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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... increased ability to adapt to extreme variations of weather and climate in Canada's various regions, from changes in ... increase of the world's population and the indus- trial development of countries like China and India, presents ...
... Increasing earth systems' abilities to absorb carbon—adding to our “carbon sinks” with forestation projects, for example —can help, according to Nigel Livingston and G. Cornelis van Kooten in chapter 5, but only in the short run. Ged ...
... increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and global warming has only recently been realized. In fact, Dr. James Hansen of nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies is often credited in the media as being the “father of ...
... increase in CO2 from 280 ppm to 368 ppm over the last 150 years , primarily due to fossil fuel burning , is about the same as the increase from the depths of the last ice age ( 21,000 years ago ) to 1750 ( 190 ppm to 280 ppm ) . Source ...
... increase over the last 150 years has cre- ated a positive radiative forcing ( fig . 2.3 ) . Aerosols , which are tiny liquid or solid particles in the atmosphere , are most often considered to provide a negative radiative forcing ( e.g. ...