Climate Processes and Change

Abstract

The 1997 Kyoto summit on climate change demonstrates the world community's desire to protect future generations from harmful effects induced by the anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases. On the other hand, the worldwide impacts of the 1997–1998 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event serve as a reminder of how natural variability can strongly influence weather. In this book, Bryant provides a bird's‐eye view of natural climate change over the last 2 million years, rather than the fish's‐eye view of the more recent possible anthropogenic global warming.The key feature that sets this text apart is the perspective of climate change on a larger timescale. The author recognizes that climate is not constant, and that only small perturbations are necessary to shift climate into an extreme state. If this is the case, however, anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing may also produce extreme climate change. Climate Processes and Change also differs from other texts by raising the awareness of uncertainties in historical observations, trends, and the complex and nonlinear relationships between observations and theory.