Coastal ecosystems are sensitive to changes in the quantity and lability of terrigenous dissolved organic matter (DOM) delivered by rivers. The lability of DOM is thought to decrease with age, but this view stems from work in watersheds where terrestrial plant and soil sources dominate streamwater DOM.
Sea levels during the last interglacial stage (about 125 kyr ago) are known to have been higher than today, and may serve as a partial analogue for anthropogenic warming scenarios. However, because local sea levels differ from global sea level, accurately reconstructing past global sea level requires an integrated analysis of globally distributed data sets.
The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research
Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been
greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda
windfall. To these denialists, the scientists
The ocean takes up 20 to 35 per cent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, but uncertainties remain as to the distribution of this CO2 in the ocean, its rate of uptake over the industrial era, and the relative roles of the ocean and terrestrial biosphere in anthropogenic CO2 sequestration.
Reconstructions of temperature variations from Antarctic ice cores rely on the assumption that the relationship between hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios and temperature are stable in space and time.
To save biodiversity, on-the-ground agencies need to set the conservation research agenda, not distant academics and non-governmental organizations, argue Robert J. Smith and colleagues.
In the tortured history of climate-change negotiations, enlightened thinking has translated into positive action all too rarely. But governments have recently seen the light on a
crucial issue: they have recognized the vital role that intact natural ecosystems have in limiting the build-up of atmospheric greenhouse gases.
