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Books > Earth & environment > The environment > Pollution & threats to the environment > Global warming
Written by a leading geographer of climate, this book offers a unique guide to students and general readers alike for making sense of this profound, far-reaching, and contested idea. It presents climate change as an idea with a past, a present, and a future. In ten carefully crafted chapters, Climate Change offers a synoptic and inter-disciplinary understanding of the idea of climate change from its varied historical and cultural origins; to its construction more recently through scientific endeavour; to the multiple ways in which political, social, and cultural movements in today's world seek to make sense of and act upon it; to the possible futures of climate, however it may be governed and imagined. The central claim of the book is that the full breadth and power of the idea of climate change can only be grasped from a vantage point that embraces the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. This vantage point is what the book offers, written from the perspective of a geographer whose career work on climate change has drawn across the full range of academic disciplines. The book highlights the work of leading geographers in relation to climate change; examples, illustrations, and case study boxes are drawn from different cultures around the world, and questions are posed for use in class discussions. The book is written as a student text, suitable for disciplinary and inter-disciplinary undergraduate and graduate courses that embrace climate change from within social science and humanities disciplines. Science students studying climate change on inter-disciplinary programmes will also benefit from reading it, as too will the general reader looking for a fresh and distinctive account of climate change.
'A very funny, important and only moderately terrifying clarion call of a book' - Adam Kay 'HOT MESS provides loads of laughs about "the climate situation" and will position you at the right point between fear and determination' - Mark Watson 'Hilarious, informative and worrying in equal measure. And that's just the bits about having a baby' - Josie Long For fans of Randall Munro's WHAT IF? Matt Parker's HUMBLE PI and anyone looking for practical tips on how to stop the end of the world! Dr Matt Winning is a stand-up comedian and environmental economist with a PHD in climate change policy, which means he's the sort of doctor who will rush to your side if you fall ill on a plane, but only to berate you for flying. We are currently facing a global climate emergency. You've probably noticed. But why does the end of the world need to be so depressing? HOT MESS aims to both lighten the mood and enlighten readers on climate change. This is a book for people who care about climate change but aren't doing much about it, helping readers understand what the main causes of climate change are, what changes are needed, and what they can (and cannot) do about it. But, most importantly, it is book that'll help people find the comedy in climate change, because if we can do that, well, we can do bloody anything. 'Climate change is no laughing matter - oh yes it is - with Matt Winning's superb, hilarious, side-splitting book that makes you take a whole new look at the climate crisis, surviving having children and life in general' - Mark Maslin, author of How to Save Our Planet 'The first book about climate change that made me laugh out loud. If you've been too freaked out to subject yourself to the climate crisis, Hot Mess is the kick in the pants you need to start making yourself useful.' - Prof. Kimberly Nicholas, author of Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World
There are few more beautiful places than Scotland's winter mountains. But even when most of the snow has melted, isolated patches can linger well into summer and beyond. In The Vanishing Ice, Iain Cameron chronicles these remarkable and little-seen relics of the Ice Age, describing how they have fascinated travellers and writers for hundreds of years, and reflecting on the impact of climate change. Iain was nine years old when snow patches first captured his imagination, and they have been inextricably bound with his life ever since. He developed his expertise through correspondence (and close friendship) with research ecologist Dr Adam Watson, and is today Britain's foremost authority on this weather phenomenon. Iain takes us on a tour of Britain which includes the Scottish Highlands, the Southern Uplands, the Lake District and Snowdonia, seeking elusive patches of snow in wild and often inaccessible locations. His adventures include a perilous climb in the Cairngorms with comedian Ed Byrne, and glorious days spent out on the hills with Andrew Cotter and his very good dogs, Olive and Mabel. Based on sound scientific evidence and personal observations, accompanied by stunning photography and wrapped in Iain's shining passion for the British landscape, The Vanishing Ice is a eulogy to snow, the mountains and the great outdoors.
Water is the driving force of all nature. This old quote from Leonardo da Vinci reminds us that without water life is simply not possible. As a consequence, water is probably the most important wealth for humanity. In spite of this, drinking water is still polluted by man-made toxicals gathered by waters in soils and the atmosphere. This book presents advanced methods to clean water and air. Chapters also focus on biofuels, greenhouse gases and genetically modified crops.
