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This book examines lived experiences and perceptions of climate change, changing consumption practices, and intra- and intergenerational justice with urban residents in China, Uganda, and the United Kingdom. The book draws on an interdisciplinary research programme called INTERSECTION, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2014 to 2017. INTERSECTION was an innovative, cross-national programme that employed participatory arts and social research methods with urban residents in three cities: Jinja in Uganda, Nanjing in China, and Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Drawing together a unique dataset from these three cities -- which are very differently positioned in relation to global networks of production and consumption, (de)industrialisation and vulnerability to climate change -- the research demonstrates how people engage selectively with the ‘global storm’ and the ‘intergenerational storm’ of climate change.  The research reveals a ‘human sense of climate’ that clouds its framing as an issue of either international and intergenerational justice. Its chapters focus on the global and intergenerational dimensions of climate change, local narratives of climate change, moral geographies of climate change, intergenerational perspectives on sustainable consumption, and imaging alternative futures through community based and creative research practices.

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our times, yet also seemingly intractable. This book draws together the state-of-the-art thinking in anthropology, approaching climate change as a nexus of nature, culture, science, politics, and belief. The book reveals new ways of thinking about the complex relationships between society and climate, science and the state, certainty and uncertainty, global and local that are manifested in climate change debates. The contributors address three major areas of inquiry: how climate change issues have been framed in previous times compared to the present; how knowledge about climate change and its impacts is produced and interpreted by different groups; and how imagination plays a role in shaping conceptions of climate change.

More than half the globe is covered by visible clouds. Clouds control major parts of the Earth’s energy balance, influencing both incoming shortwave solar radiation and outgoing longwave thermal radiation. Latent heating and cooling related to cloud processes modify atmospheric circulation, and, by modulating sea surface temperatures, clouds affect the oceanic circulation. They are also an essential component of the global water cycle, on which all terrestrial life depends. Yet clouds constitute the most poorly quantified, least understood, and most puzzling aspect of atmospheric science, and thus the largest source of uncertainty in the prediction of climate change. Because they are influenced by climate change, and because complex, unidentified feedback systems are involved, science is faced with many unanswered questions. This book begins by identifying and describing the baffling nature of clouds. It explores the boundaries of current knowledge on the spatial/temporal variability of clouds and cloud-related aerosols, as well as the factors that control clouds, and examines the extent and nature of anthropogenic perturbations. Particular emphasis is placed on the connections of clouds to climate through radiation, dynamics, precipitation, and chemistry, and on the difficulties in understanding the obvious but elusive fact that clouds must be affected by climate change. The book offers recommendations to improve the current state of knowledge and to direct future research in fields ranging from chemistry and theoretical physics to climate modeling and remote satellite sensing.

This book presents the strongest possible arguments about human population, climate change, and the relationship between Earth and human beings, discussing how people on Earth should act to stabilize human population, and why and how they should act to stabilize the composition of the atmosphere. Three arguments are offered in service of the ultimate goal that is to strike a new balance in which the scale of human activities is in keeping with the scale of natural systems. The book describes the approach to population issues that prevailed from the time population became a widespread public concern in the 1960s, and the shift in approach which took place as women's health organizations and other feminist groups weighed in on population at the Cairo conference in 1994. It outlines the current knowledge about the science of climate change, recapitulates the development of the science in the past hundred years, and describes the history and content of the negotiations, including the Rio and Berlin meetings and the Kyoto Protocol. The book explains the difficult equity issues involved, continued resistance to the negotiations, and the economic models on which much of this resistance is based. It focuses on the policy agenda that is believed to be most powerful for stemming climate change: a revenue-neutral tax shift. The book also covers the scale of emission reductions required to stabilize the climate, and the importance of energy and materials efficiency.

Debates over post-Kyoto Protocol climate change policy often take note of two issues: the feasibility and desirability of international cooperation on climate change policies, given the failure of the United States to ratify Kyoto, and the very limited involvement of developing countries; and the optimal timing of climate policies. This book offers insights into both of these concerns. It first considers the appropriate institutions for effective international cooperation on climate change, proposing an alternative to the Kyoto arrangement and a theoretical framework for such a scheme. The discussions then turn to the stability of international environmental agreements, emphasizing the logic of coalition forming (including the applicability of game-theoretical analysis). Finally, chapters address both practical and quantitative aspects of policy design, offering theoretical analyses of such specific policy issues as intertemporal aspects of carbon trade and the optimal implementation of a sequestration policy and then using formal mathematical models to examine policies related to the rate of climate change, international trade and carbon leakage, and the shortcomings of the standard Global Warming Potential index.

