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This text focuses on the atmosphere and how it works as a global entity to maintain a given global climate or ozone shield and how it is influenced by human activity. A complete reference for students of environmental science and related fields, it introduces aspects of global change from a meteorological perspective. An accompanying guide to the Internet helps keep readers up to date on the latest information in the field. ... Read more

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Excellent technical introduction to global climate change
Whether you are entering a geophysical academic field or just interested in the process of global climate change and whether or not it is happeing, this book provides an excellent introduction to what is really going on in the atmosphere.
Covering not only global warming, but also long term climate change (ice ages), El Nino Southern Oscillation, the ozone hole, and changes in the carbon cycle, this book uses less than 150 pages to provide the reader a strong grasp of how the atmosphere might be changing.
What is missing from the book?Attention is focused only on the technical mechanisms of the role of the atmosphere in global climate change.The book does not address the role of human activites and hence is able to mostly maintain balance.Thus, it is a must read no matter which side of the global warming debate you stand on. ... Read more

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This book explores the effectiveness of the response of environmental groups and organizations in Britain.Examining the relative European orientation of British environmental policy, and the impact of British concerns on European environmental policy, the book examines issues of environmental diplomacy, institutional dynamics, and policy debates relating to specific concerns such as pollution, land use, transport, and natural conservation. ... Read more

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In this book, the authors demonstrate how alpineenvironments throughout the world are particularly vulnerable toglobal environmental change. Alpine populations will often be affectedearliest and most significantly, for example through extreme weathersystems, and their scope for adaptation is relatively limited. Drawingon the natural and social sciences, particularly economics, this booksupplies a broad picture of the diverse issues involved.

The authors show that observed changes in natural phenomena, such asacidity and fish toxicity in high altitude lakes, clearly support thethesis on ongoing global change induced by humans. They then analyzethe manifold socio-economic impacts of global environmental changewhich are likely to be felt in various sectors and industriesincluding tourism, insurance and water cycle management. It is shownthat adaptation options though limited can be improved, such as innatural hazard management. Finally the authors evaluate the variousmitigation options available for policymakers in agriculture, energyproduction, transport and land use planning. ... Read more

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The Earth experienced numerous cold and warm climatic excursions in the past. There is growing evidence that one of the factors that caused these changes was solar variability. In 35 chapters, leading experts present and discuss the physical mechanisms linking solar forces to the Earth's atmosphere and climate. Among other topics, the solar anomaly in the 17th century and the concomitant little ice age are covered. ... Read more

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Global Environmental Change and Agriculture offers a comprehensive perspective on the consequences and possible policy solutions for climatic change as we move into the twenty-first century.It assesses the impact of potential future global climate change on agriculture and the need to sustain agricultural growth for economic development.The book begins by examining the role of international research institutions in overcoming environmental constraints on sustainable agricultural growth and economic development.The authors then discuss how agricultural research systems may be restructured to respond to global environmental problems such as climate change and loss of genetic diversity.The discussion then extends to consider environmental accounting and indexing, to illustrate how environmental quality can be included formally in measures of national income, social welfare and sustainability.The third part of the book focuses on the effects of and policy responses to climate change.Chapters examine the effect of climate change on production, trade, land use patterns and livelihoods.They consider impacts on the distribution of income between developed and developing countries and between different social classes within the developing world, where agriculture remains a major economic activity.The authors take an economy-wide perspective to draw lessons for agricultural, trade, land use and tax policy.This book will be of special interest to agricultural, development and environmental economists as well as policy analysts in government and at international agencies confronting practical problems of environmental and economic assessment. ... Read more

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This book highlights one of the most important aspects of global change - the interaction of land use and the climate system. In separate chapters the book treats modelling of land-use patterns, the effects on climate, the effect of land use on the global carbon cycle, hydrological aspects of land use, aspects of climate change on food availability in West Africa, and the spatial requirements of bioenergy plantations. The current collection of chapters provides a unique, integrated treatment of land use in the context of global change.

Audience: This book should provide a stimulus for researchers and policy-makers alike to treat land use and land-use change in a multi-disciplinary manner.

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This book treats in detail the physical, chemical, and dynamic processes that influence atmospheric ozone in the lower stratosphere and upper troposphere. It describes general circulation models of these processes and discusses their further improvement. The observed features of ozone changes in these regions from satellite and ground-based measurements and future monitoring strategies are presented. ... Read more

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Debating the relationship between business and environment, and where this relationship is heading, this book gives voice to the industrial actors in context within industrial sectors or as part of wider institution regimes. ... Read more

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This is a timely book in light of increasing concern over global warming and environmental pollution. It describes a simulation system based on sets of computer algorithms for comprehensive analysis of data from global and regional monitoring systems. Chapters in the theoretical part of the book contain descriptions of rigorous algorithms and global environmental models. The applied part considers specific problems of environmental dynamics in areas such as the Arctic and the Caspian-Aral Seas. The purpose of this book is to develop a universal information technology to estimate the state of environmental subsystems functioning under various climatic and anthropogenic conditions. Applied mathematicians, hydrologists, geophysicists, socio-economists and other researchers of global change will find a wealth of information in this book. ... Read more

