This volume, the outcome of an excellent meeting on

‘‘Climate Variability through Europe and Africa’’ in

2001, comprises 28 chapters on environmental and

climate variability of the last 250,000 years for

Africa and Europe. The volume includes a brief

introduction, ten chapters on Africa, four on the

Mediterranean region, four on mid- and high latitude

Northwestern Eurasia, two on climate modeling, two

on aspects related to climate and its effects on soci-

eties in Africa, and two synthesis chapters. Overall

this volume presents an impressive overview of the

range of ongoing paleoclimate research along the

whole Afro-European transect, the result of many

years of intense efforts by F. Gasse and R. Battarbee

in forging a scientific community under the umbrella

of PAGES/IGBP. This volume represents another

highlight of the international efforts on improving our

understanding of global change.

The first three chapters set the stage by discussing

briefly present-day climate and key paleoclimate

questions, the types of paleoclimate archives and

proxies, some of the major climate forcing parame-

ters and ocean–atmosphere–land linkages and inter-

actions relevant along this inter-hemispheric transect.

The following ten chapters on African paleocli-

mates are in part case studies and in part regional

overviews, focusing on millennial changes during the

last two glacial-interglacial cycles and on century-to-

decadal changes during the last 10,000 years. An

excellent review of South Africa’s diversity of long

and well-dated mid to late Pleistocene and Holocene

marine and continental records documents the dom-

inant influence of orbital precession in modulating

moisture changes during the time interval of isotope

stages 6 to 4, while with the beginning of stage 3

Antarctica appears to have become the primary

forcing of climate change, producing cooling in

South Africa at the time of the Antarctic Cold

Reversal and reduced westerly circulation during the

early Holocene when the circum-Antarctic vortex

was reduced.

The following six chapters provide overviews on

tropical and subtropical climate variability in eastern

and western Africa, including two case studies on the

limnological history of Lake Malawi and on Nigerian

coastal vegetation changes. For this region new

techniques involving isotope geochemistry and their

climate signal have greatly enhanced our under-

standing of the timing of the latitudinal shifts of the

Intertropical Convergence Zone and the strength of

the Indian Monsoon. Like for southern Africa,

millennial climate variability in tropical and sub-

tropical Africa seems also dominated by orbital

precession forcing. Even the abrupt termination of the

‘‘African humid period’’ at 5.5k is thought to

respond to the gradual insolation change, occurring

abruptly because of vegetation feedbacks as

suggested by paleoclimate modeling simulations.

V. Markgraf (&)

Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of

Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0450, USA

J Paleolimnol (2006) 36:319–321

DOI 10.1007/s10933-005-5270-3

123

BOOK REVIEW

R. W. Battarbee, F. Gasse and C. E. Stickley (eds), Past ClimateVariability through Europe and Africa, volume 6

Springer, Dordrecht, 2004, 638 pp, Hardback, £83.00, ISBN: 1-4020-2120-8

Vera Markgraf

Published online: 24 August 2006

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Supposed teleconnections with climate changes in

polar and high northern latitude ocean records have

generally been viewed as indicating northern hemi-

sphere forcing of the tropics. However, in several

African records the timing of the termination of the

last fullglacial and the presumed 8.2 k event clearly

precedes these events in the northern hemisphere,

thereby suggested to reflect a tropical forcing of the

high latitude events. In case of the well-dated 8.2 k

event of the circum-North Atlantic region a tropical

forcing, however, seems unlikely given our under-

standing of the mechanism that produced it.

Climate variability for northern Africa’s arid and

subarid regions is discussed in the following three

chapters, based on the studies of paleolakes,

groundwater and historical ENSO-related Nile

flooding periods. Hyper-arid periods are clearly re-

lated to fullglacial intervals, during times of enhanced

northerly trade winds. Humid periods, on the other

hand, were either related to times of enhanced mon-

soon, such as during the early Holocene, or the pre-

vious interglacial (isotope stage 5e), or during times

of cool and moist glacial conditions (isotope stages 4

and 3), when the moisture was either from tropical

sources (Sahel) or from Atlantic air masses (Sahara).

Four chapters deal with the Mediterranean climate

history, based on oceanic (with focus on sapropel

layers) and terrestrial records, including a case study

on an exceptional speleothem from Israel, covering

continuously the last 185 k years. Intervals of higher

than present precipitation (pluvials) based on pres-

ence of sapropels (reflecting reduced salinity due to

increased precipitation, water column stratification

and reduction of deep water oxygenation) and spe-

leothem oxygen isotope ratios, occurred primarily in

the entire Mediterranean basin during warm periods

(isotope stages 1, 5a, 5c, 5e and 7) but also during

some cool and wet periods when evaporation was

reduced (e.g. isotope stage 6).

