Synopsis
The focus of this book is the interactions between energy, ecology, and climate change, as well as a few of the responses of humanity to these interactions. It is not a textbook, but a series of chapters discussing subtopics in which the authors were interested and wished to write about. The basic material is cutting-edge science; technical journal articles published within the last year, selected for their relevance and interest. Each author selected eight or so technical papers representing his or her view of the most interesting current research in the field, and wrote summaries of them in a journalistic style that is free of scientific jargon and understandable by lay readers. This is the sort of science writing that you might encounter in the New York Times, but concentrated in a way intended to give as broad an overview of the chapter topics as possible. None of this research will appear in textbooks for a few years, so there are not many ways that readers without access to a university library can get access to this information. One place is scientific blogs on the Internet, and most of the material in this book will appear in the blogs ClimateVulture.com and EnergyVulture.com by mid-2016, but all of the material is available here. This book is intended be browsed—choose a chapter topic you like and read the individual sections in any order; each is intended to be largely stand-alone. Reading all of them will give you considerable insight into what climate scientists concerned with energy, ecology, and human effects are up to, and the challenges they face in understanding one of the most disruptive—if not very rapid—event in human history; anthropogenic climate change.
About the Author
Dr. J. Emil Morhardt is Roberts Professor of Biology at Claremont McKenna, Scripps, and Pitzer Colleges, members of the Claremont Colleges, in Southern California where he teaches courses related to the topics of this book. Prior to returning to academia in 1996, for nearly two decades he was Senior Vice President and Director of Western Operations for EA Engineering, Science, and Technology, Inc., a national consulting firm serving electric and water utilities, government agencies such as the National Park Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the US Environmental Protection Agency, and several branches of the US military. In all of these instances the role of EA was to conduct and clarify the science related to potential and actual environmental impacts. As a biologist he is intimately familiar with the ecological and physiological issues associated with climate change and industrial activities; as an environmental consultant he worked at oil refineries, all manner of power plants including hydroelectric, fossil-fuel-fired, and nuclear, and at water supply and wastewater facilities and many military sites.
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