ABSTRACT
Our world is changing in dramatic and consequential ways. From melting glaciers to rising seas, and from increases in violent storms to emergent and spreading diseases, many of these changes reflect a pattern of planetary warming. While some have called into question whether the changes we are seeing around us are the outcome of something more than cyclical patterns, the sheer volume of mounting data of diverse sorts has convinced most climate scientists that the global warming is real, that it is increasingly threatening to human life and well-being, and that it is largely the result of human or anthropogenic activities, particularly since the Industrial Revolution. According to Dessler and Parson,
Of all the environmental issues that have emerged in the past few decades, global climate change [or global warming] is the most serious, the most difficult to manage. Many aspects of human society and well being—where we live, how we build, how we move around, how we earn our livings, what we do for recreation—still depend on a relatively benign range of climate conditions, even though this dependence has been reduced and obscured in modern industrial societies by their wealth and technology. [Dessler and Parson 2006:1]
