A guest post by Carsten Dormann (Uni Freiburg) / @CarstenDormann. Cover picture by Takver via Wikimedia Commons. BioScience has just published the latest installment of “Scientists’ Warnings“. There have been two previous such Warnings, the latest organised by the same authors in 2017. Quite a few scientists have signed this Warning. I chose not to,…
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…
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…
The last two weeks, I was serving as a teaching side-kick for a course on agent-based modeling at the Global Sustainability Summer School 2012, which was jointly organized in Potsdam close to Berlin by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), in partnership with the Santa…
A colleague pointed me towards an interesting new article by Jerry A. Coyne in Evolution. In, so much should be noted as a disclaimer, an openly partisan note by an evolutionary biologist who has a history of fighting creationism and intelligent design, Coyne explores the degree of believe in evolution and science, particularly in the…
In a review paper that appeared in this week’s edition of Nature, Davidson and colleagues describe the interactions and feedbacks between land use change, climate change, and a range of more local climatically mediated processes such as water balance, winds and pressure systems and fire in the Amazon basin. I found this a very nice…
theoretical ecology 