Product details
- Publisher : Lutterworth Press (October 9, 1990)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0718828151
- ISBN-13 : 978-0718828158
- Item Weight : 1.48 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.14 x 0.98 x 9.21 inches
$48.45
Hardcover – October 9, 1990
by Stephen Schneider (Author)
“How important is a degree of temperature change’ A degree or two temperature change is not a trivial number in global terms and it usually takes nature hundreds of thousands of years to bring it about on her own. We may be doing that in decades … Humans are putting pollutants into the atmosphere at such a rate that we could be changing the climate on a sustained basis some ten to a hundred times faster than nature has since the height of the last ice age.” Stephen H. Schneider This essential book examines the causes of world-wide climatic change – the ‘greenhouse effect’ – that may raise world temperatures by five degrees Celsius in less than a century. Author Stephen H. Schneider describes the likely consequences – from agricultural changes and rises in sea level to public health issues and social upheaval – and addresses the most important and urgent question that anyone concerned with the fate of our planet must confront: ‘What can or should be done about the greenhouse effect” Global Warming offers a prophetic look at a year in the greenhouse century, one of slowly increasing global temperatures (a century that may have already begun). The immediate scenarios are grave: population pressures combined with devastating floods and hurricanes drive millions of ‘environmental refugees from South East Asia to find homes in Australia; California smothers under heat, smog, water shortages, and raging forest fires; and New York experiences summer heat waves so intense that hospital emergency rooms are jammed with victims. The outlook for Britain could be equally serious: the UN predicts that global warming may cause severe winter storms, the flooding of coastal defences, and even malaria in Southern England. Dr Schneider provides and authoritative and entertaining look at the science, personalities and politics behind the problem of global warming. He explains in clear, non-technical language what is scientifically well known, what is speculative, and where the major uncertainties lie. He presents an overview of sixty million years of global climate history, explaining the mechanisms that regulate climate, demonstrates how a few degrees variation can precipitate dramatic evens such as the Ice Age, and discusses how predictions are made by computer modelling to anticipate climatic changes into the next century. Global Warming provides a revealing inside look at the problems scientists encounter in dealing with other scientists, politicians and the media. Although statesmen have called for a giant international effort to tackle the issue, few concrete measures have been taken so far. Global Warming outlines the ways individuals, governments and businesses can work together to slow down the damage our impact has inflicted on the planet, and help make global development more environmentally sustainable.
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2014th Edition
by Peterson David L. (Editor), James M. Vose (Editor), Toral Patel-Weynand (Editor)
This volume offers a scientific assessment of the effects of climatic variability and change on forest resources in the United States. Derived from a report that provides technical input to the 2013 U.S. Global Change Research Program National Climate Assessment, the book serves as a framework for managing U.S. forest resources in the context of climate change. The authors focus on topics having the greatest potential to alter the structure and function of forest ecosystems, and therefore ecosystem services, by the end of the 21st century. Part I provides an environmental context for assessing the effects of climate change on forest resources, summarizing changes in environmental stressors, followed by state-of-science projections for future climatic conditions relevant to forest ecosystems. Part II offers a wide-ranging assessment of vulnerability of forest ecosystems and ecosystem services to climate change. The authors anticipate that altered disturbance regimes and stressors will have the biggest effects on forest ecosystems, causing long-term changes in forest conditions. Part III outlines responses to climate change, summarizing current status and trends in forest carbon, effects of carbon management, and carbon mitigation strategies. Adaptation strategies and a proposed framework for risk assessment, including case studies, provide a structured approach for projecting and responding to future changes in resource conditions and ecosystem services. Part IV describes how sustainable forest management, which guides activities on most public and private lands in the United States, can provide an overarching structure for mitigating and adapting to climate change.