Fisheries science in North America is changing in response to a changing climate, new technologies, an ecosystem approach to management and new thinking about the processes affecting stock and recruitment. Authors of the 34 chapters review the science in their particular fields and use their experience to develop informed opinions about the future. Everyone associated with fish, fisheries and fisheries management will find material that will stimulate their thinking about the future. Readers will be impressed with the potential for new discoveries, but disturbed by how much needs to be done in fisheries science if we are to sustain North American fisheries in our changing climate. Officials that manage or fund fisheries science will appreciate the urgency for the new information needed for the stewardship of fish populations and their ecosystems. Research organizations may want to keep some extra copies for a future look back into the thoughts of a wide range of fisheries professionals. Fisheries science has been full of surprises with some of the surprises having major economic impacts. It is important to minimize these impacts as the demand for seafood increases and the complexities of fisheries management increase.
Displacement caused by climate change is an area of growing concern. With current rises in sea levels and changes to the global climate, it is an issue of fundamental importance to the future of many parts of the world. This book critically examines whether States have obligations to protect people displaced by climate change under international refugee law, international human rights law, and the international law on statelessness. Drawing on field work undertaken in Bangladesh, India, and the Pacific island States of Kiribati and Tuvalu, it evaluates whether the phenomenon of 'climate change-induced displacement' is an empirically sound category for academic inquiry. It does so by examining the reasons why people move (or choose not to move); the extent to which climate change, as opposed to underlying socio-economic factors, provides a trigger for such movement; and whether traditional international responses, such as the conclusion of new treaties and the creation of new institutions, are appropriate solutions in this context. In this way, the book queries whether flight from habitat destruction should be viewed as another facet of traditional international protection or as a new challenge requiring more creative legal and policy responses. law, and the international law on statelessness. Drawing on
Our realisation of how profoundly glaciers and ice sheets respond to climate change and impact sea level and the environment has propelled their study to the forefront of Earth system science. Aspects of this multidisciplinary endeavour now constitute major areas of research. This book is named after the international summer school held annually in the beautiful alpine village of Karthaus, Northern Italy, and consists of twenty chapters based on lectures from the school. They cover theory, methods, and observations, and introduce readers to essential glaciological topics such as ice-flow dynamics, polar meteorology, mass balance, ice-core analysis, paleoclimatology, remote sensing and geophysical methods, glacial isostatic adjustment, modern and past glacial fluctuations, and ice sheet reconstruction. The chapters were written by thirty-four contributing authors who are leading international authorities in their fields. The book can be used as a graduate-level textbook for a university course, and as a valuable reference guide for practising glaciologists and climate scientists.
Integrated Regional Assessment (IRA) promotes a better understanding of how regions contribute to global environmental change. This book provides a detailed treatment of the methodological challenges of IRA and a set of international examples illustrating the practice of such assessments at the regional scale. The first nine chapters address questions of scale, uncertainty, quantitative versus qualitative approaches, and particular conceptual frameworks for IRA evaluation. The next five chapters illustrate a range of IRA activities combining qualitative and quantitative approaches in innovative ways. The final five chapters review IRA as a process from an implementation perspective. This volume is the culmination of the START/CIRA/IHDP initiative: a collection of international research programmes, including the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). This is an important resource for researchers and policymakers in environmental science and policy.
In the ongoing effort to combat global climate catastrophe, animal agriculture has long been a subject of contention. On the one hand, most agree that across the world increasing meat and dairy consumption are accelerating anthropogenic climate change. On the other hand, proponents of the livestock industry argue that modern advancements reduce greenhouse gas emissions from efficient livestock production to negligible quantities. Some even maintain that grass-based livestock production has a net positive impact on the environment, due to the carbon sequestration caused by grazing. Whom are we to believe? This book shows us that the answer is not so clear-cut. Beginning with the implications of the UN's Livestock's Long Shadow report, it breaks down the blind spots and highlights the insights of the most prominent pro-meat arguments, as well as of the push for a global switch to vegetarianism. While advances in efficiency might reduce greenhouse gas emissions per unit of meat or milk produced, attendant decreases in cost can enable overconsumption and thus produce more waste. And while carbon sequestration is beneficial, it is not a reliable cure-all for the industry. Due to the economics of farming, however, eliminating meat consumption may not even reduce emissions at all. The truth about livestock production is much more nuanced but, luckily, also far more holistic. The future of agricultural policy will have to take into consideration factors such as human health and economics, as well as climate. Eschewing ideology for empirical rigor, this book paves an actionable path forward for both consumers and producers, offering unique solutions for each livestock system and simple, everyday adjustments for the average omnivore.
