Interannual-scale to century-scale

Abstract

Nobel prizewinner Paul Crutzen argues that the Holocene period of Earth history has ended, within the past century or so, and that we are now at the beginning of the "Anthropocene," the period in which the face of the Earth and the composition of its atmosphere has been altered by our species. One indicator of this is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, which started to climb in the 19th century and has now reached higher levels than for millions of years. This has implications for global climate and also for the functioning of both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in all regions. These implications may be serious for mountainous regions, which may be particularly vulnerable to climatic and other atmospheric change. These global changes have important implications for our understanding of how the Sierra Nevada systems work, because all our scientific observations, including those made by John Muir, were made on an altered system. If we are to have a "control" for this global unplanned experiment, we must look back to the centuries and millennia immediately before the Industrial Revolution.

Parent Publication

• Proceedings of the Sierra Nevada Science Symposium

Citation

Hughes, Malcolm K. 2004. Interannual-scale to century-scale. In: Murphy, Dennis D. and Stine, Peter A., editors. Proceedings of the Sierra Nevada Science Symposium. Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-193. Albany, CA: Pacific Southwest Research Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture: 33-35