(Paperback) [Paperback] Paperback
by Uman (Author)
(Ecological Studies, 222) 2015th Edition
by Daniel G. Gavin (Author), Linda B. Brubaker (Author)
This study brings together decades of research on the modern natural environment of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, reviews past research on paleoenvironmental change since the Late Pleistocene, and finally presents paleoecological records of changing forest composition and fire over the last 14,000 years. The focus of this study is on the authors’ studies of five pollen records from the Olympic Peninsula. Maps and other data graphics are used extensively. Paleoecology can effectively address some of these challenges we face in understanding the biotic response to climate change and other agents of change in ecosystems. First, species responses to climate change are mediated by changing disturbance regimes. Second, biotic hotspots today suggest a long-term maintenance of diversity in an area, and researchers approach the maintenance of diversity from a wide range and angles (CITE). Mountain regions may maintain biodiversity through significant climate change in ‘refugia’: locations where components of diversity retreat to and expand from during periods of unfavorable climate (Keppel et al., 2012). Paleoecological studies can describe the context for which biodiversity persisted through time climate refugia. Third, the paleoecological approach is especially suited for long-lived organisms. For example, a tree species that may typically reach reproductive sizes only after 50 years and remain fertile for 300 years, will experience only 30 to 200 generations since colonizing a location after Holocene warming about 11,000 years ago. Thus, by summarizing community change through multiple generations and natural disturbance events, paleoecological studies can examine the resilience of ecosystems to disturbances in the past, showing how many ecosystems recover quickly while others may not (Willis et al., 2010)
Hardcover – September 7, 2021
by Stephen J. Pyne (Author)
The Pyrocene tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding species, humanity, met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's history. Since terrestrial life first appeared, flames have flourished. Over the past two million years, however, one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic force by cooking the planet.
Some fire uses have been direct: fire applied to convert living landscapes into hunting grounds, forage fields, farms, and pastures. Others have been indirect, through pyrotechnologies that expanded humanity's reach beyond flame's grasp. Still, preindustrial and Indigenous societies largely operated within broad ecological constraints that determined how, and when, living landscapes could be burned. These ancient relationships between humans and fire broke down when people began to burn fossil biomass—lithic landscapes—and humanity’s firepower became unbounded. Fire-catalyzed climate change globalized the impacts into a new geologic epoch. The Pleistocene yielded to the Pyrocene. Around fires, across millennia, we have told stories that explained the world and negotiated our place within it. The Pyrocene continues that tradition, describing how we have remade the Earth and how we might recover our responsibilities as keepers of the planetary flame.2011th Edition
Landscape Development and Climate Change in Southwest Bulgaria aims to address some of the current limitations in our understanding of past Balkan climate and environment. High mountains and their ecosystems offer an outstanding opportunity for studies on the impact of climate change. The Balkan Mountains in Southeast Europe, situated at the transition between temperate and Mediterranean climate, are considered as very sensitive to historical and current global changes. The geoarchives lake sediment, peat and soil, long living trees and glaciers have been used to reconstruct the climatically-driven change of forest and treeline during the Holocene and the younger past. These processes are interrelated with complex ecological changes, as for example the seasonality of climate parameters. The landscape research approach with the analyses through multi-palaeo-geoecological proxies is new for the Balkans
(Advances in Global Change Research, 3) 2000th Edition
by John L. Innes (Editor), Martin Beniston (Editor), Michel M. Verstraete (Editor)
JOHN L. INNES University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada The interactions between biomass burning and climate have been brought into focus by a number of recent events. Firstly, the Framework Convention on Climate Change and, more recently, the Kyoto Protocol, have drawn the attention of policy makers and others to the importance of biomass burning in relation to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Secondly, the use of prescribed fires has become a major management tool in some countries; with for example the area with fuel treatments (which include prescribed burns and mechanical treatments) having increased on US National Forest System lands from 123,000 ha in 1985 to 677,000 ha in 1998. Thirdly, large numbers of forest fires in Indonesia, Brazil, Australia and elsewhere in 1997 and 1998 received unprecedented media attention. Consequently, it is appropriate that one of the Wengen Workshops on Global Change Research be devoted to the relationships between biomass burning and climate. This volume includes many of the papers presented at the workshop, but is also intended to act as a contribution to the state of knowledge on the int- relationships between biomass burning and climate change. Previous volumes on biomass burning (e. g. Goldammer 1990,Levine 1991a, Crutzen and Goldammer 1993, Levine 1996a, 1996b, Van Wilgen et al. 1997) have stressed various aspects of the biomass–climate issue, and provide a history of the development of our understanding of the many complex relationships that are involved
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