Future Climate Change

In recent years, future climate change has increasingly been recognized as one of the most important issues of the twenty-first century, challenging the very structure of our global society. No longer just an abstruse scientific concern, it prompts difficult choices for both individuals and governments. Moreover, it is of the first importance to those working in disciplines such as climatology, engineering, economics, sociology, geopolitics, local politics, law, and global health.

Emanating from across the social and natural sciences, as well as in the humanities, serious scholarship on future climate change flourishes now as it has never done before, and this new title in the Routledge series, Critical Concepts in the Environment, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a vast literature – and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by leading scholars in the field, this new Routledge Major Work is a four-volume collection of foundational and cutting-edge contributions.

The first volume (Science) in the collection deals with the development of the science of global warming and climate change, starting with Tyndall (1861), through to the IPCC synthesis (2007), and ending with the very latest research. Volume two (Impact Assessments), meanwhile, assembles the best thinking on how the potential physical, biological, social-political, and economic impacts of climate change are assessed. This volume also includes material on potential surprises that science is starting to investigate, such as the rapid melting of the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets, die back of the Amazon rainforest, release of gas hydrates, and other tipping points. The third volume (Politics and Solutions) gathers the most influential research on climate-change solutions; it encompasses global and local politics, engineering, renewable energy, and geoengineering. The final volume in the collection (Framing the Debate) brings together key scholarship to question and explore how the climate-change debate has been framed and reframed as a scientific, economic, security, health, development, geopolitical, ethical, and cultural issue.

With comprehensive introductions to each volume, newly written by the editors, which place the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Future Climate Change is an essential collection destined to be welcomed as a vital research resource by all scholars and students of the subject.