Scale Relationships in the Interactions of Climate, Ecosystems, and Societies

Abstract

Abstract. Climates, ecosystems, and societies interact over a tremendous range of temporal and spatial scales. Scholarly work on forecasting climate impacts has tended to emphasize different questions, variables, and modes of explanation depending on the primary scale of interest. Much of the current debate on cause and effect, vulnerability, marginality, and the like stems from uncritical or unconscious efforts to transfer experience, conclusions, and insights across scales. This paper sketches a perspective from which the relative temporal and spatial dimensions of climatic, ecological, and social processes can be more clearly perceived, and their potential interactions more critically evaluated. Quantitative estimates of a variety of characteristic scales are derived and compared, leading to specific recommendations for the design of climate impact studies.

Scales of climate impacts

“…I hope only that it will provide a stimulus for mere systematic efforts to apply a scale perspective in quantitative terms across traditional disciplinary boundaries. A fuller discussion of data sources and interpretations is given in Clark (1985).…”

“…Changing slopes of species-area curves for the world's vegetation (C.B. Williams, 1964) and birds (Preston, 1960) show three distinct spatial scales: 'within associations' (1-300rn), characterized by (ecologically) homogeneous environments; 'between associations' (300 m to continental Clark, 1985). scale), characterized by a continuous gradient of new environments; and 'between continents', characterized by major environmental discontinuiLies leading to species isolation.…”

A Typology of Spatial and Temporal Scale Relations

“…Many subsequent examples of similar plots can be found (Clark 1987;Easterling 1997;Meyer et al 1997). Most of these "Stommel diagrams" are intended to represent characteristic scales of phenomena in terms of their extents, but occasionally a graph representing the comparative grain size of phenomena in spacetime can be found (Meetenmeyer 1989).…”

The human ecology of global change: Unresolved questions

“…On a scale of decades, however, the consequences -intended and incidental -of technological change for environmental change can be tremendous. Work on life-cycle dynamics of major technical processes suggests that 20 to 40 years is sufficient for oil to displace coal as a world energy source, for the steel industry to shift from open hearth to electric arc processing, or for world turpentine production to shift from biotic to chemical feed stocks (Ausubel and Herman 1988;Clark 1987). Each of these developments, and many other like them, have had major implications for environmental change, though few were undertaken with environmental issues in mind.…”