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Assessing Climate Change - Temperatures, Solar Radiation and Heat Balance
Donald Rapp
Springer (Praxis)
2008
Hardcover 374 pp ISBN 9783540765868
£117.00
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In ASSESSING CLIMATE CHANGE Donald Rapp has investigated a large body
of scientific data relevant to climate change, approaching each element with necessary (but neutral)
scientific skepticism. The chapters of the book attempt to answer a number of essential questions in
relation to global warming and climate change. He begins by showing how the earth€s climate has varied in the
past, discussing ice ages, the Holocene period since the end of the last ice age, particularly during the past 1000
years. He investigates the reliability of "proxies" for historical temperatures and assesses the hockey stick version
of global temperatures for the past millennium. To do this effectively he looks carefully at how well near surface
temperatures of land and ocean on earth have been monitored during the past 100 years or more, and looks
at the utility and significance of a single global average temperature.
Topics such as the variability of the Sun and the Earth€s heat balance are discussed in
considerable detail. The author also investigates how the current global warming trend compares with
past fluctuations in earth€s climate and what is the likelihood that the warming trend we are experiencing
now is primarily just another in a series of natural climate fluctuations as opposed to a direct result of human activities.
A key factor in understanding what may happen in the future is to examine the credibility of the global climate models
which claim that greenhouse gasses produce most of the temperature rise of the 20th Century, and
forecast much greater impacts in the century ahead.
Finally, the book considers future global energy requirements, fossil fuel usage
and carbon dioxide production, public policy relating to global warming, and agreements
such as the Kyoto Protocol.
Written for environmental scientists, climatologists, meteorologists and atmospheric physicists, intermediate
and advanced undergraduates, postgraduate students and researchers studying global warming, climate change,
and anthropogenic impacts on the environment
Contents
- Historical variations in the earth's climate
- Earth surface temperatures
- Total solar irradiance
- Temperature changes driven by changes in the sun
- Volcanic eruptions
- The earth's heat balance and the greenhouse effect
- Future fossil fuel usage and CO2 production
- Impacts of global warming
- Global climate change and public policy
To find similar publications, click on a keyword below:
Springer
: climate change
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