United States
£ GBP
In our time, the global population has become large enough to cause perceptible environmental changes all over the world. With it, a new science of global change has emerged, mostly as a practical matter to understand and manage the earth's habitability and create a sustainable environment for some time to come – one which balances the benefits of technological and societal advances with their potential, less desirable side effects. These concerns began with the depletion of the ozone layer and its possible adverse consequences on human health, and have, in recent decades, shifted to climate change driven by ongoing global warming.
Why are these global changes occurring? How will they affect our lives? If we find the effects undesirable, what should we do? This book will attempt to answer these questions. It will show how to accomplish the goal of managing our climate, what it will take, and when it needs to be done. Such a management process has to be dynamic, making it more complex and less didactic, requiring changes in strategy to achieve a longer-term goal as our knowledge advances.
Global Climate Change and Human Life is a comprehensive and cohesive look at the emerging field of global change science. Using models that take the theoretical or conceptual understanding and translate them into mathematical forms, the book lays out a holistic view of the science that develops and teaches the main principles, concepts and conclusions. In the end, readers will be empowered to use science and the scientific method to decide how important and timely climate change is as a social issue and which solutions can succeed.
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. The Framework
Chapter 3. Atmospheric Composition
Chapter 4. Mass Balance Theory and Small Models
Chapter 5. Transport Processes
Chapter 6. Mechanisms of Sources and Sinks
Chapter 7. Balance of Climate Gases and Aerosols
Chapter 8. The Science Of Climate
Chapter 9. Instructive Climate Models
Chapter 10. Climate Feedbacks
Chapter 11. Match of Climate Change Observed and Modeled
Chapter 12. Population, Affluence and Global Change
Chapter 13. Impacts of Climate Change on Humans
Chapter 14. Climate Management
Chapter 15. Possible Futures
Aslam Khalil is a Professor of Physics at Portland State University. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the Center for Particle Theory at the University of Texas, Austin and a PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering from OGI in Portland, Oregon. He has published more than 200 papers most of which deal with the human impact on the Earth’s climate, particularly from non-CO2 greenhouse gases. This work contributed to international agreements for controlling global climate and ozone depletion such as the Kyoto and Montreal Protocols. He won the Outstanding Scientist Award in 2004 and was recognized as one of the most cited authors in the world in the environmental sciences by ISI.
