Climate change in the Polar Regions has received increased attention over the last several years. Reports of rapid changes in sea ice and temperature have been common in the media, with the disintegration of Antarctic ice shelves and the record minimum sea ice extent in the Arctic in 2007 getting significant attention. This interest has been reflected in increased scientific focus on the Polar Regions, including the recently completed International Polar Year from 2007–08. Given this increased focus on climate change in the high latitudes the publication of Climate change in the Polar Regions by Turner & Marshall is quite timely.
The book is divided into eight chapters and provides a solid background for understanding the role of the atmosphere, ocean, and cryosphere in shaping the climate of the Polar Regions and how these components of the climate system respond to changing climate. One major theme throughout the book is the role of natural versus anthropogenic climate change and the book spends a significant amount of time discussing climate change in the Polar Regions over a range of timescales for the last million years.
The book begins with a basic overview of polar climate and the role of the Polar Regions in the global climate system. The second chapter focuses on the observations and models used to study high latitude climate. This chapter includes discussion of instrumental observations, both in situ and remotely sensed, as well as climate records derived from palaeoclimatic proxies such as ice cores and ocean sediments. Chapter 3 considers the processes responsible for shaping the climate of the Polar Regions and the mechanisms for climate change on a range of timescales. An important topic in this chapter is the discussion of feedbacks between the atmosphere and sea ice which are essential to understanding amplification of climate change in the Polar Regions. The next three chapters review polar climate change on a wide range of timescales from the past million years (Chapter 4), the Holocene (Chapter 5), and the past 50–100 years, which corresponds to the period of most instrumental records. These chapters give a solid overview of the range of natural climate variability and the timescale of these natural changes. These topics are essential for placing the currently observed polar climate change in the context of natural variability and are critical for understanding the scientific debate about the role of natural and anthropogenic components of recently observed changes in polar climate. A chapter likely to be of most interest to many readers is Chapter 7 which discusses current predictions of climate change in the Arctic and Antarctic over the next century. The book concludes with a summary of our current understanding of high latitude climate change and discusses possible avenues for future research activities.
This book will provide a valuable and accessible overview of polar climate change for non-climate scientists and will serve as a useful reference for climate scientists. As with any such book it represents a snapshot of our understanding of a rapidly changing topic.