Northwestern Eurasian climate history is dealt with

in the subsequent four chapters, presenting a wide

range of climate proxy records (pollen, macrofossils,

beetles, bog surface wetness, tree rings, lake-varve

thickness, speleothems, and glacier fluctuations, both

in the Alps and Scandinavia/NW Russia). Most of

these proxy records discussed are calibrated in terms

of temperature or moisture, reflecting the immense

recent advances in the field of paleoclimatic research.

Although the relatively large standard deviations of

the reconstructed climate signal may render some of

the low amplitude Holocene climate variability sta-

tistically insignificant, the similarity of the climate

trends across Europe suggests consistent climate pat-

terns and forcing, primarily related to North Atlantic

oceanic (Ice Rafting Events (IRD), thermohaline cir-

culation) and atmospheric (e.g. NAO) variability.

Another major advance has been the recovery of

several, long, laminated lake sediment records,

allowing exact dating and correlation of past changes

and identification of cycles, such as sun-spot (11-year)

or Gleissberg (88-year) cycles as well as longer cy-

cles, (200-, 600-, 800-, and 1100-year), probably also

related to changes in solar forcing.

Two chapters present the state of the art of paleo-

climate modeling for the Holocene time interval,

showing marked advances in simulating paleoclimate

change by using coupled ocean–atmosphere models

linked with dynamical vegetation models. Examples

are simulations of Holocene glacier fluctuations in

Europe, last 100 years of global temperature changes

(documenting that in the last 50 years greenhouse

gases have warmed the climate at a rate of

1.7 – 0.43 K/century, while anthropogenic and natu-

ral aerosols cooled the atmosphere by 0.3 – 0.2 K/

century), and mid-Holocene global ‘‘climate opti-

mum’’ conditions, with focus on the African monsoon.

Human and societal response to climate change

and climate variability is briefly mentioned in almost

every chapter. The topic is more specifically dis-

cussed in two chapters on Africa, including a case

study in Uganda, where it is shown that famine was

most severe when shortfalls in rainfall were not off-

set by adequate responses by society. The lessons for

African societies from the paleoclimate record are

that high climate variability, especially of precipita-

tion, is the dominant characteristic of African con-

ditions. Thus, sustainability of food resources can

only be achieved as long as stabilizing economic

management takes this fact into account.

The final two chapters present a remarkable effort

in summarizing the wealth of information and ideas

presented throughout the volume for both the long

(last 250,000 years) and the short (last 10,000 years)

time frame. The emerging exceedingly complex pa-

leoclimate picture calls for primarily orbital and so-

lar-driven forcing at all time scales, which, however,

at different times are modified by a number of dif-

ferent feedbacks, including lingering effects from the

320 J Paleolimnol (2006) 36:319–321

123

Eurasian ice sheets, North Atlantic ice-rafting events,

changes in the intensity of the thermohaline circula-

tion, latitudinal shifts in the circum Antarctic front,

changes in monsoonal strength due Indian ocean

conditions and/or regional vegetation characteristics,

etc. Obviously, there is not a single answer to the

question of interhemispheric climate linkage in the

case of Europe/Africa. Instead, it emerges that during

times of reduced strength of orbital precession forc-

ing, northern as well as southern mid- and high lati-

tude changes may become the primary forcing of

climate change. More high resolution dating of some

African records may even yield sufficiently precise

information to propose a tropical forcing for northern

and southern hemisphere high latitude changes.

Given these truly complex climate patterns and

interactions along the Europe–Africa transect, it

would have been important to include at the onset of

the volume a chapter on synoptic climates, how the

different forcing parameters influence specific re-

gional climates and climate variability. As it stands

each chapter attempts to deal with interpreting their

records according to the authors understanding of the

regional climate, leading to an almost confusing array

of interpretations. One example is ENSO. While

historical ENSO variability (based on Nile flood data)

is presented in one chapter, no other chapter tries to

assess ENSO’s influence on African and Mediterra-

nean climates.

Overall, the volume is very well edited, including

the figures. I have only found one mistake in Fig. 1,

chapter 21 (Eurasian glaciations), where the isotope

stages 5d and 5e should instead be labelled 5c and 5d,

as otherwise 5e (Eemian) is represented by major

glacial advances. The editors have to be congratu-

lated for their excellent work.

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