Predictions about global climate change have produced both stark scenarios of environmental catastrophe and purportedly pragmatic ideas about adaptation. This book takes a different perspective, exploring the idea that the challenge of adapting to global climate change is fundamentally an ethical one, that it is not simply a matter of adapting our infrastructures and economies to mitigate damage but rather of adapting ourselves to realities of a new global climate. The challenge is to restore our conception of humanity—to understand human flourishing in new ways—in an age in which humanity shapes the basic conditions of the global environment. In the face of what we have unintentionally done to Earth’s ecology, who shall we become? The contributors examine ways that new realities will require us to revisit and adjust the practice of ecological restoration; the place of ecology in our conception of justice; the form and substance of traditional virtues and vices; and the organizations, scale, and underlying metaphors of important institutions. Topics discussed include historical fidelity in ecological restoration; the application of capability theory to ecology; the questionable ethics of geoengineering; and the cognitive transformation required if we are to “think like a planet.”

Facing Climate Change explains why people refuse to accept evidence of a warming planet and shows how to move past partisanship to reach a consensus for action. A climate scientist and licensed Jungian analyst, Jeffrey T. Kiehl examines the psychological phenomena that twist our relationship to the natural world and their role in shaping the cultural beliefs that distance us further from nature. He also accounts for the emotions triggered by the lived experience of climate change and the feelings of fear and loss they inspire, which lead us to deny the reality of our warming planet. But it is not too late. By evaluating our way of being, Kiehl unleashes a potential human emotional understanding that can reform our behavior and help protect the Earth. Kiehl dives deep into the human brain’s psychological structures and human spirituality’s imaginative power, mining promising resources for creating a healthier connection to the environment—and one another. Facing Climate Change is as concerned with repairing our social and political fractures as it is with reestablishing our ties to the world, teaching us to push past partisanship and unite around the shared attributes that are key to our survival. Kiehl encourages policy makers and activists to appeal to our interdependence as a global society, extracting politics from the process and making decisions about our climate future that are substantial and sustaining.

The ongoing assault on climate science in the United States has never been more aggressive, more blatant, or more widely publicized than in the case of the hockey stick graph—a clear and compelling visual presentation of scientific data demonstrating that global temperatures have risen in conjunction with the increase in industrialization and the use of fossil fuels. Here was an easy-to-understand graph that, in a glance, posed a threat to major corporate energy interests and those who do their political bidding. The stakes were simply too high to ignore the hockey stick—and so began a relentless attack on a body of science and on the investigators whose work formed its scientific basis. The hockey stick achieved prominence in a 2001 UN report on climate change and quickly became a central icon in the “climate wars.” The real issue has never been the graph's data but rather its implied threat to those who oppose governmental regulation and other restraints to protect the environment and planet. This book shares the story of the science and politics behind this controversy. It reveals key figures in the oil and energy industries and the media front groups who do their bidding in sometimes slick, sometimes bare-knuckled ways. The book concludes with the real story of the 2009 “Climategate” scandal, in which climate scientists' emails were hacked.

Which fungus is as sensitive to light as the human eye? What are the myths and facts about the ozone hole, tanning, skin cancer, and sunscreens? What effect does light have on butterfly copulation? This book explores how various organisms—including archaebacteria, slime molds, fungi, plants, insects, and humans—sense and respond to sunlight. The chapters cover vision, photosynthesis, and phototropism, as well as such unusual topics as the reason that light causes beer to develop a “skunky” odor. The book introduces us to the types of eyes that have evolved in different animals, including those in a species of shrimp that is ostensibly eyeless; the book gives us a better appreciation of color vision; explains how plowing fields at night may be used to control weeds; and tells us about variegate porphyria, a metabolic disease that makes people very sensitive to sunlight and that may have afflicted King George III of England.

Climate change is happening all around us, and one of the telltale signs is melting glaciers. We hear about it almost daily, pieces of ice the size of continents breaking off of Antarctica or the polar arctic ice breaking up and disappearing more and more quickly opening up navigational routes once unavailable due to thick winter ice cover. Will melting ice and glaciers so far away change our lives? Meltdown takes us deep into the cryosphere, the Earth’s frozen environment and picks apart why glacier melt caused by climate change will alter (and already is altering) the way we live around the world. From rising seas that will destroy property and flood millions of acres of coastal lands, displacing hundreds of millions of people, to rising global temperatures due to reflectivity changes of the Earth because of decreased white glacier surface area, to colossal water supply changes from glacier runoff reduction, to deadly glacier tsunamis caused by the structural weakening of ice on high mountaintops that will take out entire communities living in glacier runoff basins, to escaping methane gas from thawing frozen permafrost grounds, and changing ocean temperatures that affect jet streams and ocean water currents around the planet, glacier melt is altering our global ecosystems in ways that will drastically change our everyday lives. Meltdown takes us into the little-known periglacial environment, a world of invisible subterranean glaciers in our coldest mountain ranges that will survive the initial impacts of climate change but that are also ultimately at risk due to a warming climate. By examining the dynamics of melting glaciers, Meltdown helps us grasp the impacts of a massive geological era shift occurring right before our eyes.

