By Orrin H. Pilkey Jr., Keith C. Pilkey
After explaining the greenhouse influence, Pilkey, writing with son Keith, turns to the wear and tear it's inflicting: sea point upward push, ocean acidification, glacier and sea ice melting, altering habitats, desertification, and the threats to animals, people, coral reefs, marshes, and mangroves. those reasons are observed through Mary Edna Fraser’s wonderful batiks depicting the large-scale arenas during which weather swap performs out.
The Pilkeys at once confront and rebut arguments quite often complex through international switch deniers. fairly helpful are their discussions of “Climategate,” a synthetic scandal that undermined recognize for the clinical group, and the denial campaigns through the fossil gasoline undefined, which they examine to the strategies utilized by the tobacco businesses a iteration in the past to obfuscate findings at the damage attributable to cigarettes.
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Extra info for Global Climate Change: A Primer
Example text
In North America arid lands will expand in the Southwest region. Tundra in the subarctic 17 will be reduced, perhaps by as much as by two-t hirds by 2100, releasing abundant methane into the atmosphere and creating serious problems for subsistence societies such as the Inuit and Yupik of Canada and Alaska, and the indigenous peoples of Siberia. Decreased winter snow packs will significantly reduce the water supply of western North America, leading to political conflict over water allocation. Forest fires will increase in number and size in the West.
Deserts are such places: only a small number of people can eke out a living in deserts unless they are supported by massive technology such as dams and irrigation systems. In his book Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner recounts the settling of the deserts in the western United States, a process leading to the current situation, in which large amounts of money are infused into these regions, resulting in dwindling water supplies and increasing conflicts between water users. Desertification—the deterioration of land and the reduction of vegetation and soil in arid areas—results from climatic variations as well as human activities such as those described by Reisner.
Increased carbon dioxide causes the leaves’ pores to shrink and release less water. Cao and Caldeira found that in some regions, including North America and East Asia, over a quarter of warming from increased CO2 in the atmosphere is a result of decreased evaporative cooling by plants. They also found that high carbon dioxide will result in greater runoff from the land surface, as water from precipitation increasingly bypasses the plant cooling system and flows directly into rivers and streams.