U.S. Global Change FY 2000 Implementation Plan and Budget
Overview Vision and Perspective for the Decade Ahead Stage for
Global Change Research in the 21st Century The U.S. Global
Change Research Program stands at the threshold of a major
transition. Over the next several years, in addition to
continuing to improve our understanding of the Earth’s
environment and how it is changing, the program will advance
greatly our understanding of the implications of such change for
society. The research successes of the last decade have laid the
foundation for establishment of a global environmental change
information service that will allow global change research
results to be applied more effectively to national needs. In the
early 1980s, when climate research began in earnest on a global
scale, the problem of understanding the entire Earth system
seemed in many ways intractable. Climate system behavior,
excepting a few well-known features such as the ice ages and the
annual march of the seasons, seemed chaotic. Accur