UID:
kobvindex_GFZ1779840713
Format:
1 Online-Ressource (xvi, 1001 Seiten)
,
Illustrationen
Edition:
Third edition
ISBN:
9783030763381
Content:
Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Discovering Climate -- Chapter 3. The Language of Science -- Chapter 4. Applying Mathematics to Problems -- Chapter 5. Geologic Time -- Chapter 6. Putting Numbers on Geologic Ages -- Chapter 7. Documenting Past Climate Change -- Chapter 8. The Nature of Energy Received From the Sun – The Analogies with Water Waves and Sound -- Chapter 9. The Nature of Energy Received From the Sun---Figuring Out What Light Really Is -- Chapter 10. Exploring the Electromagnetic Spectrum -- Chapter 11. The Origins of Climate Science---The Idea Of Energy Balance -- Chapter 12. The Climate System -- Chapter 13. What’s At The Bottom of Alice’s Rabbit Hole -- Chapter 14. Energy from the Sun---Long-Term Variations -- Chapter 15. Solar Variability and Cosmic Rays -- Chapter 16. Albedo -- Chapter 17. Air -- Chapter 18. HOH---The Keystone Of Earth’s Climate -- Chapter 19. The Atmosphere -- Chapter 20. Oxygen and Ozone---Products and Protectors of Life -- Chapter 21. Water Vapor---The Major Greenhouse Gas -- Chapter 22. Carbon Dioxide -- Chapter 23. Other Greenhouse Gases -- Chapter 24. The Earth Is a Sphere and Rotates -- Chapter 25. The Coriolis Effect -- Chapter 26. The Circulation of Earth’s Atmosphere -- Chapter 27. The Circulation of Earth’s Oceans -- Chapter 28. The Biological Interactions -- Chapter 29. Sea Level -- Chapter 30. Global Climate Change---The Geologically Immediate Past -- Chapter 31. Human Impacts on the Environment and Climate -- Chapter 32. Predictions of the Future of Humanity -- Chapter 33. Is there an Analog for the Future Climate -- Chapter 34. The Instrumental Temperature Record -- Chapter 35. The Changing Climate of the Polar Regions -- Chapter 36. Global, Regional and Local Effects of Our Changing Climate -- Chapter 37. Final Thoughts.
Content:
This book is a thorough introduction to climate science and global change. The author is a geologist who has spent much of his life investigating the climate of Earth from a time when it was warm and dinosaurs roamed the land, to today's changing climate. Bill Hay takes you on a journey to understand how the climate system works. He explores how humans are unintentionally conducting a grand uncontrolled experiment which is leading to unanticipated changes. We follow the twisting path of seemingly unrelated discoveries in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and even mathematics to learn how they led to our present knowledge of how our planet works. He explains why the weather is becoming increasingly chaotic as our planet warms at a rate far faster than at any time in its geologic past. He speculates on possible future outcomes, and suggests that nature itself may make some unexpected course corrections. Although the book is written for the layman with little knowledge of science or mathematics, it includes information from many diverse fields to provide even those actively working in the field of climatology with a broader view of this developing drama. Experimenting on a Small Planet is a must read for anyone having more than a casual interest in global warming and climate change - one of the most important and challenging issues of our time. This new edition includes actual data from climate science into 2021. Numerous Powerpoint slides can be downloaded to allow lecturers and teachers to more effectively use the book as a basis for climate change education.
Note:
Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 Leningrad—1982
1.2 ‘Global Warming’ or ‘Global Weirding’
