Introduction to 'Progress towards reconstructing past climate in Central Eurasia, with special emphasis on Lake Baikal'

摘要

Over the last 150 years, Central Eurasia has experienced the largest increase in global warming. The IPCC (2001) special report on regional impacts of climate change suggests that a doubling of CO_2 concentration will further act to exacerbate changes in biogeography, productivity, water quantity, and water quality. Yet, in this region, both experiments with quasi-realistic climate models and palaeoclimate reconstructions from proxies in natural archives are underrepresented. Given the remoteness of Central Eurasia (far from ice sheet and oceanic influences), it is not prudent to simply extrapolate climate change signals from the Atlantic or the Pacific regions. Hence, there is an important gap in our knowledge of how large-scale climate processes, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation and interactions between the Westerlies and monsoons, affect such continental regions.