Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability  Other
reports in this collection   Climate change may cause responses
in many human and natural systems, influencing human health
(disease outbreaks, heat/cold stress), agriculture (yield, pest
outbreaks, crop timing), physical systems (glaciers, icepack,
streamflow), and biological systems (distributions/abundances of
species, timing of events). In intensely human-managed systems,
the direct effects of climate change may be either buffered or
so completely confounded with other factors that they become
impossible to detect. Conversely, in systems with little human
manipulation, the effects of climate change are most
transparent. Systems for which we have a good process-based
understanding of the effects of climate and weather events, and
have had minimal human intervention, may act as indicators for
the more general effects of climate change in systems and
sectors where they are less readily studied.   The cryosphere is
very sensitive to climate change