New Climate Change Data Place Policymakers in the Hot Seat

Abstract

he last decade has seen an explosion in research on climate change and its effects on natural sys- tems. The vast amount of data that has been collated and published in a series of international committee reports has convinced even hard-nosed skeptics that global warming is a reality, and it has provided convincing evidence of adverse climate effects on natural ecosystems. Collaborations between climate- change scientists from complementary yet disparate disciplines may not only advance the field but also focus public attention on important research find- ings. A paper by Camille Parmesan and Gary Yohe (2003) that appeared in Nature early this year, the fruit of such a collaboration, received considerable attention in the news media. The authors presented an analysis of hun- dreds of data sets that provided con- vincing evidence of the existence of a global fingerprint of climate-change ef- fects in natural systems. What made this report especially noteworthy was that numerous species, biological measures, and geographic locations were included in the analyses, which tracked climate- related changes over several decades. Previous studies had tended to focus on the effects of climate on one or a few species in a specific location, often over a short duration. Yohe, an economics professor at