Environmental Change
Key Issues and Alternative Perspectives

Advanced non-specialist textbook explaining the significance of past and contemporary environmental and climatic change.

Frank Oldfield (Author)

9780521536332, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 25 August 2005

386 pages, 101 b/w illus.
24.6 x 18.9 x 2 cm, 0.69 kg

'Earth's climate 50 and 100 years from now ill be influenced by decisions that we make today and tomorrow. Informed people will make wise choices, and to this end Environmental Change: Key Issues and Alternative Approaches, makes an important contribution.' Polar Record

Environmental Change: Key Issues and Alternative Approaches describes and explains the significance of past and contemporary environmental and climatic change. It outlines the conceptual framework for studies of environmental change by posing key questions and presenting the results of relevant research. It provides a non-specialist introduction to models in environmental change research and to the study of past environmental changes. Covering the last 400 000 years, special emphasis is placed on past periods of rapid warming, the nature of climatic variability over the last 1000 years and the dramatic and accelerating changes in the Earth system heralded by the industrial revolution. The book is extensively referenced and illustrated. This book provides a balanced, non-specialist basis for understanding and exploring the scientific issues underlying global change for advanced undergraduates in geography, environmental, earth, biological and ecological sciences.

1. Defining and exploring the key questions
2. An introduction to models and modelling
3. The palaeo-record: approaches, timeframes and chronology
4. The palaeo-record: archives, proxies and calibration
5. Glacial and interglacial worlds
6. The transition from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene
7. The Holocene
8. The Anthropocene – a changing atmosphere
9. The Anthropocene – changing land
10. The Anthropocene: changing aquatic environments and ecosystems
11. Changing biodiversity
12. Detection and attribution
13. Future mean global temperatures and sea-level
14. From the global to the specific
15. Impacts and vulnerability
16. Sceptics, responses and partial answers.

Subject Areas: Environmental science, engineering & technology [TQ], Pollution & threats to the environment [RNP], Geography [RG], Ecological science, the Biosphere [PSAF]