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This book puts the debates about the energy-climate continuum on a scientific ground!It is a must-read for everyone, who wants to understand how intimately the energy and climate debates are linked to each other, and who wants to participate in these omnipresent discussions. Antoine Bret explains in his book how fossil fuels became indispensable for our society. He carefully explains how and why this impacts the earth's climate. And he points out that all available fossil fuels will sooner or later be used up. Therefore, he introduces and discusses the alternatives, which are currently considered. The book is divided into three parts. The first part explains the problem and where we stand today, the second part critically discusses possible elements of solution. The third part illustrates historic case studies, containing both warning as well as encouraging examples of societies at turning points.This book is a careful introduction to these topics. The basic science behind the problem and the debates are introduced in an understandable and nicely readable fashion. Facts are illustrated with simple back-on-the-envelope calculations, providing a good feeling for orders of magnitudes. A rich appendix provides additional background information for the interested readers. In this way, the book can even be a valuable resource for introductory university courses in physics, climate science, natural science and many more subjects.This book is a real conversation starter and can be recommended to everyone, specialist or non-specialist, who wants to understand the actual energy-climate debates and maybe even involve.

Presented in nontechnical terms, this book offers a unique and powerful conceptual framework for analysis of energy technologies (standard and alternative) in terms of their respective dollar costs, environmental costs, and national security costs. Energy technologies examined include coal, nuclear, oil, natural gas, solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower, biomass and biogas, energy conservation and efficiency, ocean power, hydrogen, electric power and transmission, and transportation. This three-point framework allows examination of issues and problems associated with implementation of U.S. energy policies in the context of major social goals (such as growth and equity), with treatment of conflicts and trade-offs between energy development and other social values (such as health and safety, cultural, historical, and aesthetic values). These are the key political issues for policy makers formulating national energy policy and decisions makers implementing it.

In this two-volume encyclopedia for general readers and students of all levels, Bruce E. Johansen marshals scientific work on global warming into 300 articles presented in clear and understandable language.Comprehensive in scope and accessible to all reader levels, The Encyclopedia of Global Warming Science and Technology covers a vast range of topics, concepts, issues, processes, and scientists sifted and melded from the many scientific and technological fields. These include atmospheric chemistry, paleoclimatology, biogeography, oceanography, geophysics, glaciology, soil science, and more.Bruce E. Johansen digests the explosion of scientific work on global warming that has been published since 1980 and presents it in a set that is sure to be the indispensable standard reference work on the topic. The information here is of importance to just about everyone on the planet—for the findings of global warming science and technology should dictate the choices we make today to secure our common future. This encyclopedia will prove useful for many different types of professionals, inasmuch as global warming science informs public policy debates, applied science, and technology in such fields as energy generation, architecture, engineering, and agriculture.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the citizens of Great Britain faced a formidable challenge: coal resources seemed destined to run out and commentators were unable to foresee a viable alternative fuel. To address the crisis, military strategists were urged to seize control of coal in foreign lands, and companies were encouraged to increase domestic production of the resource. In Global Energy Shifts, Bruce Podobnik draws intriguing parallels between the'coal panics'that once swept through Britain and the'oil panics'that grip the world today. His concise history of global energy use contextualizes the coal and oil scares, demonstrating how the convergence of specific geopolitical, commercial, and social conditions can generate rapid and far-reaching transformations in the energy foundations of our world. Ultimately, Podobnik informs readers on how a'crisis'of one fuel system is quickly averted with the introduction of another, and describes opportunities for shifting our problematic, oil-based system toward a renewable energy system.