Environmental Change: Key Issues and Alternative Approaches: Key Issues and Alternative Perspectives
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 8/25/2005
EAN 9780521536332, ISBN10: 0521536332
Paperback, 386 pages, 24.6 x 18.8 x 2 cm
Language: English
Environmental Change: Key Issues and Alternative Approaches describes and explains the significance of past and contemporary environmental and climatic change. It outlines the conceptual framework for studies of environmental change by posing key questions and presenting the results of relevant research. It provides a non-specialist introduction to models in environmental change research and to the study of past environmental changes. Covering the last 400 000 years, special emphasis is placed on past periods of rapid warming, the nature of climatic variability over the last 1000 years and the dramatic and accelerating changes in the Earth system heralded by the industrial revolution. The book is extensively referenced and illustrated. This book provides a balanced, non-specialist basis for understanding and exploring the scientific issues underlying global change for advanced undergraduates in geography, environmental, earth, biological and ecological sciences.
1. Defining and exploring the key questions
2. An introduction to models and modelling
3. The palaeo-record
approaches, timeframes and chronology
4. The palaeo-record
archives, proxies and calibration
5. Glacial and interglacial worlds
6. The transition from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene
7. The Holocene
8. The Anthropocene – a changing atmosphere
9. The Anthropocene – changing land
10. The Anthropocene
changing aquatic environments and ecosystems
11. Changing biodiversity
12. Detection and attribution
13. Future mean global temperatures and sea-level
14. From the global to the specific
15. Impacts and vulnerability
16. Sceptics, responses and partial answers.
'This is a remarkable text. It takes both method and data and subjects them to rigorous analysis ... there are numerous books on the global warming debate but this is the first seen that actually looks in detail at the substance behind the article. This is a definite 'must buy' for both institutional and personal shelves.' British Ecological Society