Synthesis Retreat Annotated Bibliography of Background Readings 1. OBSERVATIONS OF ARCTIC CHANGE

• Main Authors: J. Marotzke, W. D. Nordhaus, J. T. Overpeck, D. M. Peteet, R. A. Pielke, R. T. Pierrehumbert, P. B. Rhines, T. F. Stocker, L. D. Talley, J. M. Wallace, J. E. Walsh, F. S. Chapin, T. Osterkamp, M. Dyurgerov, V. Romanovsky
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Greenland; Climate change; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.118.1883; http://www.arcus.org/arcss/2004_retreat/tahoe_annotated_biblio.pdf

change, and makes the case that abrupt change poses the largest potential threat to society in the future, partly because of our current inability to anticipate abrupt climate change with enough detail to be of sufficient use to decision-makers, and also because global climate change may increase the probability of crossing abrupt change thresholds. Greenland Ice Sheet melting and weakened thermohaline circulation change could both occur more rapidly than generally anticipated. Overpeck, J.T. and 17 others. 1997. Arctic environmental change of the last four centuries. Science 278: 1251-1256. The first iteration of ARCSS paleoclimate synthesis reveals that the Arctic is now warmer than at any time in the last 500 years, and that other aspects of the Arctic system are undergoing change unprecedented in millennia. More recent work, both published and unpublished, confirms these results, indicating that the Arctic is undergoing climate change not seen since the last interglacial.