Since its emergence in the 1990s, the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) has focused on unsettling traditional understandings of the 'city' as entirely distinct from nature, showing instead how cities are metabolically linked with ecological processes and the flow of resources. More recently, a new generation of scholars has turned the focus towards the climate emergency. Turning up the heat seeks to turn UPE's critical energies towards a politically engaged debate over the role of extensive urbanisation in addressing socio-environmental equality in the context of climate change. The collection brings together theoretical discussions and rigorous empirical analysis by key scholars spanning three generations, engaging UPE in current debates about urbanisation and climate change. Engaging with cutting edge approaches including feminist political ecology, circular economies, and the Anthropocene, case studies in the book range from Singapore and Amsterdam to Nairobi and Vancouver. Contributors make the case for a UPE better informed by situated knowledges: an embodied UPE that pays equal attention to the role of postcolonial processes and more-than-human ontologies of capital accumulation within the context of the climate emergency. Acknowledging UPE's rich intellectual history and aiming to enrich rather than split the field, Turning up the heat reveals how UPE is ideally positioned to address contemporary environmental issues in theory and practice. -- .
This book provides applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in environmental monitoring, with an emphasis on livestock disease detection and agricultural management in Africa to aid farmers. This proposed system entails current and innovative monitoring technologies intended to improve agricultural conditions in Africa, with a focus on Botswana, and addresses the Internet of Things (IoT) as a set of remote monitoring protocols using WSNs to improve and ensure proper environmental maintenance. In this book, the author introduces WSNs, and how the IoT can be applied to develop a system of "smart agriculture" in Africa, taking into account livestock health, climate change impacts on crops and wildlife, and technological innovations in response to climate change such as windmills and solar panels. The book will be interesting to students and researchers in engineering and life sciences, as well as practitioners working with sensing technologies for agricultural monitoring and improvement.
In the modern era, two types of international migration have consumed our attention: politically induced migration to flee war, genocide, and instability, and migration for economic reasons. Recently, though, another force has generated a new wave of refugees-global warming. Climate change has altered terrains and economies throughout the tropical regions of the world, from sub-Saharan Africa to Central America to South and Southeast Asia. In Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World, Greg White provides a rich account of the phenomenon. Focusing on climate-induced migration from Africa to Europe, White shows how global warming's impact on international relations has been significant, enhancing the security regimes in not only the advanced economies of the North Atlantic, but in the states that serve as transit points between the most advanced and most desperate nations. Furthermore, he demonstrates that climate change has altered the way the nations involved view their own sovereignty, as tightening or defining borders in both Europe and North Africa leads to an increase of the state's reaches over society. White closes by arguing that a serious and comprehensive program to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change is the only long-term solution. With an in-depth coverage of both environmental and border policy from a global perspective, Climate Change and Migration provides a provocative and much-needed link between two of the most pressing issues in contemporary international politics.
