Abstract
The phrase, ‘the future of the past,’ is in many ways the epitome of Earth System science and global change. For the natural component of the system, the statement is to a large extent true; for anthropogenically induced change, it is true only for the Anthropocene—the latest era in Earth’s history in which the influence of humanity has come to rival that of nature. While humans have modified their environment from earliest times, the scale of that modification only assumed global proportions after the Industrial Revolution. Initially, global change science was concerned only with the global dimensions of natural and human-induced change. Increasingly, however, scientists have come to recognise that regional processes must be taken into account in global change science.
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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Tyson, P. et al. (2002). Regional Studies and Global Change. In: Tyson, P., et al. Global-Regional Linkages in the Earth System. Global Change — The IGBP Series (closed). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-56228-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-56228-0_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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