Global Warming in the 21st CenturyGlobal Warming in the 21st Century
Evidence of rising temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels, and damage to flora and fauna on land and in the oceans has been accumulating for several decades. Scientific bodies around the world have traced this trend to increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, most of it attributable to the consumption of fossil fuels. Despite the evidence, political debate still rages over the existence of global warming. Global Warming in the 21st Century provides a detailed review of the accumulating evidence of global warming, from the Arctic and Antarctic to the tropics, focusing special attention on a number of processes that will accelerate warming as the century passes. Extensive warming also could endanger sea life through the devastation of phytoplankton populations at the base of the oceanic food chain.
Bruce Johansen presents scientific theories on the subject that conflict with popular assumptions and explains that global warming is a slow-motion crisis in which the effects of greenhouse gas emissions are not evident in the atmosphere until roughly a half-century after they occur. Extensive reports from scientific literature explain how ozone depletion in the stratosphere and warming near the surface of the Earth are related. This three-volume work also proposes detailed solutions to global warming, including a worldwide overhaul in energy systems that will go beyond the initial diplomatic efforts of the Kyoto Protocol.
The set ends with one of the most extensive bibliographies in the field and includes more than 80 color and black and white illustrations.
This three-volume work presents a critical mass of evidence that global warming is already exerting a dramatic influence over air, land, and sea temperatures, with disastrous results for flora, fauna, and humans.
The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will soon cease to exist. Manhattan will be covered inch by inch by the Atlantic. There is nothing we can do. Johansen (communications and Native American studies, U. of Nebraska) compares popular assumptions such as these with the science that agrees or conflicts with them. Johansen notes that greenhouse gas emissions are not evident in the atmosphere until about 50 years after they occur, resulting in a slow-motion crisis. He describes the science behind the crisis and its evolving paradigm and evidence of global warming in weather patterns and trends, explains the phenomenon of melting ice and warming seas around the world, including the aforesaid sea-level rise, and describes mass extinction in plants and animals in global warming and the effects on human health. He offers a comprehensive solution by changing the way we view energy. The bibliography is very impressive. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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- Westport, Conn. : Praeger Publishers, 2006.
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