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Africa: Greening of the Sahara

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Challenges of a Changing Earth

Part of the book series: Global Change — The IGBP Series ((GLOBALCHANGE))

Abstract

In many classical considerations about climate, its interaction with the biosphere played a dominant role. For example, (1936) described vegetation as “crystallised, visible climate” and referred to it as an indicator of climate much more accurate than our instruments. However until a few decades ago, many climate researchers doubted that vegetation could have a strong and significant impact on global climate changes besides those impacts related to modification of carbon storage and hence atmospheric CO2 concentration. Today, we are convinced that in some regions, which we call “hot spots”, vegetation also affects continent-scale atmospheric motion — North Africa is an excellent example of such a hot spot.

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Claussen, M., Brovkin, V., Ganopolski, A. (2002). Africa: Greening of the Sahara. In: Steffen, W., Jäger, J., Carson, D.J., Bradshaw, C. (eds) Challenges of a Changing Earth. Global Change — The IGBP Series. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19016-2_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19016-2_23

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-62407-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-19016-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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