Hard Choices: Climate Change in CanadaWilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2004 M06 24 - 273 pages Drought, floods, hurricanes, forest fires, ice storms, blackouts, dwindling fish stocks...what Canadian has not experienced one of these or more, or heard about the “greenhouse” effect, and not wondered what is happening to our climate? Yet most of us have a poor understanding of this extremely important issue, and need better, reliable scientific information. Hard Choices: Climate Change in Canada delivers some hard facts to help us make some of those hard choices. This new collection of essays by leading Canadian scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanists offers an overview and assessment of climate change and its impacts on Canada from physical, social, technological, economic, political, and ethical / religious perspectives. Interpreting and summarizing the large and complex literatures from each of these disciplines, the book offers a multidisciplinary approach to the challenges we face in Canada. Special attention is given to Canada’s response to the Kyoto Protocol, as well as an assessment of the overall adequacy of Kyoto as a response to the global challenge of climate change. Hard Choices fills a gap in available books which provide readers with reliable information on climate change and its impacts that are specific to Canada. While written for the general reader, it is also well suited for use as an undergraduate text in environmental studies courses. |
From inside the book
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... amount of energy received from the sun , averaged over a few decades , equals the total amount of energy emitted by the earth to space . A change in the aver- age net ( incoming minus outgoing ) radiation at the top of the atmosphere is ...
... amount . This is not the case and there are , in fact , regions where the earth has cooled over the twentieth century ( fig . 2.5a ) . Warming on the global scale is either amplified or reduced through local feedbacks . In general , the ...
... amount over the next century , a number of key conclusions can be drawn . First , land areas warm more than ocean areas due to the greater heat capacity of the ocean . Second , the interior of the continents warm more than the coasts as ...
... amount of heat transported northward in the North Atlantic by the ocean would be substan- tially reduced ; this would tend to affect the climate over land downwind of the ocean ( i.e. , Europe ) . In its Third Assessment Report ( ipcc ...
... amount and type of clouds varies between models. Climate Change Detection and Attribution The climate system varies on a variety of time scales both through natural, internal processes as well as in response to variations in external ...