This book unpacks the increasingly complex relationships between food and climate change. Whether you're a chef, baker, distiller, restaurateur, or someone who simply enjoys a good pizza or drink, it's time to come to terms with how climate change is affecting our diverse and interwoven food system. The book offers an eye-opening journey through a complete menu of before-dinner drinks and salads; main courses and sides; and coffee and dessert. Along the way, the book examines the escalating changes occurring to the flavors of spices and teas, the yields of wheat, the vitamins in rice, and the price of vanilla. The story is rounded out with a primer on the global food system, the causes and impacts of climate change, and what we can all do. The book is a celebration of food and a call to action—encouraging readers to join with others from the common ground of food to help tackle the greatest challenge of our time.

The air we breathe is 21 percent oxygen, an amount higher than on any other known world. While we may take our air for granted, Earth was not always an oxygenated planet. How did it become this way? This book covers this vast history, emphasizing its relationship to the evolution of life and the evolving chemistry of the Earth. The book guides readers through the various lines of scientific evidence, considers some of the wrong turns and dead ends along the way, and highlights the scientists and researchers who have made key discoveries in the field. Showing how Earth's atmosphere developed over time, the book takes readers on a remarkable journey through the history of the oxygenation of our planet.

This clear and concise introduction to planetary climates explains the global physical and chemical processes that determine climate on any planet or major planetary satellite—from Mercury to Neptune and even large moons such as Saturn's Titan. The book presents a tour of our solar system's diverse planetary atmospheres, providing a rich foundation on their structure, composition, circulation, climate, and long-term evolution. Although the climates of other worlds are extremely diverse, the chemical and physical processes that shape their dynamics are the same. As this book makes clear, the better we can understand how various planetary climates formed and evolved, the better we can understand Earth's climate history and future. Explaining current knowledge, physical and chemical mechanisms, and unanswered questions, the book brings the reader to the cutting edge of this field.

Climate change will shape the political, economic, and cultural landscape as surely as it shapes the natural landscape. It challenges our existing political institutions, ethical theories, and ways of conceptualizing the human relationship to the environment, it defies current principles of distributive justice, transcends current discourses on rights, and disrupts our sense of place. This book argues that the conceptual tools of political theory can help us understand the obstacles to fair and effective global climate change policies, and offers a selection of scholarly efforts to do so. Illuminating the variety of political, economic, and social problems caused by global warming, the book applies a range of theoretical approaches and methodologies—from analytic philosophy and constitutional and legal theory to neo-Marxism and critical theory—using climate change as a case to test standard normative and empirical premises. It first looks at distributive justice concerns raised by climate change, including allocation of the global atmospheric commons and how to establish the basis for a fair and effective global climate policy regime, then examines the complex relationships between climate change and society, including the way that social institutions and practices construct, reinforce, aim to address, and are disrupted by climatic instability. Showing how political theory challenges and is challenged by global climate change, the book both demonstrates and evaluates innovative approaches in the developing field of environmental political theory.

After nearly a quarter century of international negotiations on climate change, we stand at a crossroads. A new set of agreements is likely to fail to prevent the global climate's destabilization. Islands and coastlines face inundation, and widespread drought, flooding, and famine are expected to worsen in the poorest and most vulnerable countries. How did we arrive at an entirely inequitable and scientifically inadequate international response to climate change? Combining rich empirical description with a political economic view of power relations, the chapters in this book document the struggles of states and social groups most vulnerable to a changing climate and describe the emergence of new political coalitions that take climate politics beyond a simple North–South divide. They offer six future scenarios in which power relations continue to shift as the world warms. A focus on incremental market-based reform, they argue, has proven insufficient for challenging the enduring power of fossil fuel interests, and will continue to be inadequate without a bolder, more inclusive and aggressive response.

