A commonly used assumption about climate change is that increasing temperature goes hand in hand with increasing climatic variability. One of the problems with this claim is that, while temperature is a well-defined concept, variability can mean different things to different people. It is clear that there are mechanisms (e.g. hurricane systems) that link temperature…
Lots of interesting papers in the last days – one paper that caught my attention is an opinion piece by Brook et al. that just came out in TREE, titled “Does the terrestrial biosphere have planetary tipping points?”. Brooks et al. argue against the occurrence of major tipping points in the terrestrial! biosphere, essentially on…
This week’s edition of Nature featured a comment by Drew Purves and colleagues titled “Ecosystems: Time to model all life on Earth”, in which they propose that we need a new model type, general ecosystem models (GEM), that describe the interplay of all major organism types on earth. They say that GEMs […] could capture…
There has been considerable controversy in recent years about the question of earth system tipping points in general and about the question of an Amazon dieback that is predicted by some of the global vegetation models in particular. A cornerstone for answering this question is to understand how tropical forests affect large scale precipitation patterns…
theoretical ecology 