Climate change and other global environmental changes deserve attention by the the humanities - they are caused mainly by human attitudes and activities and feed back to human societies. Focussing on religion allows for analysis of various human modes of perception, action and thought in relation to global environmental change. On the one hand, religious organizations are aiming to become "greener"; on the other hand, some religious ideas and practices display fatalism towards impacts of climate change. What might be the fate of different religions in an ever-warming world? This book gathers recent research on functions of religion in climate change from theological, ethical, philosophical, anthropological, historical and earth system analytical perspectives. Charting the spread from regional case studies to global-scale syntheses, the authors demonstrate that world religions and indigenous belief systems are already responding in highly dynamic ways to ongoing and projected climate changes - in theory and practice, for better or for worse. The book establishes the research field "religion in climate change" and identifies avenues for future research across disciplines. >

The volume "Observed Global Climate" comprises a set of climate budget quantities, relevant for atmosphere and ocean (the "climate fluids") as well as for land and ice (the "climate solids"). Examples for budget quantities are temperature, salinity, wind, rain, radiation. They are displayed in standardised form for all climate subsystems. The data are arranged around the budget principle which is basic for the entire climate system. The book demonstrates that budgeting is not only a useful principle but also that "budget-thinking" has practically become state of the art in modern quantitative climatology. Examples include the global water budget (consistency of the components better than 10%) and the global energy budget (consistency better than 5%). The data are based on direct observations but have been subject to data assimilation. They are presented in gridded form and in form of maps and sections. The DVD carries the data, the original articles, figures in original colours, plus additional material like animations of the most important climate parameters and selected non-standard quantities. The gridded fields can be loaded by the user from the DVD into the personal computer.

Climate change and other global environmental changes deserve attention by the the humanities - they are caused mainly by human attitudes and activities and feed back to human societies. Focussing on religion allows for analysis of various human modes of perception, action and thought in relation to global environmental change. On the one hand, religious organizations are aiming to become "greener"; on the other hand, some religious ideas and practices display fatalism towards impacts of climate change. What might be the fate of different religions in an ever-warming world? This book gathers recent research on functions of religion in climate change from theological, ethical, philosophical, anthropological, historical and earth system analytical perspectives. Charting the spread from regional case studies to global-scale syntheses, the authors demonstrate that world religions and indigenous belief systems are already responding in highly dynamic ways to ongoing and projected climate changes - in theory and practice, for better or for worse. The book establishes the research field "religion in climate change" and identifies avenues for future research across disciplines.