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The
Role and Response of Continental Vegetation in the Global Climate System
Overpeck, J.T. 1993 In: Global Changes in the Perspective of the Past (J.A. Eddy and H. Oeschger, eds.). J. Wiley and Sons, New York, pp 221-238 ABSTRACT Future climate change is likely to be much greater than that of the past two centuries, making the late Quaternary record of climate and vegetation change a crucial resource for understanding both the response and role of vegetation within the climate system. Predictions of future change will have to be model-based, because this change will not have past analogs. Simulation of observed past change, however, provides needed insight for simulating future change. Current models can simulate many aspects of past climate-induced vegetation change and suggest that future change could be as large as that which took place over the last glacial to interglacial transition, and more rapid. This possibility highlights the need to build better models for simulating vegetation change and for including realistic influences of vegetation in climate and trace gas models. Climate models will not be able to simulate regional climates or hydrologic change correctly without the incorporation of realistic vegetation feedbacks. The record of global change for the late Quaternary must be reconstructed more thoroughly before it will be possible to gain a complete understanding of the response and role of vegetation in a climate system subjected to rapidly changing boundary conditions. | Mailing
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Studies Laboratory, Department of Geosciences, The University of Arizona Last updated
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