I have been reading "Nature" for a long time. It is a journal that brings significant articles from every scientific discipline to peers like myself.
Nature, Vol. 416
28 March 2002
The Earth's climate (click here) has warmed by approximately 0.6 8C
over the past 100 years with two main periods of
warming, between 1910 and 1945 and from 1976
onwards. The rate of warming during the latter period
has been approximately double that of the ®rst and, thus,
greater than at any other time during the last 1,000 years1
. Organisms,
populations and ecological communities do not, however,
respond to approximated global averages. Rather, regional changes,
which are highly spatially heterogeneous (Fig. 1), are more relevant
in the context of ecological response to climatic change. In many
regions there is an asymmetry in the warming that undoubtedly will
contribute to heterogeneity in ecological dynamics across systems.
Diurnal temperature ranges have decreased because minimum
temperatures are increasing at about twice the rate of maximum
temperatures. As a consequence, the freeze-free periods in most
mid- and high-latitude regions are lengthening and satellite data
reveal a 10% decrease in snow cover and ice extent since the late
1960s. Changes in the precipitation regime have also been neither
spatially nor temporally uniform (Fig. 1). In the mid- and high
latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere a decadal increase of 0.5±1%
mostly occurs in autumn and winter whereas, in the sub-tropics,
precipitation generally decreases by about 0.3% per decade....
