This book focuses on revisiting the past to study climate and environment in a suite of experiments where boundary conditions are similar but not identical to today, so that we can learn about the climate-environment system, its sensitivity, thresholds and feedback. It presents state-of-the-art science on new reconstructions from all spheres of the Earth System and their synthesis, on methodological advances, and on the current ability of numerical models to simulate low and high frequency changes of climate, environment, and chemical cycling related to interglacials.

Read the preface by T. Kiefer and C. Kull here.

Mountain paleoarchives, including glaciers, laminated lake sediments, and trees near the limits of their habitable range, provide much information relevant to the study of past climatic changes. This chapter highlights two methods which use dynamical constraints, either from the climate system or the underlying archives themselves, to help tease out the climatic information contained in point-based proxy timeseries. These are relevant to the interpretation of annually resolved climate proxy timeseries in high altitude regions such as glaciers, laminated lake sediments and trees.

This book co-edited by the PAGES IPO, synthesises research from IGBP's first phase and captures the state of the planet and the pressure it is under.

The interactions between environmental change and human societies have a long, complex history spanning many millennia, but these have changed fundamentally in the last century. Human activities are now so pervasive and profound that they are altering the Earth in ways which threaten the very life support system upon which humans depend.

This book describes what is known about the Earth System and the impact of changes caused by humans. It considers the consequences of these changes with respect to the stability of the Earth System and the well-being of humankind; as well as exploring future paths towards Earth System science in support of global sustainability.

1st ed. 2004. 2nd printing, 2005, XII, 332 p. 258 illus., 145 in color. With CD-ROM.

Hardcover, ISBN 978-3-540-26594-8

This book, mainly based on keynote lectures from the PEP III Open Science Meeting held from 27-31 August 2001 in Aix-en-Provence, France, provides a major synthesis of evidence for past climate variability at the regional and continental scale across Europe and Africa along the PAGES PEP III Transect.

This volume contains a series of papers that collectively summarise evidence for climate change in Africa and Europe over approximately the last 200,000 years. It is a product of PEP III, the pole-equator-pole transect through Europe and Africa, that has been defined by the IGBP-PAGES project for palaeoclimate study along with PEP II (Asia-Australasia) and PEP I, the Americas (Fig. 1).

The PEP transects focus on two time intervals, time-stream 1, the Holocene (with an emphasis on the last 2000 years), and time-stream 2, the last two glacial cycles. The principal long-term objectives of PEP III are (i) to understand how and why climate has varied in the past along the transect; (ii) to assess how climate change and variability has affected natural ecosystems and human society in the past; and (iii) to provide a basis both for developing and testing climate models that are needed to forecast climate change in the future.

The specific papers contained in this volume were presented at a conference on “Climate Variability through Europe and Africa” held in Aix-en-Provence in August, 2001. The volume presents an attempt to bring together in a coherent way our present understanding of past climate change along the PEP III transect, providing a basis for the future work needed to make progress towards these objectives.

This publication also complements other related syntheses that overview the scientific achievements of the PAGES community over the last decade, notably for the PAGES programme as a whole (Alverson et al. 2003), and for the PEP III sister transect, PEP I (Markgraf 2001) and PEP II (Dodson et al. 2004).

This book stands as a ten-year milestone in the operation of PAGES. It provides a synthesis of the past decade of research into global changes that occurred in the earth system in the past. Focus is achieved by concentrating on those changes in the Earth's past environment that best inform our evaluation of current and future global changes and their consequences for human populations. It seeks to provide a quantitative understanding of the Earth's environment in the geologically recent past and to define the envelope of natural environmental variability against which anthropogenic impacts on the Earth System may be assessed. (ISBN 3-540-42402-4). Although this book is currently out of print, pdfs can be downloaded using the links below.

This book stands as a ten-year milestone in the operation of PAGES. It provides a synthesis of the past decade of research into global changes that occurred in the earth system in the past. Focus is achieved by concentrating on those changes in the Earth's past environment that best inform our evaluation of current and future global changes and their consequences for human populations. It seeks to provide a quantitative understanding of the Earth's environment in the geologically recent past and to define the envelope of natural environmental variability against which anthropogenic impacts on the Earth System may be assessed. (ISBN 3-540-42402-4).

This chapter briefly outlines some of the primary reasons why palaeohydrological information has a vital role to play in achieving sustainable development of freshwater resources. A brief description of some relevant international global change research and water resources programs is also provided.

Chapter abstract: Warming has been measured over most parts of the globe during the late 20th century. The instrumental data that record this warming provides only a limited perspective on either its nature or its cause. Because instrumental measurements cover mainly the period of industrialization, for example, they offer little information with which to distinguish between natural and anthropogenic effects. Furthermore, the instrumental record does not capture the spatial and temporal range of decadal to centennial scale variability which models and paleodata suggest is inherent to the climate system.

An understanding of these decadal to centennial scale modes of variability must be an inherent component of any attempt at climate prediction. Furthermore, the paleorecord provides numerous examples of abrupt shifts in climate, and the ecosystem responses to these. Because such changes are absent in the instrumental period, societal infrastructure has largely been built without consideration of such possibilities, leaving many societies highly vulnerable to the types of climate changes which we know have occurred in the past.

This chapter written by the PAGES IPO staff.

In this volume, scientists from the PAGES Pole-Equator-Pole 1 project (PEP 1 - Americas transect) present the results of recent efforts. 

This book brings together a wealth of present and past environmental and climate data from the Americas to provide a comprehensive analysis of interhemispheric linkages of climate, present and past, and their effects on human societies. The ultimate goal of this interhemispheric integration is to improve our understanding of causes and mechanisms of climate change in order to enhance our capability of predicting future changes.

The Pole-Equator-Pole projects (PEP) aim to facilitate the development of north- south research partnerships and foster a unified sense of purpose within the diverse international and interdisciplinary community addressing questions of past global change. 

PEP 1 - the Americas transect, represents an important building block in the global network, the inter-American paleoenvironmental research program is designed to address questions about the dynamics of transequatorial atmospheric linkages and to determine the hierarchy of climate control over the last glacial-interglacial transition. PEP 1 is also especially designed to link the marine and terrestrial records along the eastern Pacific coast and to understand the importance of the equatorial trans-Pacific and Amazonian basin in climatic linkages.