Environmental Change: Key Issues and Alternative Approaches describes and explains the significance of past and contemporary environmental and climatic change. It outlines the conceptual framework for studies of environmental change by posing key questions and presenting the results of relevant research. It provides a non-specialist 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 past 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. The book is extensively referenced and illustrated. This book provides a balanced, non-specialist basis for understanding and exploring the scientific issues underlying global change for advanced undergraduates in geography, environmental, earth, biological and ecological sciences.

The Holocene spans the 11,500 years since the end of the last Ice Age and has been a period of major global environmental change. However the rate of change has accelerated during the last hundred years, due largely to human impacts and this has led to a growing concern for the future of our environmental resources. Global Change in the Holocene demonstrates how reconstructing the record of past environmental change can provide us with essential knowledge about how our environment works and presents the reader with an informed viewpoint from which to project realistic future scenarios. The book brings together key techniques that are widely used in Holocene research, such as radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology and sediment analysis and offers a comprehensive analysis of various archives of environmental change including instrumental and documentary records, corals, lake sediments, glaciers and ice cores. This reference will be an informative and cutting-edge resource for all researchers in the fields of climate change, environmental science, geography, palaeoecology and archaeology.

The interactions between environmental change and human societies have a long, complex history spanning many millennia, but these have changed fundamentally in the last century. Human activities are now so pervasive and profound that they are altering the Earth in ways which threaten the very life support system upon which humans depend. This book describes what is known about the Earth System and the impact of changes caused by humans. It considers the consequences of these changes with respect to the stability of the Earth System and the well-being of humankind; as well as exploring future paths towards Earth System science in support of global sustainability.

Global Change and the Earth System describes what is known about the Earth system and the impact of changes caused by humans. It considers the consequences of these changes with respect to the stability of the Earth system and the well-being of humankind; as well as exploring future paths towards Earth-system science in support of global sustainability. The results presented here are based on 10 years of research on global change by many of the world's most eminent scholars. This valuable volume achieves a new level of integration and interdisciplinarity in treating global change.

The scientist will be forced, in the unenthusiastic words of one of my scientific colleagues, 'to slosh about in the primordial ooze known as inter-disciplinary studies'. John Passmore Man's responsibility for nature The present text has arisen from some thirteen years advances in our perception, appraisal and creative use of collaboration between the two authors. During that of order in natural systems. Out of this can come period, upwards of a dozen postgraduates in enhanced insight into processes, structures and Edinburgh, the New University of Ulster and Liver systems interactions on all temporal and spatial scales pool have been closely involved in exploring many of and at all integrative levels from subatomic to cosmic. the applications of magnetic measurements described In the environment, elements of order are often in the second half of the book. Much of the text is difficult to appraise and analyse, not only because of based on their work, both published and unpublished. intrinsic complexity, but as a consequence of our lack A great deal of the work summarised reflects extensive of techniques, instrumentation and suitable co-operation not only between the authors and among methodologies. Magnetic properties, whether natural their postgraduate groups, but also involving or induced, reflect forms of order which, in recent colleagues in geology, geography, ecology, hydrology, years, have become dramatically more accessible to a meteorology, glaciology, archaeology, limnology, growing range of instruments and techniques.

Klimageschichte - Holozän - Umweltgeschichte - Human impact - Global change - Modell - Spätglazial - Würmeiszeit.