Rebalancing Our Climate The Future Starts Today

by Rohling, Eelco J.

• ISBN13: 9780197502556
• ISBN10: 0197502555
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-11-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

We only have one planet, and its climate and ecosystem are essential to our survival.

A veritable tsunami of studies and assessment reports outlines a stark picture of humanity's detrimental impacts on our planet's life and environmental health. Climate change is at the heart of many of these impacts. We cannot continue to live in the same way; we're facing relentless population growth, paired with ever-expanding energy and resource consumption. Every day we dither exacerbates the issues we have to repair. What are our options, though?

We can still avert the doomsday scenario and choose more sustainable behavior. Decisive action can still make a significant difference to our environment. In Rebalancing Our Climate, Eelco J. Rohling documents a wealth of ways to adjust the trajectory of climate change. He outlines measures to drive massive reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, remove these gases from our atmosphere, and reflect part of the incoming energy from the Sun back into space. The book evaluates both advantages and disadvantages of changing our behaviour.

Rohling thus addresses the issues that affect the pathways to our survival in an understandable way. He also showcases the need to protect ourselves from impacts that have become inevitable already and presents ways to drive society to get these jobs done. The resulting book provides powerful facts and arguments to support informed choices about how we manage our dear planet.

Author Biography

Eelco J. Rohling is Professor of Ocean and Climate Change at the Australian National University. He is secondarily affiliated with the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. Rohling earned his PhD from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1991, and his post-doctoral research was split between Utrecht and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the United States. He is former joint chief editor of Paleoceanography, current editor of Reviews of Geophysics, and founding chief editor of Oxford Open Climate Change. He is Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science and of the American Geophysical Union. A Web of Science 2019 "Highly Cited Researcher," Rohling is also a former recipient of a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and an Australian Laureate Fellowship. His research focuses on ocean and climate change with emphasis on sea level, climate sensitivity, and past episodes of enhanced carbon burial in ocean sediments.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Introduction: Outline of the Challenge
Chapter 2: The Problem: The Human-Caused Climate Crisis
Chapter 3: The No-Brainer: Emissions Reduction
Chapter 4: The New Kid on the Block: Negative Emission Through Greenhouse Gas Removal
Chapter 5: The Controversial One: Solar Radiation Management
Chapter 6: The Inevitable One: Impacts and Adaption
Chapter 7: The Behavioral Renaissance: Re-forming Society
Chapter 8: The Future: Toward Rebalancing Climate
Chapter 9: Conclusions

Appendix 1: Climate Feedbacks
Appendix 2: Indicative Future Projection for Carbon Removal by Nets