Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change

Abstract

Significant changes in physical and biological systems are occurring on all continents and in most oceans, with a concentration of available data in Europe and North America. Most of these changes are in the direction expected with warming temperature. Here we show that these changes in natural systems since at least 1970 are occurring in regions of observed temperature increases, and that these temperature increases at continental scales cannot be explained by natural climate variations alone. Given the conclusions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely to be due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations, and furthermore that it is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent except Antarctica, we conclude that anthropogenic climate change is having a significant impact on physical and biological systems globally and in some continents.

Assessment of goods and services, vulnerability, and conservation status of European seabed biotopes: a stepping stone towards ecosystem-based marine spatial management

“…1). This is aggravated by the fact that climate change will influence the structure and functioning of marine ecosystems and the use of coastal zones (IPCC, 2007;Rosenzweig et al, 2008;EEA, 2010;Coll et al, 2010).…”

Ciencia Para No Científicos: Lo Que Einstein Desconocía Sobre El Cambio Climático

“…De esta manera, decidimos consultar documentos relacionados con las cumbres internacionales sobre cambio climático (IPCC, 2007;UNFCCC. 2007), investigaciones relacionadas con sus causas e impactos (Rosenzweig et al, 2008;Karl et al, 2009;Cardona, A. 2009), al igual que la opinión de educadores ambientales a nivel mundial (UNESCO, 2004;Rule y Meyer, 2009;Mackeown y Hopkins, 2010;Dent y Dalton, 2010;Punter et al, 2011).…”

Detection and Attribution of Observed Impacts

“…The AR4 precursor of the current chapter (Rosenzweig et al, 2007) provided a geographically distributed empirical analysis of correlations across numerous detailed and localized studies of changing systems (elaborated more later in Rosenzweig et al, 2008). Rather than expand that approach, this synthesis organizes the findings on detection and attribution of observed impacts of climate change aiming at covering the full disciplinary, sectoral, and geographic diversity of impacts, drawn directly from sectoral and regional assessments in this report.…”

“…Quantitative synthesis assessments have been particularly prominent in ecology, where measures of phenology (timing of seasonal events) and geographical range can be assembled across species into standardized indices (Parmesan and Yohe, 2003;Rosenzweig et al, 2008;Chen, I.C. et al, 2011;Poloczanska et al, 2013;Rosenzweig and Neofotis, 2013).…”

“…These tools include associative pattern analyses (e.g., Rosenzweig et al, 2008) and regression analyses (Chen, I.C. et al, 2011), which compare expected changes due to anthropogenic climate change across multiple studies against observed changes.…”