Activity 7
Climate change and terrestrial ecosystems
Potential impacts of climate change are well summarised by the reading Hennessy et al. (2004) and captures some potential impacts particular to north Australia.
Climate change is a complex and rapidly developing science – keep up at https://www.csiro.au/en/Research/OandA/Areas/Assessing-our-climate/Climate-Science-Centre
One major impact will be a shift in the productivity of ecosystems with climate change – CO2 increases, changes to rainfall and temperature are all primary drivers of plant growth ah development as we have seen in the lecture. A global vegetation model was used by Erbrecht and Lucht W (2006) to examine potential impacts of climate change and how sensitive the Earth’s vegetation systems are to rapid changes in climate. An extreme disturbance event, the 1992 – 1993 cooling event after the Mt Pinatubo volcanic eruption was examined as an example of short-term but rapid climate change – how did the world vegetation respond. Find out here in this reading.
Not everyone is convinced that the climate is changing and/or is changing due to human activities. The Great Global Warming Swindle was a documentary film claiming to debunk much of the science of climate change and is an example of mass media entering the climate change debate. It was made in 2007 by documentary-maker Martin Durkin (not a climate scientist) and shown on Channel 4 in the UK in 2007 and ABC1 in Australia in 2008 and caused a great deal of controversy. More can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle
Climate scientists countered arguments promoted by the film as misinterpretations of historical climate data and a detailed critique of the film was undertaken by CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, available at http://www.csiro.au/resources/GGWS-critique.html
Why do you think that some people reject the notion that climate is changing, despite overwhelming evidence? Exactly who is questioning that climate change is occurring?