ABSTRACT
Editors’ note The comment is often made that ‘environmental change’ is frequently used synonymously with ‘climatic change’. In this chapter Nicholas Clifford and John McClatchey attempt to see if we can identify changes of a shorter duration than Grove considered. They do so with respect to one variable, temperature in England, because we have comparatively good records for this variable over the past three hundred years. But even in examining one variable it rapidly becomes clear that there are many indices that may be relevantincluding for example the frequency of temperature extremes rather than averages. Their major conclusions throw doubt on our ability either to understand or to predict even short-term change, and these caveats should be borne in mind when in later chapters there are passing and sometimes rather token references to ‘scientific uncertainty’.
