Making Sense of Weather and Climate
Making Sense of Weather and Climate

Author: Mark Denny

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-01-17

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 0231542860

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How do meteorologists design forecasts for the next day's, the next week's, or the next month's weather? Are some forecasts more likely to be accurate than others, and why? Making Sense of Weather and Climate takes readers through key topics in atmospheric physics and presents a cogent view of how weather relates to climate, particularly climate-change science. It is the perfect book for amateur meteorologists and weather enthusiasts, and for anyone whose livelihood depends on navigating the weather's twists and turns. Making Sense of Weather and Climate begins by explaining the essential mechanics and characteristics of this fascinating science. The noted physics author Mark Denny also defines the crucial differences between weather and climate, and then develops from this basic knowledge a sophisticated yet clear portrait of their relation. Throughout, Denny elaborates on the role of weather forecasting in guiding politics and other aspects of human civilization. He also follows forecasting's effect on the economy. Denny's exploration of the science and history of a phenomenon we have long tried to master makes this book a unique companion for anyone who wants a complete picture of the environment's individual, societal, and planetary impact.

Weather, Climate, and the Geographical Imagination
Weather, Climate, and the Geographical Imagination

Author: Martin Mahony

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0822987554

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As global temperatures rise under the forcing hand of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, new questions are being asked of how societies make sense of their weather, of the cultural values, which are afforded to climate, and of how environmental futures are imagined, feared, predicted, and remade. Weather, Climate, and Geographical Imagination contributes to this conversation by bringing together a range of voices from history of science, historical geography, and environmental history, each speaking to a set of questions about the role of space and place in the production, circulation, reception, and application of knowledges about weather and climate. The volume develops the concept of “geographical imagination” to address the intersecting forces of scientific knowledge, cultural politics, bodily experience, and spatial imaginaries, which shape the history of knowledges about climate.

The Anthroposcene of Weather and Climate
The Anthroposcene of Weather and Climate

Author: Paul Sillitoe

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1800732325

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While it is widely acknowledged that climate change is among the greatest global challenges of our times, it has local implications too. This volume forefronts these local issues, giving anthropology a voice in this great debate, which is otherwise dominated by natural scientists and policy makers. It shows what an ethnographic focus can offer in furthering our understanding of the lived realities of climate debates. Contributors from communities around the world discuss local knowledge of, and responses to, environmental changes that need to feature in scientifically framed policies regarding mitigation and adaptation measures if they are to be effective.

Global Warming in Local Discourses
Global Warming in Local Discourses

Author: Michael Brüggemann

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9781783749393

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Global news on anthropogenic climate change is shaped by international politics, scientific reports and voices from transnational protest movements. This timely volume asks how local communities engage with these transnational discourses.The chapters in this volume present a range of compelling case studies drawn from a broad cross-section of local communities around the world, reflecting diverse cultural and geographical contexts. From Greenland to northern Tanzania, it illuminates how different understandings evolve in diverse cultural and geographical contexts while also revealing some community.

Angry Weather
Angry Weather

Author: Friederike Otto

Publisher: Greystone Books Ltd

Published: 2020-09-12

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 1771646152

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From leading climate scientist Dr. Friederike Otto, this gripping book reveals the revolutionary science that definitively links extreme weather events—including deadly heat waves, forest fires, floods, and hurricanes—to climate change. “Meet the forensic scientists of climate change; if you like CSI, you’ll be equally enthralled with the skill and speed these folks exhibit. But the stakes are infinitely higher!” —Bill McKibben, author of Falter and The End of Nature Tied with Hurricane Katrina as the costliest cyclone on record, Hurricane Harvey caused catastrophic flooding and over a hundred deaths in 2017. Angry Weather tells the compelling, day-by-day story of the World Weather Attribution unit—a team of scientists that studies extreme weather events while they’re happening—and their race to track the connection between the hurricane and climate change. As the hurricane unfolds, Otto reveals how attribution science works in real time, and determines that Harvey’s terrifying floods were three times more likely to occur due to human-induced climate change. At the forefront of cutting-edge climate science, Friederike Otto uncovers how the new ability to determine climate change’s role in extreme weather events can dramatically transform how we view the climate crisis: from how it will affect those of us who are most vulnerable, to the corporations and governments that may find themselves held accountable in the courts. The research laid out in Angry Weather will have profound impacts, both today and for the future of humankind. Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute.

Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change
Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2016-07-28

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 0309380979

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As climate has warmed over recent years, a new pattern of more frequent and more intense weather events has unfolded across the globe. Climate models simulate such changes in extreme events, and some of the reasons for the changes are well understood. Warming increases the likelihood of extremely hot days and nights, favors increased atmospheric moisture that may result in more frequent heavy rainfall and snowfall, and leads to evaporation that can exacerbate droughts. Even with evidence of these broad trends, scientists cautioned in the past that individual weather events couldn't be attributed to climate change. Now, with advances in understanding the climate science behind extreme events and the science of extreme event attribution, such blanket statements may not be accurate. The relatively young science of extreme event attribution seeks to tease out the influence of human-cause climate change from other factors, such as natural sources of variability like El Niño, as contributors to individual extreme events. Event attribution can answer questions about how much climate change influenced the probability or intensity of a specific type of weather event. As event attribution capabilities improve, they could help inform choices about assessing and managing risk, and in guiding climate adaptation strategies. This report examines the current state of science of extreme weather attribution, and identifies ways to move the science forward to improve attribution capabilities.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

Author: Bill Gates

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-02-16

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0385546149

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions—suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.

Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change
Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change

Author: Michael Collier

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2021-11-30

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 0816547513

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No one in America would deny that the weather has changed drastically in our lifetime. We read about El Niño and La Niña, but how many of us really understand the big picture beyond our own front windows or even the headlines on the Weather Channel? Hydrologists and climatologists have long been aware of the role of regional climate in predicting floods and understanding droughts. But with our growing sense of a variable climate, it is important to reassess these natural disasters not as isolated events but as related phenomena. This book shows that floods and droughts don't happen by accident but are the products of patterns of wind, temperature, and precipitation that produce meteorologic extremes. It introduces the mechanics of global weather, puts these processes into the longer-term framework of climate, and then explores the evolution of climatic patterns through time to show that floods and droughts, once considered isolated "acts of God," are often related events driven by the same forces that shape the entire atmosphere. Michael Collier and Robert Webb offer a fresh, insightful look at what we know about floods, droughts, and climate variability—and their impact on people—in an easy-to-read text, with dramatic photos, that assumes no previous understanding of climate processes. They emphasize natural, long-term mechanisms of climate change, explaining how floods and droughts relate to climate variability over years and decades. They also show the human side of some of the most destructive weather disasters in history. As Collier and Webb ably demonstrate, "climate" may not be the smooth continuum of meteorologic possibilities we supposed but rather the sum of multiple processes operating both regionally and globally on different time scales. Amid the highly politicized discussion of our changing environment, Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change offers a straightforward scientific account of weather crises that can help students and general readers better understand the causes of climate variability and the consequences for their lives.

Preparing for Climate Change
Preparing for Climate Change

Author: Michael D. Mastrandrea

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2010-09-10

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 0262289113

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Why we should prepare for climate change now by taking anticipatory action in vulnerable regions. Global momentum is building to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So far, so good. The less happy news is that Earth's temperatures will continue to rise for decades. And evidence shows that climbing temperatures are already having serious consequences for vulnerable people and regions through droughts, extreme weather, and melting glaciers. In this book, climate experts Michael Mastrandrea and Stephen Schneider argue that we need to start adapting to climate change, now. They write that these efforts should focus primarily on identifying the places and people most at risk and taking anticipatory action—from developing drought-resistant crops to building sea walls. The authors roundly reject the idea that reactive, unplanned adaptation will solve our problems—that species will migrate northward as climates warm, and farmers will shift to new crops and more hospitable locations. And they are highly critical of “geoengineering” schemes that are designed to cool the planet by such methods as injecting iron into oceans or exploding volcanoes. Mastrandrea and Schneider insist that smart adaptation will require a series of local and regional projects, many of them in the countries least able to pay for them and least responsible for the problem itself. Ensuring that we address the needs of these countries, while we work globally to reduce emissions over the long term, is our best chance to avert global disaster and to reduce the terrible, unfair burdens that are likely to accompany global warming.

British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment
British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment

Author: Jan Golinski

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-11-15

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0226302067

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Enlightenment inquiries into the weather sought to impose order on a force that had the power to alter human life and social conditions. British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment reveals how a new sense of the national climate emerged in the eighteenth century from the systematic recording of the weather, and how it was deployed in discussions of the health and welfare of the population. Enlightened intellectuals hailed climate’s role in the development of civilization but acknowledged that human existence depended on natural forces that would never submit to rational control. Reading the Enlightenment through the ideas, beliefs, and practices concerning the weather, Jan Golinski aims to reshape our understanding of the movement and its legacy for modern environmental thinking. With its combination of cultural history and the history of science, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment counters the claim that Enlightenment progress set humans against nature, instead revealing that intellectuals of the age drew characteristically modern conclusions about the inextricability of nature and culture.