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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 3, MARCH 1999

RECENT BOOKS AND PROCEEDINGS

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 #d99mar31

Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, J. R. Fleming, 208 pp., 1998, $45.00, hbk (Oxford University Press).

This volume examines the historical roots of global climate change as a field of inquiry from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century. Based on primary and archival sources, it contains notable perspectives on what people have understood, experienced, and feared about the climate and its changes in the past. It covers such topics as the great climate debate in colonial and early America, the expansion of observing systems, Joseph Fourier's theory of terrestrial temperatures, the early research on carbon dioxide and climate of John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius, T. C. Chamberlin’s concept of the geological agency of the atmosphere, climate determinism, and the historical dimensions of global warming and global cooling.

Item #d99mar32

Climate, Change and Risk, T. E. Downing, A. A. Olsthoorn, and R. S. J. Tol (Eds.), 432 pp., 1998, $115.00, hbk (Routledge).

This work speculates about the nature of the Earth under an inexorably rising temperature. It focuses specifically on extreme weather events and on society’s ability to cope with them. It considers societal responses, insurance matters, and the analysis of climatic hazards and pulls together a wealth of research from the worldwide scientific literature to explore the changes in weather hazards that might be expected as the global climate changes. It covers such topics as climatic hazards and policy responses in Australia, land subsidence, agricultural drought in Europe, riverine floods and flood management in the Dutch Rhine Delta, hurricane impacts and coastal management in the United States, the economic impacts of sea level rise on developed coasts, tropical cyclones in the southwest Pacific, impacts on Pacific island countries, windstorms in the Netherlands, heat waves, economic analysis of natural disasters, and weather insurance. New Scientist (Mar. 13, 1999) says “The economic impacts of changes such as these, especially for the insurance industry, make gloomy reading.”

Item #d99mar33

Ocean, Ice, and Atmosphere: Interactions at the Antarctic Continental Margin, Antarctic Research Series, Vol. 75, Stanley Jacobs and Ray Weiss, (Eds.), 382 pp., 1998, hbk (AGU).

This book updates our understanding of the Antarctic continental shelf, slope, and rise, aided by modern transport and instrumentation, realistic models, and observational data. It addresses issues from air-sea to ice-ocean interactions, from ice crystals to icebergs, from regional circulation to circumpolar fronts, from tides to bottom topography, and from the fate of deep water to the formation of bottom water. Here the Southern Ocean interacts strongly with the ice shelves, sea ice, atmosphere, and sea floor, making oceanography complex and adventurous. The book discusses new techniques and reinterprets existing data, allowing, in some cases the interpretation of previously fragmented data or the perception of long-term cycles related to global climate change. In its 18 papers, it describes and models air-sea and ice-ocean interactions, the formation and chemistry of deep and bottom waters, regional circulations, tidal heights and currents, ocean bathymetry, interannual variability, and the Antarctic Slope Front.

Item #d99mar34

Landfill Emission of Gases into the Atmosphere, V. Popov and H. Power (Eds.), 250 pp., 1998, $120.00, hbk (WIT Press/Computational Mechanics).

The uncontrolled release of gases from landfill sites can present fire and explosion hazards as well as constitute a source of methane, a greenhouse gas with a high global warming potential. This book presents an analysis of landfill gaseous emissions and contains descriptive material about sanitary landfills, landfill gases, foundations of flow of gases in porous media, and some analytical solutions for gas flow in porous media. A boundary element numerical model of flow of gases is presented and applied to the problem of design of landfill-gas-control structures in a multilayer landfill.