Global Warming in the 21st Century [3 volumes] - Hardcover

"This three-volume reference work provides a comprehensive, objective, and up-to-date overview of global warming for the scientifically literate nonspecialist. . . . One of the most comprehensive reference works available on global warming, it belongs in all academic libraries." - Reference & User Services Quarterly "Bruce Johansen's three-volume compendium, Global Warming in the 21st Century, is a definitive guide to what has become one of the year's most contorversial topics." - Kirkus Reviews "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 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." - SciTech Book News "A great value of the three-volume work of which this is the first in the breadth of topics presented on the climate change associated with global warming. Introductory chapters provide an excellent review of basic climate-change science, the complexity of the issue, and the underappreciated impact of feedback loops." - Science Books & Films "Presenting scientific theories that conflict with popular assumptions, explaining 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, and proposing detailed solutions including a worldwide overhaul in energy systems that will go beyond the initial diplomatic efforts of the Kyoto Protocol." - Natural Resources Journal "Johansen serves a wake-up call to naysayers, listing the scientific evidence of global warming in terms of its effects on icecaps, oceans, plants, and animals. He also provides examples of how the United States and other nations are (or are not) reacting to this impending catastrophe. . . . Recommended." - Library Journal "Johansen is an accomplished wordsmith who uses his fluency in the natural sciences and the human condition to fashion a compelling argument for change in the energy industry. Although he couches his apocalyptic view of future global climate change within a context of real events, his anecdotal descriptions of melting glaciers, drowning polar bears looking for Arctic ice, spruce bark beetles destroying forests, Russian peat bogs smoldering, and grass sprouting on the Antarctic peninsula are factual and alarming. The first recorded landing of sea turtles on Kodiak Island in Alaska, northern permafrost that is no longer permanent, the projected loss of the maple sugar industry in New England, increasing numbers of wildfires, and, of course, dramatic increases in summer temperatures in the Arctic and global illustrations of elevated sea levels add impetus to Johansen's concerns. . . . [T]he subject of global climate change is expertly presented. The three-volume set concludes with a list of solutions to the current threat, along with many useful references. Highly recommended. All levels." - Choice

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.