Log for Geology 141: Global Climate Change

6 Jan 2000
I did a bunch of searching via Annie, figuring that I'd see where books could get me in the search for some graphs of climate phenomena for the last 10,000 years. Fairly quickly I found the term Holocene and integrated it into my searching. I exported lists of likely things from Annie (many of them here) and spent an hour or so leafing through stuff in QC981 and QC884. Found a nice 1966 source with a graph of "air temperature cin the lowlands of central England", showing 3000-6000 BC (mid-Holocene) high for summer. Also Driver and Chapman Time-Scales and Environmental Change, section on "Holocene fluctuations" with stuff on glacial history (cf Le Roy Ladurie).

Neil Roberts The Holocene: an environmental history took me a lot further into research literature, and I used references therein to find some stuff from Nature. Picked up a lot of threads that it would be worthwhile to follow up on.

Did a search in Academic Press, wherein lurks Quaternary Research. A search for "holocene climate" produced a bunch of stuff, and I glanced through a couple of the articles via .pdf

SCALE is so important --what you look at in terms of time and space, what your purview is, really limits/expands what you're going to see out there. The idea that somehow the natural state is for climate to be "stable" is touching, but misguided in even the short run. The kinds of evidence used in the various sciences are worth knowing a LOT more about... how palynologists do what they do (see see Sawada et al., Towards Improved Paleoclimate Estimates: the modern pollen-vegetation relation (1999)), what ice cores tell us, how dendrochronology works... and so on. Lots to look into.

Some links (AltaVista search for 'holocene near climate and graph'):

Steve's Climate Change page

INGRID Columbia's IRI/LDEO Climate Data Library

some of the many Global Change-related Web Sites around the world from USGCRP

NCAR's Climate and Global Dynamics Division

AN INVENTORY OF DATA, FOR RECONSTRUCTING 'NATURAL STEADY STATE' CARBON STORAGE IN TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEMS (Jonathan Adams)

Paleoclimate Modeling from NOAA (see data page)