1.3 My Background
1.4 What Is Science?
1.5 The Observational Sciences
1.6 The Compexity of Nature
1.7 Summary
2 Discovering Climate
2.1 Defining ‘Climate’
2.2 Numerical Descriptions of Climate
2.3 How Science Works
2.4 Summary
3 The Language of Science
3.1 Numbers and Symbols
3.2 Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus
3.3 Shapes
3.4 Orders of Magnitude and Exponents
3.5 Logarithms
3.6 Logarithms and Scales with Bases Other Than 10
3.7 Earthquake Scales
3.8 The Beaufort Wind Force Scale
3.9 Extending the Beaufort Scale to Cyclonic Storms
3.10 Calendars and Time
3.11 Summary
4 Applying Mathematics to Problems
4.1 Measures and Weights
4.2 The Nautical Mile
4.3 The Metric System
4.4 Temperature
4.5 Precisely Defining Some Words You Already Know
4.6 Locating Things
4.7 Latitude and Longitude
4.8 Map Projections
4.9 Trigonometry
4.10 Circles, Ellipses, and Angular Velocity
4.11 Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces
4.12 Graphs
4.13 Exponential Growth and Decay
4.14 The Logistic Equation
4.15 Statistics
4.16 Summary
5 Geologic Time
5.1 Age of the Earth—4004 BCE, or Older?
5.2 The Discovery of the Depths of Time—Eternity
5.3 Geologic Time Punctuated by Revolutions
5.4 Catastrophism Replaced by Imperceptibly Slow Gradual Change
5.5 The Development of the Geological Timescale
5.6 The Discovery of the Ice Age
5.7 The Discovery of Past Warm Polar Regions
5.8 Throwing a Monkey Wrench into Explaining Climate Change
5.9 Crustal Mobility’ to the Rescue
5.10 The Return of Catastrophism and the Idea of Rapid Change
5.11 The Nature of the Geologic Record
5.12 The Great Extinctions and Their Causes
5.13 Summary—A History with No Dates
6 Putting Numbers on Geologic Ages
6.1 1788—An Abyss of Time of Unknown Dimensions
6.2 1863—Physics Comes to the Rescue—Earth Is Not More than 100 Million Years Old