This imaginative and empowering book explores the ways that our emotions entangle us with climate change and offers strategies for engaging with climate anxiety that can contribute to social transformation. Climate educator Blanche Verlie draws on feminist, more-than-human and affect theories to argue that people in high-carbon societies need to learn to 'live-with' climate change: to appreciate that human lives are interconnected with the climate, and to cultivate the emotional capacities needed to respond to the climate crisis. Learning to Live with Climate Change explores the cultural, interpersonal and sociological dimensions of ecological distress. The book engages with Australia's 2019/2020 'Black Summer' of bushfires and smoke, undergraduate students' experiences of climate change, and contemporary activist movements such as the youth strikes for climate. Verlie outlines how we can collectively attune to, live with, and respond to the unsettling realities of climate collapse while counteracting domineering ideals of 'climate control.' This impressive and timely work is both deeply philosophical and immediately practical. Its accessible style and real-world relevance ensure it will be valued by those researching, studying and working in diverse fields such as sustainability education, climate communication, human geography, cultural studies, environmental sociology and eco-psychology, as well as the broader public. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367441265, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
This book presents a comprehensive collection of recent research on the timely topic of sustainable development goals, with a focus on developing countries. In this manner, it furnishes interdisciplinary coverage in terms of sustainable development; it sets forth the pillars of sustainability (environmental, technical and technological, social, institutional, and economic disciplines); and it explores the adaption of these pillars for long-term sustainability. With its survey of transboundary research, experiences, and lessons learned, the book offers integrated conceptual and empirical contributions from diverse interrelated fields. Viable options are set forth for societies in transition in the twenty-first century to achieve well-being in the lives of their people through the eradication of poverty, mitigation of climate change, promotion of lifelong learning opportunities, and empowerment of society. These options also make it possible to deploy affordable energy, sustain economic growth, offer innovation, reduce inequality, and finally, to help ensure global sustainability.
Explores capitalism’s role in creating the current state of climate emergency Over the last 11,700 years, during which human civilization developed, the earth has existed within what geologists refer to as the Holocene Epoch. Now science is telling us that the Holocene Epoch in the geological time scale ended, replaced by a new more dangerous Anthropocene Epoch, which began around 1950. The Anthropocene Epoch is characterized by an “anthropogenic rift” in the biological cycles of the Earth System, marking a changed reality in which human activities are now the main geological force impacting the earth as a whole, generating at the same time an existential crisis for the world’s population. What caused this massive shift in the history of the earth? In this comprehensive study, John Bellamy Foster tells us that a globalized system of capital accumulation has induced humanity to foul its own nest. The result is a planetary emergency that threatens all present and future generations, throwing into question the continuation of civilization and ultimately the very survival of humanity itself. Only by addressing the social aspects of the current planetary emergency, exploring the theoretical, historical, and practical dimensions of the capitalism’s alteration of the planetary environment, is it possible to develop the ecological and social resources for a new journey of hope.
This book elaborates on the physical principles of polarization remote sensing. It explains the reflective characteristics of surface objects and atmosphere separately, including theory, experiment, instrument and application. In addition, it introduces how polarization remote sensing works in advanced research programs as it can be used in aviation, astronomy, disaster risk prevention and navigation fields. This book serves as a fundamental and comprehensive reference for researchers and students.
As plants see it, humans are not the masters of the Earth but only one of its most unpleasant and irksome residents. They have been on the planet for only about 300,000 years ago (nothing compared to the three billon years of plant evolution), yet have changed the conditions of the planet so drastically as to make it a dangerous place for their own survival. It's time for the plants to offer advice. In this playful, philosophical manifesto, Stefano Mancuso, expert on plant intelligence, presents a new constitution on which to build our future as beings respectful of the Earth and its inhabitants. These eight articles - the fundamental pillars on which plant life is based - must henceforth regulate all living beings.
This book discusses molecular approaches in plant as response to environmental factors, such as variations in temperature, water availability, salinity, and metal stress. The book also covers the impact of increasing global population, urbanization, and industrialization on these molecular behaviors. It covers the natural tolerance mechanism which plants adopt to cope with adverse environments, as well as the novel molecular strategies for engineering the plants in human interest. This book will be of interest to researchers working on the impact of the changing environment on plant ecology, issues of crop yield, and nutrient quantity and quality in agricultural crops. The book will be of interest to researchers as well as policy makers in the environmental and agricultural domains.