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Global Environmental Change reviews the facts and the uncertainties relating to some of the major environmental issues facing us today--greenhouse warming, loss of stratospheric ozone, and acid precipitation--and shows how these facts and uncertainties are dealt with by both governmental and nongovernmental agencies. Anticipated environmental changes in future decades are described and explained, and the consequences of those projected changes are described for rise of sea level, water resources, agriculture, ecological systems, and other topics. Three chapters of the study are devoted to the roles of academic institutions, government agencies, and nongovernmental agencies in developing and implementing policies. Another chapter discusses the relationship of U.S. research and environmental policy to international research and environmental policy, emphasizing how new concepts relating to global change have emerged from earlier research and out of the growing recognition of the seriousness of environmental problems. Finally, the work addresses the need for more effective interactions of science and policy. ... Read more

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Timely
With the Exxon/GM Motors sponsored jury still out on this issue, Fleagles book poses the pertinent question - what causes the most severe damage to the environment? Cutting down millions of trees or planting one Bush? ... Read more

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This volume summarizes the present knowledge of the various ways in which continental ice and sea ice both respond to, and in turn control climate system evolution. Interdisciplinary as this field is the contributions come from glaciologists, physical oceanographers, atmospheric general circulaltion modellers, experts on the reconstruction of past climates using data from ice cores, paleoceanographers and palynologists. The focus is on the thermohaline circulation: the influence of the deep circulation of the oceans upon the long time scale oscillation of planetary climate. ... Read more

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The book addresses the threat of climate change to world food security, by providing an authoritative review of climate change and surprise, contrasting trends in world food security, case studies of food and the environment, and chapters on adaptive responses. It reviews: trends in agriculture and food security - projections of the incidence and distribution of hunger over the next few decades; the risk and global impacts of climate change on agricultural systems, relying on alternative models of world agricultural potential that have simulated the impacts of climate change; vulnerability and multiple threats to sustainable agriculture; studies of local impacts and responses; and strategies to limit climate change and improve food security. ... Read more

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Every year NATO subsidizes the organisation of many scientifically outstanding summer schools and international symposia. The results are now published in a new thematical series, namely Global Environmental Change. This is the first volume in the new series and as its title suggests, Global Environmental Change addresses one of the most pervasive scientific issues of our time. Global change is increasingly dominating the agenda of world leaders, who as a result are becoming more concerned with the potential economic, social, and political consequences of global environmental change. The contents of this text are derived from a special NATO Workshop which sought to explain the main themes and state of the science which describe the Earth as a system and identify the natural and anthropogenic factors which affect its dynamics. ... Read more

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Soil organic matter (SOM) represents a major pool of carbon within the biosphere, roughly twice than in atmospheric CO2. SOM models embody our best understanding of soil carbon dynamics and are needed to predict how global environmental change will influence soil carbon stocks. These models are also required for evaluating the likely effectiveness of different mitigation options. The first important step towards systematically evaluating the suitability of SOM models for these purposes is to test their simulations against real data. Since changes in SOM occur slowly, long-term datasets are required. This volume brings together leading SOM model developers and experimentalists to test SOM models using long-term datasets from diverse ecosystems, land uses and climatic zones within the temperate region. ... Read more

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Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "Global Environmental Change," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Global Environmental Change in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Global Environmental Change when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name Global Environmental Change, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain. ... Read more

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Drawing on four years of field research, the authors look at how farmers manage biological resources, crop and non-crop biodiversity, soil fertility, and transform the landscape through agricultural intensification in the Sahel region of Northern Nigeria. ... Read more

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Working the Sahel
Mortimore, a British geographer with 28 years of residence in northern Nigeria and several books to his name, is an adept and rigorous practitioner of local-level cultural ecology. Bill Adams began his career examining the fate of Northern Nigeria's large irrigation schemes, and has since written extensively on conservation and sustainability questions. Working the Sahel emerged from a five year British-funded investigation into patterns of agricultural intensification and labor use in four sub-locations located on a transect of varying population density between Kano and the Nigeria-Niger border. This book subsumes some of Mortimore's long term datasets and archival material, permitting longitudinal evaluations.

Working the Sahel is a tightly focused research monograph. The key question it poses is how individual skills are exercised in "strategic and tactical" ways by households in Northern Nigeria, and how resource endowments are managed under varying population densities.The starting point is that constraints on farming activities can be distilled into four categories; rainfall, bioproductivity of plants and soil, labor, and the availability of capital. Labor constraints in Nigeria and elsewhere have been generally been relaxed as population densities rise, permitting some combination of intensification of agricultural production in-situ, economic diversification out of agriculture, and circular migration. Adaptation - a term much critiqued by anthropologists - is used quite sensibly here to describe the reflexive, longer term restructuring of Sahelian rural systems in the response to these four constraints. Both flexibility and adaptability are demanded of Sahelian farmers.