6.3 What We Now Know About Heat from Earth’s Interior
6.4 Some Helpful Background in Understanding Nineteenth-Century Chemistry
6.5 Atomic Weight, Atomic Mass, Isotopes, Relative Atomic Mass, Standard Atomic Weight—A Confusing Plethora of Terms
6.6 1895–1913—The Worlds of Physics and Chemistry Turned Upside Down
6.7 Henri Becquerel and the Curies
6.8 Nonconformists and the British Universities Open to All
6.9 The Discovery of Electrons, Alpha-Rays, and Beta-Rays
6.10 The Discovery of Radioactive Decay Series, Exponential Decay Rates, and Secular Equilibrium
6.11 The Mystery of the Decay Series Explained by Isotopes
6.12 The Discovery That Radioactive Decay Series Might Be Used to Determine the Age of Rocks
6.13 The Discovery of Stable Isotopes
6.14 Rethinking the Structure of the Atom
6.15 From Science to Science Fiction
6.16 The Discovery of Protons and Neutrons
6.17 Arthur Holmes and the Age of the Earth
6.18 The Development of a Numerical Geological Timescale
6.19 Summary
7 Documenting Past Climate Change
7.1 What Is ‘Climate’?
7.2 A Brief Overview of Earth’s Climate History
7.3 The Cenozoic Climate ‘Deterioration’
7.4 From Ages to Process Rates
7.5 Radiometric Age Dating in the Mid-Twentieth Century
7.6 Potassium—Argon Dating
7.7 Reversals of Earth’s Magnetic Field
7.8 Fission Track Dating
7.9 Astronomical Dating
7.10 Tritium, Carbon-14, and Beryllium-10
7.11 The Human Acceleration of Natural Process Rates
7.12 The Present Climate in Its Geologic Context
7.13 Steady State Versus Non-steady State
7.14 Feedbacks
7.15 Summary
8 The Nature of Energy Received from the Sun—The Analogies with Water Waves and Sound
8.1 Water Waves
8.2 Special Water Waves—Tides and Tsunamis
8.3 Wave Energy, Refraction, and Reflection
8.4 Sound Waves
8.5 Sound Waves and Music
8.6 Measuring the Speed of Sound in Air
8.7 Measuring the Speed of Sound in Water
8.8 The Practical Use of Sound in Water
8.9 Summary
9 The Nature of Energy Received from the Sun—Figuring Out What Light Really Is
9.1 Early Ideas About Light
9.2 Refraction of Light
9.3 Measuring the Speed of Light
9.4 The Discovery of Double Refraction or ‘Birefringence’
9.5 Investigating the Dispersion of Light
9.6 Figuring Out the Wavelengths of Different Colors of Light
9.7 Diffraction
9.8 Polarization of Light
9.9 Eureka!—Light Is Electromagnetic Waves
9.10 A Review of the Discovery of the Invisible Parts of the Electromagnetic Spectrum
9.11 The Demise of the ‘Luminiferous Æther’
9.12 Summary
10 Exploring the Electromagnetic Spectrum
10.1 Spectra and Spectral Lines
10.2 The Discovery of Helium—First in the Sun, Then on Earth
10.3 The Discovery That Spectral Lines Are Mathematically Related
10.4 Heinrich Hertz’s Confirmation of Maxwell’s Ideas
10.5 Marconi Makes the Electromagnetic Spectrum a Tool for Civilization
10.6 Human Use of the Electromagnetic Spectrum for Communication, Locating Objects, and Cooking
10.7 Summary
11 The Origins of Climate Science—The Idea of Energy Balance
11.1 What Is Heat?
11.2 Thermodynamics
11.3 The Laws of Thermodynamics
11.4 The Discovery of Greenhouse Gases
11.5 Kirchhoff’s ‘Black Body’
11.6 Stefan’s Fourth Power Law
11.7 Black Body Radiation
11.8 Summary
12 The Climate System
12.1 Insolation—The Incoming Energy from the Sun
12.2 Albedo—The Reflection of Incoming Energy Back into Space
12.3 Reradiation—How the Earth Radiates Energy Back into Space
12.4 The Chaotic Nature of the Weather
12.5 The Earthly Components of the Climate System: Air, Earth, Ice, and Water
12.6 The Atmosphere
12.7 The Hydrosphere
12.8 The Cryosphere
12.9 The Land
12.10 Classifying Climatic Regions
12.11 Uncertainties in the Climate Scheme
12.12 Summary
13 What Is at the Bottom of Alice’s Rabbit Hole?
13.1 Max Planck and the Solution to the Black Body Problem
13.2 The Photoelectric Effect
13.3 The Bohr Atom
13.4 Implications of the Bohr Model for the Periodic Table of the Elements
13.5 The Zeeman Effect
13.6 Trying to Make Sense of the Periodic Table
13.7 The Second Quantum Revolution
13.8 The Discovery of Nuclear Fission
13.9 Molecular Motions
13.10 Summary
14 Energy from the Sun—Long-Term Variations
14.1 The Faint Young Sun Paradox
14.2 The Energy Flux from the Sun
14.3 The Orbital Cycles
14.4 The Rise and Fall of the Orbital Theory of Climate Change
14.5 The Resurrection of the Orbital Theory
14.6 Correcting the Age Scale: Filling in the Details to Prove the Theory1
14.7 The Discovery that Milankovitch Orbital Cycles Have Affected Much of Earth History
14.8 Summary
15 Solar Variability and Cosmic Rays
15.1 Solar Variability
15.2 The Solar Wind
15.3 Solar Storms and Space Weather
15.4 The Solar Neutrino Problem
15.5 The Ultraviolet Radiation
15.6 Cosmic Rays
15.7 A Digression into the World of Particle Physics
15.8 How Cosmic Rays Interact with Earth’s Atmosphere
15.9 Carbon-14
15.10 Beryllium-10
15.11 Cosmic Rays and Climate
15.12 Summary
16 Albedo
16.1 Albedo of Planet Earth
16.2 Clouds
16.3 Could Cloudiness Be a Global Thermostat?
16.4 Volcanic Ash and Climate Change
16.5 Aerosols
16.6 Albedo During the Last Glacial Maximum
16.7 Changing the Planetary Albedo to Counteract Greenhouse Warming
16.8 Summary
17 Air
17.1 The Nature of Air
17.2 The Velocity of Air Molecules
17.3 Other Molecular Motions
17.4 The Other Major Component of Air—Photons
17.5 Ionization
17.6 The Scattering of Light
17.7 Absorption of the Infrared Wavelengths
17.8 Other Components of Air: Subatomic Particles
17.9 Summary
18 HoH—The Keystone of Earth’s Climate
18.1 Some History
18.2 Why Is HOH So Strange?
18.3 The Hydrologic Cycle
18.4 Vapor
18.4.1 Pure Water
18.5 Natural Water
18.6 Water—Density and Specific Volume
18.7 Water—Surface Tension
18.8 Ice
18.9 Earth’s Ice
18.10 How Ice Forms from Freshwater and from Seawater
18.11 Snow and ICE on Land
18.12 Ice Cores
18.13 Ice as Earth’s Climate Stabilizer
19 The Atmosphere
19.1 Atmospheric Pressure
19.2 The Structure of the Atmosphere
19.3 The Troposphere
19.4 The Stratosphere
19.5 The Mesosphere
19.6 The Thermosphere
19.7 The Exosphere
19.8 The Magnetosphere
19.9 The Ionosphere
19.10 The Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect
19.11 Th
Language:
English
Subjects:
Geography
Keywords:
Electronic books
URL:
Ebook (access only within the AWI network)