A timely and accessible analysis of one of the most crucial and contentious issues facing the world today – the processes and consequences of natural and human induced changes in the structure and function of the climate system.Integrating the latest scientific developments throughout, the text centres on climate change control, addressing how weather and climate impact on environment and society.

By looking backward at the course of great extinctions, a paleontologist sees what the future holds.More than 200 million years ago, a cataclysmic event known as the Permian extinction destroyed more than 90 percent of all species and nearly 97 percent of all living things. Its origins have long been a puzzle for paleontologists. During the 1990s and the early part of this century, a great battle was fought between those who thought that death had come from above and those who thou...

Twenty thousand years ago our planet was an icehouse. Temperatures were down six degrees; ice sheets kilometres thick buried much of Europe and North America and sea levels were 130m lower. The following 15 millennia saw an astonishing transformation as our planet metamorphosed into the temperate world upon which our civilisation has grown and thrived. One of the most dynamic periods in Earth history saw rocketing temperatures melt the great ice sheets like butter on a hot summer's day; fe...

In this wide-ranging Very Short Introduction to climate, Mark Maslin considers all aspects of the global climate system, exploring and explaining the different components that control climate on Earth. He considers the processes that allow energy to reach the Earth and how it is redistributed around the planet by the ocean-atmosphere system; the relationship and differences between climate and the weather; how climate has affected life on Earth and human settlements; and the cycli...

A Short Introduction to Climate Change provides a clear, balanced and well documented account of one of the most important issues of our time. It covers developments in climate science over the past 250 years and shows that recent climate change is more than the result of natural variability. It explains the difference between weather and climate by examining changes in temperature, rainfall, Arctic ice and ocean currents. It also considers the consequences of our use of fossil fuels and d...

Physical Geography: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to the interactions, systems and processes that have shaped, and continue to shape, the physical world around us. This book introduces five key aspects of the study of physical geography:atmosphere, weather and climate systemsthe carbon cycle and historic and contemporary climate changeplate tectonics, weathering, erosion and soilsthe role of water and ice in shaping t...

An incredible wealth of scientific data on global warming has been collected in the last few decades. The history of the Earth's climate has been probed by drilling into polar ice sheets and sediment layers of the oceans' vast depths, and great advances have been made in computer modelling of our climate. This book provides a concise and accessible overview of what we know about ongoing climate change and its impacts, and what we can do to confront the climate crisis. Using clear and simpl...

What were the landscapes of the past like? What will landscapes look like in the future? Landscapes are all around us, but most of us know very little about how they have developed, what goes on in them, and how they react to changing climates, tectonics and human activities. Examining what landscape is, and how we use a range of ideas and techniques to study it, Andrew Goudie and Heather Viles demonstrate how geomorphologists have built on classic methods pioneered by some great 19th cent...

Tectonic geomorphology is the study of the interplay between tectonic and surface processes that shape the landscape in regions of active deformation and at time scales ranging from days to millions of years. Over the past decade, recent advances in the quantification of both rates and the physical basis of tectonic and surface processes have underpinned an explosion of new research in the field of tectonic geomorphology. Modern tectonic geomorphology is an exceptionally integrative field ...

The Weather Makers tells the dramatic story of the earth's climate, of how it has changed, how we have come to understand it, and of what that means for the future. Tim Flannery's gripping narrative takes the reader on an extraordinary journey into the past and around the globe, bringing us closer to the science than ever before. Along the way he explodes the many illusions that have grown up around this subject.

The Earth's climate is already warming due to increased concentrations of human-produced greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the specter of rising sea level is one of global warming's most far-reaching threats. Sea level will keep rising long after greenhouse gas emissions have ceased, because of the delay in penetration of surface warming to the ocean depths and because of the slow dissipation of excess atmospheric carbon dioxide. Adopting a long perspective that interprets sea level ...

Which species of moth was nearly killed off by the fight for cleaner air? How does a cow's bottom contribute to global warming? Could warmer mean colder? All these questions and more are answered in 'Global Warming: A Very Peculiar History'. This book arms you with an introduction to the scientific concepts behind global warming then hits you hard with the bizarre and at times disputed facts that go along with the theory. 'Global Warming, A Very Peculiar History' includes information on th...