Over recent decades, a wide variety of studies and assessment reports has portrayed a stark picture of humanity’s detrimental impacts on our planet’s life and environmental health. Climate change is at the heart of many of these impacts. This cannot be allowed to continue, given the relentless human population growth and ever-expanding energy and resource consumption. We have but one planet, and its ecosystem services are essential to our survival. As Rebalancing Our Climate reports, the doomsday scenario can still be averted; humanity stands at a crossroads where it must take the route of sustainable behavior. Decisive action can still make a significant difference to climate change. This is humanity’s greatest challenge. To have any chance of success, however, the time to act can be delayed no longer. Instead, it is right now: today is the future. This book documents a wealth of ways to adjust the trajectory of climate change. It outlines measures to drive massive reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and to reflect part of the incoming energy from the Sun. For all measures, the book evaluates both advantages and disadvantages. Finally, it discusses the need to protect ourselves from impacts that have become inevitable already and looks at how society may be driven to get the job done. In short, this book provides powerful facts and arguments to support informed choices.

City governments are rapidly becoming society's problem solvers. As this book shows, nowhere is this more evident than in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto, where the cities' governments are taking on the challenge of addressing climate change. This book focuses on the specific issue of reducing urban greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and develops a new framework for distinguishing analytically and empirically the policy agendas city governments develop for reducing GHG emissions, the governing strategies they use to implement these agendas, and the direct and catalytic means by which they contribute to climate change mitigation. The book uses a framework to assess the successes and failures experienced in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto as those agenda-setting cities have addressed climate change. It then identifies strategies for moving from incremental to transformative change by pinpointing governing strategies able to mobilize the needed resources and actors, build participatory institutions, create capacity for climate-smart governance, and broaden coalitions for urban climate change policy.

Melting ice sheets and warming oceans are causing the seas to rise. By the end of this century, hundreds of millions of people living at low elevations along coasts will be forced to retreat to higher and safer ground. Because of sea-level rise, major storms will inundate areas farther inland and will lay waste to critical infrastructure, such as water-treatment and energy facilities, creating vast, irreversible pollution by decimating landfills and toxic-waste sites. This big-picture, policy-oriented book explains in gripping terms what rising oceans will do to coastal cities and the drastic actions we must take now to remove vulnerable populations. The authors detail specific threats faced by Miami, New Orleans, New York, and Amsterdam. Aware of the overwhelming social, political, and economic challenges that would accompany effective action, they consider the burden to the taxpayer and the logistics of moving landmarks and infrastructure, including toxic-waste sites. They also show readers the alternative: thousands of environmental refugees, with no legitimate means to regain what they have lost. The authors conclude with effective approaches for addressing climate-change denialism and powerful arguments for reforming U.S. federal coastal management policies.

This is a multidisciplinary reexamination of the Gaia hypothesis, which was introduced by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the early 1970s. The Gaia hypothesis holds that Earth’s physical and biological processes are linked to form a complex, self-regulating system, and that life has affected this system over time. Until a few decades ago, most of the earth sciences viewed the planet through disciplinary lenses: biology, chemistry, geology, atmospheric, and ocean studies. The Gaia hypothesis, on the other hand, takes a very broad interdisciplinary approach. Its most controversial aspect suggests that life actively participates in shaping the physical and chemical environment on which it depends in a way that optimizes the conditions for life. Despite initial dismissal of the Gaian approach as New Age philosophy, it has today been incorporated into mainstream interdisciplinary scientific theory, as seen in its strong influence on the field of Earth System Science. This book provides a multi-faceted examination of Gaia as science and addresses significant criticism of, and changes in, the hypothesis since its introduction. Chapters explore the scientific, philosophical, and theoretical foundations of Gaia. They address such topics as the compatibility of natural selection and Gaian processes, Gaia and the “thermodynamics of life,” the role of computer models in Gaian science (from James Lovelock’s famous but controversial “Daisyworld” to more sophisticated models that use the techniques of artificial life), pre-Socratic precedents for the idea of a “Living Earth,” and the climate of the Amazon Basin as a Gaian system.

The Earth's climate system depends entirely on the Sun for its energy. Solar radiation warms the atmosphere and is fundamental to atmospheric composition, while the distribution of solar heating across the planet produces global wind patterns and contributes to the formation of clouds, storms, and rainfall. This book provides an unparalleled introduction to this vitally important relationship. The book covers the basic properties of the Earth's climate system, the structure and behavior of the Sun, and the absorption of solar radiation in the atmosphere. It explains how solar activity varies and how these variations affect the Earth's environment, from long-term paleoclimate effects to century timescales in the context of human-induced climate change, and from signals of the 11-year sunspot cycle to the impacts of solar emissions on space weather in our planet's upper atmosphere.