After numerous scienti?c papers and books on most aspects of climate change and the design of pro-environmental policies (including some that suit some industrial lobby or another), is there relevance for another book and what is the purported role of this one? Is this yet another academic exercise or "much ado about nothing"? Do we have to bother designing green economic policies and incur transaction costs of this effort? Are there shortcomings of existing policies if we care to live "happily" on this planet? Is it not enough to care for the current generations so that the future generations can take care of themselves (or even be given the incentives for in- vations - for lack of fully provided resources)? What can "we" do about the green economic policies (and what are these anyway)? What trade-offs, if any, are re- vant in foregoing some bene?ts and in incurring some costs (not all of which can be expressed in monetary units)? What are the overarching objectives and priorities in the current context? What economic and other approaches are relevant for atta- ing the objectives? These are some of the questions the author re?ected in writing this book.
This book provides new insights into the mechanisms of plant hormone-mediated growth regulation and stress tolerance covering the most recent biochemical, physiological, genetic, and molecular studies. It also highlights the potential implications of plant hormones in ensuring food security in the face of climate change. Each chapter covers particular abiotic stress (heat stress, cold, drought, flooding, soil acidity, ozone, heavy metals, elevated CO2, acid rain, and photooxidative stress) and the versatile role of plant hormones in stress perception, signal transduction, and subsequent stress tolerance in the context of climate change. Some chapters also discuss hormonal crosstalk or interaction in plant stress adaptation and highlight convergence points of crosstalk between plant hormones and environmental signals such as light, which are considered recent breakthrough studies in plant hormone research. As exogenous application or genetic manipulation of hormones can alter crop yield under favorable and/or unfavorable environmental conditions, the utilization of plant hormones in modern agriculture is of great significance in the context of global climate change. Thus, it is important to further explore how hormone manipulation can secure a good harvest under challenging environmental conditions. This volume is dedicated to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2 and 13. The volume is suitable for plant science-related courses, such as plant stress physiology, plant growth regulators, and physiology and biochemistry of phytohormones for undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students at colleges and universities. The book can be a useful reference for academicians and scientists involved in research related to plant hormones and stress tolerance.
This collection gathers a set of seminal papers from the emerging area of ethics and climate change. Topics covered include human rights, international justice, intergenerational ethics, individual responsibility, climate economics, and the ethics of geoengineering. Climate Ethics is intended to serve as a source book for general reference, and for university courses that include a focus on the human dimensions of climate change. It should be of broad interest to all those concerned with global justice, environmental science and policy, and the future of humanity.
This book explores the real-world consequences changing ideas and strategies have on effective climate governance. Its main focus is on why accountability matters - both for transformations and transitions in international climate change governance and how international support for environmentally responsible actions, and extending shared accountabilities, might strengthen climate governance globally. A main point of discussion is if and how better understanding of accountabilities and transformations in ecosystems dynamics, the capacities of organisms to adapt, migrate or otherwise respond to environmental or climatic changes, can improve climate governance mechanisms. Bringing together a diverse set of considerations from various fields of study, chapters examine responses to environmental transformations that occur during periods of climatic crisis, such as species depletion, industrialisation, de-industrialisation or urbanisation. Throughout, this book aims to further readers understanding of if or how accountable climate governance can reduce the risks of global political disorder and widespread conflict in the 21st century, arising from environmental transformations of depleted forests, re-routed waterways, coastlines impacted by sea level rises, changed rainfall patterns and industrial practices.
This open access book is a result of the Dalhousie-led research project Safe Navigation and Environment Protection, supported by a grant from the Ocean Frontier Institute's the Canada First Research Excellent Fund (CFREF). The book focuses on Arctic shipping and investigates how ocean change and anthropogenic impacts affect our understanding of risk, policy, management and regulation for safe navigation, environment protection, conflict management between ocean uses, and protection of Indigenous peoples' interests. A rapidly changing Arctic as a result of climate change and ice loss is rendering the North more accessible, providing new opportunities while producing impacts on the Arctic. The book explores ideas for enhanced governance of Arctic shipping through risk-based planning, marine spatial planning and scaling up shipping standards for safety, environment protection and public health.
This book is a collection of extended papers based on presentations given during the ICEC 2018 conference, held in Caen, France, in August 2018. It explores both the limitations and advantages of current models, and highlights the latest developments concerning new numerical schemes, high-performance computing, multi-physics and multi-scale methods, and better interaction with field or scale model data. Accordingly, it addresses the interests of practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, and engineers active in this field. |
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