January 2003

See a perhaps-more-useful linked page of search examples for 14 January's class. Material below is updated and retreaded from 2001.

There's a page of materials for the Water Resources course that gives a general introduction to the art of finding what you need, including uses of Annie and various databases.

Science magazine is an absolutely essential resource, because of its audience (loosely, 'scientists' and people who have reason to keep track of what's happening in the sciences) and its commitment to following scientific topics that have implications in public policy. Science combines a news magazine covering the whole range of scientific disciplines (and written so that non-specialists can understand) with a platform for the publication of primary research articles that are judged by the Editors to have particular importance. Science is a weekly publication, so it piles up.

• Science is available on the campus network in FULL TEXT, with an excellent search interface, October 1995-2003.
• We have access to Science in full text all the way back to 1880.
• Science is linked to an array of other journals and to the amazing stupendous fantastic Web of Science database, which I'll detail further below.

But so what? If I do a search for "global climate" in title or abstract, on 16 Jan I get 72 hits. Here's a link to one of them:

 GLOBAL WARMING: Draft Report Affirms Human Influence (Richard A. Kerr, Volume 288, Number 5466, Issue of 28 Apr 2000, pp. 589-590)

"last week, the group, the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released the draft of a new report concluding "that there has been a discernible human influence on global climate." If those words hold up under further expert and governmental review, they would be the strongest official pronouncement yet that human-induced warming is real."

One of the pointers is to  The Ascent of Atmospheric Sciences ( Paul J. Crutzen and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Volume 290, Number 5490, Issue of 13 Oct 2000, pp. 299-304), which begins with this:

Atmospheric science matters to everyone every day. It has been infiltrating public awareness lately for compelling reasons: the Antarctic ozone hole, global warming, and El Niño, a combined atmosphere-ocean phenomenon that causes severe weather. The first two are side effects of the industrial revolution, and El Niño is nature's warning against taking good weather for granted. Atmospheric science has become a multidisciplinary, high-tech activity rife with new and sophisticated instrumentation, computers, information technology, and measurement platforms, including satellites and aircraft.

Another leads to  Climate Extremes: Observations, Modeling and Impacts (David Easterling et al., Volume 289, Number 5487, Issue of 22 Sep 2000, pp. 2068-2074), which offers us these options in a sidebar:

Here's where things start to get really interesting: if I click on the link to ISI Web of Science I get a large set (920!) of "Related records" (many in journals we don't have at W&L, but hey...) If I go back to one for February 1999 and look at its record, here's what I see:

 

What's revolutionary about this is the links to citations. We can see not only the article's bibliography, but ALSO the articles whose authors thought enough of this one to cite it themselves. That's really cool, really a great advance in how we can deal with scientific literatures.

If I do a search for "climatic forcing" in Web of Science I get 75 hits (from 4.7 million records searched...). Here's the oldest record in the set (#75):

We get the References links and also a Related Records button, which does wonders... such as leading to this recent summary:

Amazing. How would we ever have found this one?

Another bit of serendipity: when I was preparing this class two years ago I just happened to pick up the latest Science and see (in "This Week in Science") a reference to "Forcing Glacial Cycles"... and sure enough there's a link to an article not unrelated to global climate change: Orbital Forcing of the Marine Isotope Stage 9 Interglacial (C. H. Stirling et al.)

Milankovitch orbital forcing theory has been used to assign time scales to many paleoclimate records. However, the validity of this theory remains uncertain, and independent sea-level chronologies used to test its applicability have been restricted largely to the past ~135,000 years. Here, we report U-series ages for coral reefs formed on Henderson Island during sea-level high-stands occurring at ~630,000 and ~330,000 years ago. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that interglacial climates are forced by Northern Hemisphere summer solar insolation centered at 65°N latitude, as predicted by Milankovitch theory.

The serendipity for 2003 is in this week's Science:

From Anchovies to Sardines and Back: Multidecadal Change in the Pacific Ocean (Francisco P. Chavez et al., Volume 299, Number 5604, Issue of 10 Jan 2003, pp. 217-221)In the Pacific Ocean, air and ocean temperatures, atmospheric carbon dioxide, landings of anchovies and sardines, and the productivity of coastal and open ocean ecosystems have varied over periods of about 50 years. In the mid-1970s, the Pacific changed from a cool "anchovy regime" to a warm "sardine regime." A shift back to an anchovy regime occurred in the middle to late 1990s. These large-scale, naturally occurring variations must be taken into account when considering human-induced climate change and the management of ocean living resources.

A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems (Parmesan C, Yohe G NATURE 421 (6918): 37-42 JAN 2 2003
Abstract:
Causal attribution of recent biological trends to climate change is complicated because non-climatic influences dominate local, short-term biological changes. Any underlying signal from climate change is likely to be revealed by analyses that seek systematic trends across diverse species and geographic regions; however, debates within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reveal several definitions of a 'systematic trend'. Here, we explore these differences, apply diverse analyses to more than 1,700 species, and show that recent biological trends match climate change predictions. Global meta-analyses documented significant range shifts averaging 6.1 km per decade towards the poles ( or metres per decade upward), and significant mean advancement of spring events by 2.3 days per decade. We define a diagnostic fingerprint of temporal and spatial 'sign-switching' responses uniquely predicted by twentieth century climate trends. Among appropriate long-term/large-scale/multi-species data sets, this diagnostic fingerprint was found for 279 species. This suite of analyses generates 'very high confidence' (as laid down by the IPCC) that climate change is already affecting living systems.)

Having nothing to do for 5 minutes, I did a search in the JSTOR archive of Science to see what I could find out about the occurrence of the phrase 'global climate change'. This found 112 articles, which I had sorted by age (oldest first) and then saved as a Web page. (By the way, the first instance of the phrase "global climate" comes from 1963 --then appears again in '65, '66, '69, '70...)

 Pew Center for Global Climate Change

 Global Climate Change (a Congressional Research Service Issue Brief by Wayne A. Morrissey and John R. Justus [Resources, Science, and Industry Division],  November 27, 2000) --see also the  Global Climate Change Briefing Book of which this is a part

 World Bank on Global Climate Change

 Government of Canada Climate Change Site

 Global Climate Change Digest (Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security)

 Spotlight: Climate Change (U.S. Department of State)

Here are some links from an AltaVista search for 'holocene near climate and graph' which look pretty good.

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)