This book presents the climate archives of the tropics and critically discusses their palaeoclimatic informative value. Based on decades of research the author demonstrates that a lack of geoecological knowledge leads to misinterpretations in modeling climate futures. The results presented here call for a correction of many widely held views about the role of atmospheric greenhouse gases in global warming over the past 150 years.
The book is intended for natural scientists of all disciplines who are looking for a synopsis of the problem area "Our climate in the past, present and future in the tropics".Professor Dr. rer. nat. Klaus Heine has been researching prehistoric climate since the 1970s, combining glacial geology, desert research, fluvial morphology, and soil science in a multidisciplinary way. Numerous research visits, often lasting several months, have taken him to Mexico, southern Africa, the South American tropics, and Australia. In addition to teaching at the Universities of Bonn, Saarbrücken, and Regensburg, he was a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia (Canada) in 1994 and at Kyoto University (Japan) in 2005/06. He is (co-)author of 150 publications in national and international journals and (co-)editor of several scientific books. He discussed his results in national and international seminars, projects, congresses, and field trips on five continents. Like no other, he surveys the development of global change research since its beginnings and can mediate hotly contested views on climate change.