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Global Climate Change Digest
A Guide to Information on Greenhouse Gases and Ozone Depletion
Published July 1988 through June 1999

FROM VOLUME 12, NUMBER 2, FEBRUARY 1999

RECENT BOOKS AND PROCEEDINGS

Item #d99feb25

Information given in the annotations is frequently taken from publishers’ promotional literature. Prices and page numbers may be approximate; contact publisher for details and additional information on content. Publishers are named in parentheses at the end of each citation; addresses, when known, are listed at the end of this section. In most cases, books advertised by publishers with an expected publication date are not listed here until actually in print.

Item #d99feb26

Antarctic Sea Ice: Physical Processes, Interactions and Variability, Antarctic Research Series Vol. 74, M. O. Jeffries, Ed., 407 pp., 1998, $80.00 hbk (AGU).

This book summarizes current field, remote-sensing, and modeling studies of sea ice in the Southern Ocean. It also reviews the nature of Antarctic sea ice, its role in atmospheric and oceanographic processes, and its impact on the global environment. Together with a companion volume on sea-ice biology and ecology, it reveals the widening scope of current sea-ice research in Antarctica.

Item #d99feb27

Antarctic Sea Ice: Biological Processes, Interactions and Variability, Antarctic Research Series Vol. 73, M. P. Lizotti and K. R. Arrigo, Eds., 198 pp., 1998, $45.00 hbk, (AGU).

This volume explores the vast expanse of Antarctic sea ice that harbors one of the most dynamic ecosystems on Earth. The authors of the individual contributions to this book present a fascinating habitat and describe its role within the Antarctic food web, covering a wide array of topics in sea-ice biology and ecology: algal biomass, microalgal physiology, nitrogen metabolism, response to UV radiation, zooplankton grazing, numerical modeling, and the use of sea-ice diatoms as paleoenvironmental indicators. Together with a companion volume on sea-ice biology and ecology, it reveals the widening scope of current sea-ice research in Antarctica.

Item #d99feb28

Clean Air Handbook, 3rd ed., F. W. Brownell et al., 324 pp., 1998, $95.00 pbk (Government Institutes).

Designed to keep the regulated community abreast of developments in the regulatory proceedings and amendatory legislation that are continually changing the Clean Air Act, this book reviews legislation, regulatory proceedings, rule changes and supplements, guidance documents, and policy statements dealing with the Act. It covers the federal-state partnership, the 1990 amendments, air-quality regulations, state implementation plans, nonattainment programs, control- technology regulation, permitting programs, acid-deposition control, hazardous air pollutants, stratospheric ozone protection, and legislative and regulatory trends.

Item #d99feb29

Reframing Deforestation: Global Analysis and Local Realities: Studies in West Africa, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, 238 pp., 1998, $22.99 pbk/$85.00 hbk (Routledge).

The premise of this book is that West Africa is unfairly perceived by the world as having undergone dramatic deforestation in recent decades, leading to a loss of biodiversity, the displacement of native peoples, a disregard for nature, and a contribution to cataclysmic climate change. To counter this perception, the book individually considers the countries of West Africa (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benin) and reviews the history of forest use and cover for each. Most of this history is drawn from the narratives of early governors, developers, or explorers. Statistics are presented where available, but few numerical statistics were recorded during the colonial exploitation of this region as there were in other places, such as India. In the course of these national forest histories, the forest issues, policies, and practices that came into play in each country are reviewed. These policies are examined in a chapter devoted to the ecological principles and developmental imperatives that characterized the histories of these countries. A concluding chapter synthesizes all this information and describes (or “reframes”) the regional experience in terms of deforestation extent, population pressures, forest-savanna ecology, anthropogenic effects on vegetation, forest science, and conservation vs. development.

Item #d99feb30

GIS Technologies and Their Environmental Applications, P. Pascolo and C. A. Brebbia, 368 pp., 1998 $155.00/£95.00 hbk (WIT Press).

Geographic information systems (GISs) are rapidly being adopted by governments and industries for a wide variety of purposes from managing transportation fleets to documenting municipal services, enhancing cartography, and planning resource extraction and exploitation. This volume contains most of the papers presented at the First International Conference on Geographical Information Systems in the Next Millennium, which was held in Udine, Italy, in July 1998. The collected papers review the state of the art of GIS technology and document its development in and application to various fields of endeavor. The general topics covered include environmental management, applications, the management of economic development, data acquisition, and GIS technologies.

Item #d99feb31

Energy and the Environment, R. A. Ristinen and J. J. Kraushaar, 368 pp., 1998, $61.95 pbk (John Wiley & Sons).

This textbook is designed for use in a two-semester college course covering the basic societal concerns related to the environment and to energy production. It reviews the fundamentals of energy use and production in an industrialized society; the production, costs, characteristics, and available resources of fossil fuels; how heat engines work; the mechanics, economics, and availability of renewable energy resources; the “promise and problems” of nuclear energy (with, for some reason, a section on nuclear weapons); energy conservation (treated in a simplistic and mundane manner); the role of the transportation sector in the use of energy and the production of pollution; air pollution (treated broadly but not deeply); and global effects (i.e., ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect). It is an good introduction to the problems our society is creating and facing, and it has many illustrations, both textual and graphic, to make the subject matter clear and relevant to the uninitiated. As a textbook, it has regular sections of questions and quizzes, lists of additional readings, glossaries of terms, and summary diagrams and tables. The design and organization are very good; the writing is fairly well done.

Additional Reviews of Previous Entries

Item #d99feb32

Assessing Climate Change: Results from the Model Evaluation Consortium for Climate Assessment, W. Howe, A. Henderson-Sellers, Eds., 420 pp., 1997, $140/£91 (Gordon & Breach).

Reviewed by Curt Covey and Peter Gleckler in Eos 80 (1), 3 (Jan. 5, 1999), who say that the book, the final product of the MECCA (Model Evaluation Consortium for Climate Assessment) analysis team, is “a remarkably frank discussion of both the history of MECCA and the lessons it offers for the evaluation of global climate models.” Further, they say that they “were struck by the heroic scale of endeavor undertaken by Howe and Sellers as the leaders” of the analysis team. They end by saying that the book “provides a fascinating glimpse of both the scientific and the organizational state of the art in modeling the global environment.”