Global Environmental Change reviews the facts and the uncertainties relating to some of the major environmental issues facing us today--greenhouse warming, loss of stratospheric ozone, and acid precipitation--and shows how these facts and uncertainties are dealt with by both governmental and nongovernmental agencies. Anticipated environmental changes in future decades are described and explained, and the consequences of those projected changes are described for rise of sea level, water resources, agriculture, ecological systems, and other topics. Three chapters of the study are devoted to the roles of academic institutions, government agencies, and nongovernmental agencies in developing and implementing policies. Another chapter discusses the relationship of U.S. research and environmental policy to international research and environmental policy, emphasizing how new concepts relating to global change have emerged from earlier research and out of the growing recognition of the seriousness of environmental problems. Finally, the work addresses the need for more effective interactions of science and policy.

This book is addressed to those who wish to understand the relationship between atmospheric phenomena and the nature of matter as expressed in the principles of physics. The interesting atmospheric phenomena are more than applications of gravitation, of thermodynamics, of hydrodynamics, or of electrodynamics; and mastery of the results of controlled experiment and of the related theory alone does not imply an understanding of atmospheric phenomena. This distinction arises because the extent and the complexity of the atmosphere permit effects and interactions that are entirely negligible in the laboratory or are deliberately excluded from it. the objective of laboratory physics is, by isolating the relevant variables, to reveal the fundamental properties of matter; whereas the objective of atmospheric physics, or of any observational science, is to understand those phenomena that are characteristic of the whole system. For these reasons the exposition of atmospheric physics requires substantial extensions of classical physics. It also requires that understanding be based on a coherent "way of seeing" the ensemble of atmospheric phenomena. Only then is understanding likely to stimulate still more general insights.