Why decadal to century timescale paleoclimate data is needed to explain present-day patterns of biological diversity and change

The current distribution of species, environmental conditions and their interactions represent only one snapshot of a planet that is continuously changing, in part due to human influences. To distinguish human impacts from natural factors, the magnitude and pace of climate shifts since the Last Glacial Maximum are often used to determine whether patterns of diversity today are artefacts of past climate change. In the absence of high-temporal-resolution paleoclimate reconstructions, this is generally done by assuming that past climate change occurred at a linear pace between widely spaced (usually, ≥ 1,000 years) climate snapshots. We show here that this is a flawed assumption, because regional climates have changed significantly across decades and centuries during glacial/interglacial cycles, likely causing rapid regional replacement of biota. We demonstrate how recent atmosphere-ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) simulations of the climate of the past 21,000 years can provide credible estimates of the details of climate change on decadal to centennial time scales, showing that these details differ radically from what might be inferred from longer time scale information. High temporal resolution information can provide more meaningful estimates of the magnitude and pace of climate shifts, the location and timing of drivers of physiological stress, and the extent of novel climates. They also produce new opportunities to directly investigate whether short-term climate variability is more important in shaping biodiversity patterns, rather than gradual changes in long-term climatic means. Together these more accurate measures of past climate instability are likely to bring about a better understanding of the role of paleoclimatic change and variability in shaping current macro-ecological patterns in many regions of the world.

Damien A. Fordham, Frédérik Saltré, Stuart C. Brown, Camille Mellin, Tom M.L. Wigley