| Summary: | What do we know about the response of nature in the Arctic to global warming? Let’s have a look at the results of the project "Back to the Future" under the International Polar Year 2006–2008 published in AMBIO. The twelve contributions included in this special issue represent a substantial part of the knowledge we have on vegetation composition, temperatures of the active soil layer, snow cover and extent of glaciation in the Arctic over the past several decades of a period of global warming .Why are the data from natural, non-manipulated conditions so scarce? The reason is simple: in order to say something about changes, we should know a preceding state, but this knowledge cannot be acquired today – it should have been obtained long ago, when nobody spoke about climate change yet.
|
|---|