Changes in climate and climate variability have an effect on people's behaviour around the world, and public institutions have an important part to play in influencing our ability to respond to and plan for climate risk.
This special volume contains a selection of papers that were presented as part of the Seventh International Symposium on Natural and Man-Made Hazards (HAZARDS-98), held in Chania, Crete Island, Greece, during May 1998.
International climate change policy can be broadly divided into two periods: A first period, where a broad consensus was reached to tackle the risk of global warming in a coordinated global effort, and a second period, where this consensus was finally framed into a concrete policy.
The thermodynamics of the atmosphere is the subject of several chapters in most textbooks on dynamic meteorology, but there is no work in English to give the subject a specific and more extensive treatment.
International concern for the continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, and the potentially damaging consequences of resultant global climate change, led to the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by 155 nations at the Earth Summit in June 1992.
Since the pioneering work of Shannon in the late 1940's on the development of the theory of entropy and the landmark contributions of Jaynes a decade later leading to the development of the principle of maximum entropy (POME), the concept of entropy has been increasingly applied in a wide spectrum of areas, including chemistry, electronics and communications engineering, data acquisition and storage and retreival, data monitoring network design, ecology, economics, environmental engineering, earth sciences, fluid mechanics, genetics, geology, geomorphology, geophysics, geotechnical engineering, hydraulics, hydrology, image processing, management sciences, operations research, pattern recognition and identification, photogrammetry, psychology, physics and quantum mechanics, reliability analysis, reservoir engineering, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, topology, transportation engineering, turbulence modeling, and so on.
The last decade of this century has seen a renewed interest in the dynamics and physics of the small bodies of the Solar System, Asteroids, Comets and Meteors.
Over the past decade the scientific activities of the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS), which focuses on the role of the oceans in controlling climate change via the transport and storage of greenhouse gases and organic matter, have led to an increased interest in the study of the biogeochemistry of organic matter.
The history of scientific research and technological development is replete with examples of breakthroughs that have advanced the frontiers of knowledge, but seldom does it record events that constitute paradigm shifts in broad areas of intellectual pursuit.
th Towards the end of the 19 century some researchers put forward the hypothesis that the Polar regions may play the key role in the shaping of the global climate.
The interaction between environmental change and human activities is com- plex, requiring the concepts and tools of a number of disciplines for its effective analysis.
As we all know, weather radar came into existence during the Second World War when aircraft detection radars had their vision limited by echoes from rain bearing clouds.
Turbulence theory is one of the most intriguing parts of fluid mechanics and many outstanding scientists have tried to apply their knowledge to the development of the theory and to offer useful recommendations for solution of some practical problems.
This Volume constitutes the Proceedings of the IUTAM Symposium on 'Scaling Laws in Ice Mechanics and Ice Dynamics', held in Fairbanks, Alaska from 13th to 16th of June 2000.
This anthology of studies by the eminent geographer and climate scientist Eduard Bruckner (1862-1927) on anthropogenic climate change and the social, political and economic impact of climate variations on societies in historical times, assembles his pioneering work in English for the first time.
Climate change is one of the major global environmental problems, one that has the potential to confront us with great costs during the decades to come.
Reducing the cost of space program interests people more and more nowadays due to the concerns of budget limitation and commercialization of space technology.
In the climate change discussion, non-CO2 greenhouse gases (NCGGs) received official political recognition for the first time in 1997, when agreement was reached on the Kyoto Protocol.