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This page intentionally left blank Environmental Change: Key Issues and Alternative Perspectives Environmental Change: Key Issues and Alternative Approaches describes and explains the current and future significance of past and contemporary environmental, and especially climatic, change. It outlines the conceptual framework for studies of environmental change by posing a series of key questions and presenting the results of the most recent and relevant research. The book thereby establishes a basis for evaluating projections of future environmental change. The crucial role of modelling and the basic concepts and techniques used to research past environmental change are introduced for non-specialists in the field. The main time frame is the last 400,000 years, with special emphasis on past periods of rapid warming, on the nature of climatic variability over the last 1,000 years and on the dramatic and accelerating changes in the Earth system heralded by the industrial revolution. The book is extensively referenced and illustrated. This book provides a balanced basis for understanding and exploring the scientific issues underlying global change for advanced undergraduates in environmental, earth, biological and ecological sciences and geography. By providing a non-specialist introduction to models in environmental change research and to the study of past environmental changes, it seeks to draw a wider group of students into the field. Frank Oldfield is an Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Geography, University of Liverpool. He obtained his first degree at the University of Liverpool in 1956 and his Ph.D. at the University of Leicester in 1962. Between 1958 and 1975, he held academic positions at various universities in the UK, and following a brief period as Acting Vice-Chancellor at the University of Papua New Guinea, was Director of the School of Independent Studies with a Personal Chair in Geography at the University of Lancaster. From 1973 to 1996, he was John Rankin Professor of Geography at the University of Liverpool, holding visiting positions at institutions across the world. Until 2001, he was Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Past Global Changes (PAGES) Core Project in Bern, Switzerland, where he was responsible for promoting and coordinating environmental research worldwide. He was also on the editorial team responsible for the writing, coordinating and finalising the IGBP Synthesis. During this time, Professor Oldfield's research has covered many areas of environmental change, including palynology, palaeolimnology, environmental magnetism and the study of man-made radioisotopes in sediment and peat chronologies. More recently, his research interests have included coastal contamination from nuclear fuel reprocessing, the mass-balance in ombrotrophic peat bogs in response to climate changes and the human impact on global environmental change. The overriding theme uniting these diverse research methodologies has been to document, quantify and understand past and current environmental changes at ecosystem level resulting from the interaction between natural variability and human activities. In recognition of his research, he received the Linton Award from the British Geomorphology Research Group in 1992 and the Murchison Prize from the Royal Geographical Society and Institute of British Geographers in 1995. He was elected President of the Quaternary Research Association between 1994 and 1997, and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science Degree by the University of Plymouth in 2000. He has also served on numerous national and international committees linked to research, as well as on the editorial boards of leading journals. Environmental Change Key Issues and Alternative Perspectives Frank Oldfield University of Liverpool Cambridge University Press Cambridge New York Melbourne Madrid Cape Town Singapore São Paulo First published 2005 ISBN-13 978-0-521-82936-6 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-82936-4 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-53633-2 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-53633-2 paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. For my wife Mary Contents Preface Acknowledgements List of Permissions 1 Defining and exploring the key questions 2 An introduction to models and modelling 3 The palaeo-record: approaches, timeframes and chronology 4 The Palaeo-record: archives, proxies and calibration 5 Glacial and interglacial worlds 6 The transition from the last glacial maximum to the Holocene 7 The Holocene 8 The Anthropocene – a changing atmosphere 9 The Anthropocene – changing land 10 The Anthropocene: changing aquatic environments and ecosystems 11 Changing biodiversity 12 Detection and attribution 13 Future global mean temperatures and sea-level 14 From the global to the specific 15 Impacts and vulnerability 16 Sceptics, responses and partial answers Preface The nature of the science we undertake hinges crucially on the kinds of question we ask. Over the last four decades, the questions that have dominated the concerns of a substantial part of the environmental sciences research community have changed dramatically, first in response to the growing awareness of global environmental change, then as a result of advances in scientific understanding and technological capabilities. Ключевые слова: e, r, o