This title presents the history of climate change. Vivid text details how early studies of greenhouse gases and climate models led to our modern understanding of Earth's climate. It also puts a spotlight on the brilliant scientists who made these advances possible. Useful sidebars, rich images, and a glossary help readers understand the science and its importance. Maps and diagrams provide context for critical discoveries in the field. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
This volume, the second in the Lectures in Climate Change series, covers the full array of climate impacts and adaptation measures. It has been brought together by friends and colleagues of Dr Martin Parry, Co-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 assessment on impacts and adaptation. The writers are experts in this field and have been lead authors in many of the IPCC assessments and other major publications.Lectures in Climate Change is a unique combination of written text plus electronic slides that together comprise an informative and up-to-date set of presentations. This second volume, entitled Our Warming Planet: Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation, covers areas of climate impacts related to climate science, methods and approaches, sectors, regional and national studies, and policy and practice.The volume comprises topics such as current and future challenges of climate change, global assessments, downscaling, community-based adaptation, impacts on biodiversity, food systems, water resources, and cities. Research from across the world is presented on making science actionable through assessments, early warning and early action, communicating climate risk, documenting the uptake of adaptation on the global front, and transformation towards systemic resilience.Included with this publication are downloadable electronic slides and accompanying notes of each lecture for students, teachers, and public speakers around the world to be better able to understand and present climate change impacts and adaptation.
The processes and consequences of climate change are extremely heterogeneous, encompassing many different fields of study. Dr David Rind in his career at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and as a professor at Columbia University has had the opportunity to explore many of these subjects with colleagues from these diverse disciplines. It was therefore natural for the Lectures in Climate Change series to begin with his colleagues contributing lectures on their specific areas of expertise.This first volume, entitled Our Warming Planet: Topics in Climate Dynamics, encompasses topics such as natural and anthropogenic climate forcing, climate modeling, radiation, clouds, atmospheric dynamics/storms, hydrology, clouds, the cryosphere, paleoclimate, sea level rise, agriculture, atmospheric chemistry, and climate change education. Included with this publication are downloadable PowerPoint slides of each lecture for students and teachers around the world to be better able to understand various aspects of climate change.The lectures on climate change processes and consequences provide snapshots of the cutting-edge work being done to understand what may well be the greatest challenge of our time, in a form suitable for classroom presentation.
The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming is the comprehensive resource readers can look to for understanding why global warming happens and how we can all work together to stop it. Irreverent and entertaining, packed with essential facts and suggestions for how to effect change, the book offers a message of hope. Kids and adults alike can help prevent the full consequences of global warming-we all have a part to play.
Climate, sea level, and ice sheets have always changed, and the changes observed today are less than those of the past. Climate changes are cyclical and are driven by the Earth's position in the galaxy, the sun, wobbles in the Earth's orbit, ocean currents, and plate tectonics. In previous times, atmospheric carbon dioxide was far higher than at present but did not drive climate change. No runaway greenhouse effect or acid oceans occurred during times of excessively high carbon dioxide. During past glaciations, carbon dioxide was higher than it is today. The non-scientific popular political view is that humans change climate. Do we have reason for concern about possible human-induced climate change? This book's 504 pages and over 2,300 references to peer-reviewed scientific literature and other authoritative sources engagingly synthesize what we know about the sun, earth, ice, water, and air. Importantly, in a parallel to his 1994 book challenging "creation science," Telling Lies for God, Ian Plimer describes Al Gore's book and movie An Inconvenient Truth as long on scientific "misrepresentations." "Trying to deal with these misrepresentations is somewhat like trying to argue with creationists," he writes, "who misquote, concoct evidence, quote out of context, ignore contrary evidence, and create evidence ex nihilo."
The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook is the official companion volume to Live Earth concerts, 24 hours of nonstop concerts broadcast from around the world on July 7, 2007. The book presents 77 essential skills for stopping climate change—and for living through it. It is a fun, compelling, and sly deconstruction of a survival guide, think Boy Scout Handbook crossed with WorldChanging atop the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, that offers equal parts tongue-in-cheek suggestions, practical advice, factual information, and bluesky dreaming of ways to save the world. Each skill is presented on a spread featuring a bright, full-color instructional illustration, a brief introduction to the skill and its core ideas, a set of instructions, spin-off ideas, and scientific and environmental facts. The book also includes a resource guide that provides useful resources for the ecoconscious reader.
Climate Change is geared toward a variety of students and general readers who seek the real science behind global warming. Exquisitely illustrated, the text introduces the basic science underlying both the natural progress of climate change and the effect of human activity on the deteriorating health of our planet. Noted expert and author Edmond A. Mathez synthesizes the work of leading scholars in climatology and related fields, and he concludes with an extensive chapter on energy production, anchoring this volume in economic and technological realities and suggesting ways to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate Change opens with the climate system fundamentals: the workings of the atmosphere and ocean, their chemical interactions via the carbon cycle, and the scientific framework for understanding climate change. Mathez then brings the climate of the past to bear on our present predicament, highlighting the importance of paleoclimatology in understanding the current climate system. Subsequent chapters explore the changes already occurring around us and their implications for the future. In a special feature, Jason E. Smerdon, associate research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, provides an innovative appendix for students.
The first hopeful book about climate change, The Future Earth shows readers how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused. Which means its solutions will be similarly human-led. In The Future Earth, leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”—Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face. What could happen if we reduced carbon emissions by 50 percent in the next decade? What could living in a city look like in 2030? How could the world operate in 2040, if the proposed Green New Deal created a 100 percent net carbon-free economy in the United States? This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.
Argues that global warming is a natural, cyclical phenomenon that has not been caused by human activities and that its negative consequences have been greatly overestimated.
