An up-to-date and much enlarged edition of this text on the microclimate, emphasizing its effect on plants, animals, and humans. Provides a basis for understanding environmental biophysics, then covers the prediction, manipulation, and management of the climate near the ground.

General circulation models state that the central United States (and other mid-latitude continental regions) will become warmer and drier as the result of greenhouse warming. On this premise the dustbowl period of the 1930s was selected as an analogue of climate change and its weather records imposed on the Missouri--Iowa--Kansas region to assess how current agriculture, forestry, water resources and energy and the entire regional economy would be affected. The same climate was also imposed on a MINK region forty years into the future, by which time climate change may actually be felt, to...

This volume characterizes the current state of natural science and socioeconomic modeling of the impacts of climate change and current climate variability on forests, grasslands, and water. It identifies what can be done currently with impact assessments and suggests how to undertake such assessments. Impediments to linking biophysical and socioeconomic models into integrated assessments for policy purposes are identified, and recommendations for future research activities to improve the state of the art and remove these impediments to model integration are provided.
This book is for...

Soil carbon sequestration can play a strategic role in controlling the increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere and thereby help mitigate climatic change. There are scientific opportunities to increase the capacity of soils to store carbon and remove it from circulation for longer periods of time. The vast areas of degraded and desertified lands throughout the world offer great potential for the sequestration of very large quantities of carbon. If credits are to be bought and sold for carbon storage, quick and inexpensive instruments and methods will be needed to monitor and verify that...

In this volume, an improved Integrated Assessment methodology is used to analyze climate change impacts on agriculture, water resources, unmanaged ecosystems, irrigation, and land use in the United States and the economic implications of these impacts. This book contains a series of papers documenting the methods, models, analysis, and results of this integrated assessment for a wide-ranging set of scenarios describing future climate change.

Innovations described include the integration of water resource and agricultural modeling and the refinement of an agriculture and land-use...

WHY THIS BOOK? This book is an exploration of the possibility that a significant portion of the North American Great Plains (NAGP), now primarily in rangeland, corn, soybean, and small-grain production, can be converted to the production of biomass-energy crops. Biomass can be used as a substitute for some of the fossil fuels the use of which is now increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO ) 2 and contributing to global warming and climatic change. Such a land use change to biomass could lead not only to a global good but also to specific economic and environmental...

Soil carbon sequestration can play a strategic role in controlling the increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere and thereby help mitigate climatic change. There are scientific opportunities to increase the capacity of soils to store carbon and remove it from circulation for longer periods of time. The vast areas of degraded and desertified lands throughout the world offer great potential for the sequestration of very large quantities of carbon. If credits are to be bought and sold for carbon storage, quick and inexpensive instruments and methods will be needed to monitor and verify that...

WHY THIS BOOK? This book is an exploration of the possibility that a significant portion of the North American Great Plains (NAGP), now primarily in rangeland, corn, soybean, and small-grain production, can be converted to the production of biomass-energy crops. Biomass can be used as a substitute for some of the fossil fuels the use of which is now increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO ) 2 and contributing to global warming and climatic change. Such a land use change to biomass could lead not only to a global good but also to specific economic and environmental...

This volume characterizes the current state of natural science and socioeconomic modeling of the impacts of climate change and current climate variability on forests, grasslands, and water. It identifies what can be done currently with impact assessments and suggests how to undertake such assessments. Impediments to linking biophysical and socioeconomic models into integrated assessments for policy purposes are identified, and recommendations for future research activities to improve the state of the art and remove these impediments to model integration are provided.
This book is for...