The Oceans and Rapid Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future
ISBN: 978-1-118-66860-3
March 2013
American Geophysical Union
304 pages
ISBN: 978-1-118-66860-3
March 2013
American Geophysical Union
304 pages
Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Geophysical Monograph Series, Volume 126.
Until a few decades ago, scientists generally believed that significant large-scale past global and regional climate changes occurred at a gradual pace within a time scale of many centuries or millennia. A secondary assumption followed: climate change was scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime. Recent paleoclimatic studies, however, have proven otherwise: that global climate can change extremely rapidly. In fact, there is good evidence that in the past at least regional mean annual temperatures changed by several degrees Celsius on a time scale of several centuries to several decades.