Environmental Change Key Issues and Alternative Perspectives [Paperback]

Advanced non-specialist textbook explaining the significance of past and contemporary environmental and climatic change.Environmental Change:explains the current and future significance of past and contemporary environmental and climatic change. It poses key questions about environmental change and presents the results of recent research. Special emphasis is placed on past periods of rapid warming, the nature of climatic variability over the last 1000 years and the dramatic, accelerating changes heralded by the industrial revolution. The book is extensively referenced and illustrated. It provides a balanced, non-specialist exploration of global change for advanced undergraduates in Geography, Environmental, Earth, Biological and Ecological Sciences.Environmental Change:explains the current and future significance of past and contemporary environmental and climatic change. It poses key questions about environmental change and presents the results of recent research. Special emphasis is placed on past periods of rapid warming, the nature of climatic variability over the last 1000 years and the dramatic, accelerating changes heralded by the industrial revolution. The book is extensively referenced and illustrated. It provides a balanced, non-specialist exploration of global change for advanced undergraduates in Geography, Environmental, Earth, Biological and Ecological Sciences.Revealing the current and future significance of environmental and climatic change, this study outlines the conceptual framework for studies by posing key questions and presenting the most recent relevant research. It provides a basic 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 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.1. Defining anl³-