The core of the book concerns the day to day management of labor. In the four villages, high frequency time-budget observations by local researchers took place over four years, initially with the men, women and children of around 45 households. The study found that some labor inefficiencies are inevitable in dryland farming systems. Short cropping seasons in the drier villages concentrate labor demand; but since crop growth is dependent on rainfall, drought years can actually provoke labor surpluses. To maintain flexibility, therefore, labor is matched to resource endowments, and by switching between livelihood activities. Women and children make significant contributions to agricultural labor, that are greater in the drier and more extensive farming systems where Islamic seclusion is more relaxed.

A picture emerges of biodiversity maintained by cultivation practices, and only localized episodes of degradation, largely driven by precipitation fluctuations. In their view, "Nothing could be further from the scenario of reckless resource degradation which has been put about by some academics and development agencies" (p193). The book also argues farmers have already developed pathways to "indigenous intensification" (p97) in the drylands, where denied access to fertilizer.

Adaptive responses in the four villages include significant non-farm activities, since as Mortimore and Adams are at pains to stress, risk is spread through diversification. Impelled by economic factors, such as the instabilities generated by Nigeria's commodity booms and busts, and the recognition that animals offer investment opportunities, a pattern has emerged of "the more crops produced, the more livestock kept" (p132), in mixed farming systems. Private accumulation through petty trading in rural periodic markets is just part of a widely developed trading system, and markets also provide a wide range of social functions. Long distance migration, described much too briefly in the book, articulates with broader economic opportunity in regional hinterlands, and nationally.

The authors personalize some of these labor tradeoffs and decision-making processes by profiling six farmers, by means of activity charts and brief personal histories. These profiles highlight how and when households deploy their labor. The book concludes by stressing that agricultural development initiatives in the Sahel fail when they are reductionist, and ignore diversity and variability. There is a dig here at farming systems research, which has underpinned agronomic development programs in the Sahel, for its focus on efficiency criteria. Dryland farmers are not profit or efficiency maximizers, since "..'efficiency' would leave no room for flexible maneuver" (p192). The message for future development interventions is a simple one; big schemes won't work, and "the most impressive stories of development are those where a need for multiple choices, to suit a range of smallholder families, has been met, implicitly or explicitly, in the type of interventions and opportunities affecting rural households." (p191).

Politics receives too little discussion in the book, and is missing from the conceptual model used: it is only discussed as a starting point for the analysis of local farmer responses. Social and political conflict is downplayed, and not much is said about struggle and open resistance - and why such struggles (often gendered, or to do with resource access issues) might be necessary.
Nonetheless the insistence on rigorous comparative fieldwork in Working the Sahel is salutary. The authors remind us that smallholder agriculture is potentially productive, and environmentally benign, in parts of the world where the presence of globalized agricultural knowledge, pervasive development discourses, and far-reaching commodity markets is still fragmentary. To do this, the authors afford equal analytical weight to natural environments and to human activities. The book shows the real contribution that committed geographers can make to African agrarian and development studies. ... Read more

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Scientists concerned with the processes occurring in the stratosphere are becoming more and more aware of the role that the stratosphere may play in the global climate and in global change in general. This book focuses on the basic processes taking place in the stratosphere and on the stratospheric changes which may occur from either natural or anthropogenic forcing. Of major concern here is the consequence of the increasing Antarctic Ozone Hole and the possibility of similar processes occurring at northern latitudes. One of the expected consequences of the change in the stratospheric composition, mainly ozone depletion, is the change in the penetration of UV-B in the troposphere, at the surface, and in the top layers of the ocean. Monitoring and modeling of those changes are still in infancy, even though the implications may be of utmost importance for the entire biosphere. Several aspects of these consequences with regard to aquatic ecosystems, terrestrial vegetation and human health are presented by experts in these fields. ... Read more

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Water is the most effective agent in the climate system to modelate energy transfer by radiative processes, through its exchanges of latent heat and within cascades of chemcal processes. It it the source of all life on earth, and once convective clouds are formed, it enables large vertical transports of mometum, heat and various atmospheric constituants. Water triggers very complex processes at the earth's continental surfaces and within the oceans. At least water in its gaseous phase is the most important greenhouse-gas. Numerical modelling and measurements of the state of the climate system needs a very thourough understanding of all these processes and their various interactions and forcings. Therefore the management of the World Climate Research Programme established the new programme GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment) in 1988, specifically defined to determine the energy and water transport in the fast components of the climate system with the modelling and measurement means presently available and to provide new capabilities for the future. This book describes all aspects of the GEWEX. ... Read more

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This book compares existing soil erosion models and determines their suitability for predicting the impacts of global change upon soil erosion. The common datasets used for the evaluation are drawn from both temperate and semi-arid areas; they represent 73 site-years of data from seven sites in three countries. Six field-scale erosion models are evaluated; five of these are continuous-simulation types (GLEAMS, EPIC, CSEP, MEDRUSH and WEPP), the other is event-based (EUROSERM). After an introduction, the results of the model evaluation exercise are presented. Subsequent sections deal with weaknesses or omissions in current modelling approaches, descriptions of specific erosion models, and potential or actual model applications. ... Read more