Human Impacts on Weather and Climate

This 2007 edition of Human Impacts on Weather and Climate examines the scientific and political debates surrounding anthropogenic impacts on the Earth's climate and presents the most recent theories, data and modeling studies. The book discusses the concepts behind deliberate human attempts to modify the weather through cloud seeding, as well as inadvertent modification of weather and climate on the regional scale. The natural variability of weather and climate greatly complicates our ability to determine a clear cause-and-effect relationship to human activity. The authors describe the basic theories and critique them in simple and accessible terms. This fully revised edition will be a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate courses in atmospheric and environmental science, and will also appeal to policy makers and general readers interested in how humans are affecting the global climate.

William Cotton is a Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA).

Roger Pielke is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and a Senior Research Scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is also an Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, served as Colorado State Climatologist from 1999 to 2006, and is on the Graduate Faculty of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. As well as this book, he has authored Mesoscale Meteorological Modeling (1984 and 2002), The Hurricane (1990), Hurricanes: Their Nature and Impacts on Society (1997, co-authored with R. A. Pielke, Jr), and was co-chief editor (with R. A. Pielke, Jr) of Storms (1999). He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society and a former co-chief editor of the Journal of Atmospheric Science. Dr Pielke has published over 350 papers in peer-reviewed journals, fifty chapters in books, and has co-edited nine books.