Consensus exists that U.S. coastal ecosystems are severely degraded due to a varietyof human factors requiring large financial expenditures to restore and manage(National Research Council, 2000). Yet, even as public controversy surroundshuman factors in ecosystem degradation in the Gulf of Mexico (Ferber, 2004),Chesapeake Bay (Ernst, 2003; Thompson, 2004), and elsewhere, there is growingevidence that long-term coastal ecosystem management and restoration effortsshould integrate abrupt climate change, including human-induced change, into researchand modeling programs. Abrupt climate change1 is a form of climate variabilityinvolving a shift in climate across a threshold at a rate exceeding that ofthe cause (National Research Council, 2002), such as the Younger Dryas climatecooling that began and ended in a few decades during the last deglacial period-12.8–11.6 thousand years ago. Abrupt climate changes, however, also punctuatethe Holocene interglacial period at various spatial and temporal scales in the form oflow-frequency, sometimes quasi-oscillatory decadal and multi-decadal variability.
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