Editor's Summary
27 April 2006
A long rain
A warming climate could significantly alter the global rate and distribution of rainfall, and arguably it is changing rainfall, rather than temperature, that would have the greater direct impact on human well-being and on ecosystems. An annually resolved oxygen isotope record from tree-rings has been used to produce a millennial-scale reconstruction of precipitation variability in the mountains of northern Pakistan. The data reveal an increase in precipitation during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, producing the wettest conditions seen in the past thousand years. A comparison with other climate reconstructions points to large-scale intensification of the hydrological cycle coincident with the onset of industrialization and global warming. Its unprecedented amplitude argues for a human contribution to the change.
News and Views: Palaeoclimatology: The woods fill up with snow
Palaeoclimatological evidence covering the past millennium suggests that the global water cycle has changed in the past century. Agreement with climate models points to human activity as the main cause.
Michael N. Evans
doi:10.1038/4401120a
Letter: The twentieth century was the wettest period in northern Pakistan over the past millennium
Kerstin S. Treydte, Gerhard H. Schleser, Gerhard Helle, David C. Frank, Matthias Winiger, Gerald H. Haug and Jan Esper
doi:10.1038/nature04743
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