Climate change threatens the economy of the United States in myriad ways, including increased flooding and storm damage, altered crop yields, lost labor productivity, higher crime, reshaped public-health patterns, and strained energy systems, among many other effects. Combining the latest climate models, state-of-the-art econometric research on human responses to climate, and cutting-edge private-sector risk-assessment tools, Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus crafts a game-changing profile of the economic risks of climate change in the United States. This prospectus is based on a critically acclaimed independent assessment of the economic risks posed by climate change commissioned by the Risky Business Project. With new contributions from Karen Fisher-Vanden, Michael Greenstone, Geoffrey Heal, Michael Oppenheimer, and Nicholas Stern and Bob Ward, as well as a foreword from Risky Business cochairs Michael Bloomberg, Henry Paulson, and Thomas Steyer, the book speaks to scientists, researchers, scholars, activists, and policy makers. It depicts the distribution of escalating climate-change risk across the country and assesses its effects on aspects of the economy as varied as hurricane damages and violent crime. Beautifully illustrated and accessibly written, this book is an essential tool for helping businesses and governments prepare for the future.

For most of history, humans have made every possible effort to accurately foretell the weather, evolving from the use of guesswork, rule of thumb, and signs in the sky to the development of contemporary forecasting techniques drawn from two scientific disciplines, climatology and meteorology. The Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather 2nd Edition provides a comprehensive history of the development of this practice, as well as provides a thoroughly up-to-date resource with many additions, revisions, and updates to this field of ever-increasing importance since the publication of the First Edition in 1996. In over 330 entries, the Encyclopedia covers essential topics that include the processes that produce weather, the circulation of the atmosphere that produces the world's climates, classification of climates, important scientific concepts used by climatologists and meteorologists, as well as the history atmospheric sciences, biographies of noteworthy contributors to the field, and significant weather events, from extreme tropical cyclones to tornadoes to hurricanes. New to this edition are articles on headline-grabbing topics that include the Kyoto Protocol, global warming, tradable permits, and extreme weather. Each entry is fully cross-referenced, to both definitions of weather- and climate-related terms as well as additional sources for further study. Over 300 photographs, maps, and charts offer highly evocative depictions of various weather and climate conditions around the world and across time. The Encyclopedia is also equipped with historical examples of disasters caused by bad weather, milestones in the development of the atmospheric sciences, and the geological time scale round out this survey, making it a comprehensive and authoritative resource for anyone doing research in this area or working in the field.