CDIAC's Bookshelf

In the course of our work at CDIAC, we have many books and announcements cross our desks. Many of these are highly specialized and may not get a broad announcement to the worldwide scientific community. So we share our familiarity with them in this feature of CDIAC Communications. CDIAC will not be stocking or distributing these publications.

Proceedings of the Tsukuba Global Carbon Cycle Workshop (Center for Global Environmental Research, Tsukuba, 16-2 Onogawa, Ibaraki 305, Japan, 1995, 174 pp.)

This report presents the papers, discussions, and summaries from an international workshop held in Tsukuba, Japan, on Feb. 1-3, 1995. The workshop brought together a multidisciplinary group of leading scientists to discuss the modeling, observation, and process studies of the global carbon cycle. It was sponsored by the Environment Agency and the Center for Global Environmental Research of the National Institute for Environmental Studies.

The workshop was subdivided into sessions on global modeling, the atmospheric field, the oceanic field, and the terrestrial field. Major observations of the workshop participants included:

• The terrestrial sink could be reduced in the future if forests cannot adapt to climate change and they die, making current estimates of the future carbon sink too high.

• After an unanticipated slowing in the growth of atmospheric CO₂ concentration during the early 1990s, the rate now seems to be accelerating again.

• Model complexity is increasing, making it difficult to examine modeled processes individually and making calibration practically impossible. In some cases, simple models may give more accurate results.

• Carbon-13 and other data indicate that much of the missing sink may be caused by an increased net rate of photosynthetic uptake in the Northern Hemisphere.

• More than enough uncertainty exists in the total ocean uptake to account for the missing sink.

• Mid- and high-latitude forests currently accumulate carbon at a higher rate than previously thought, cutting into the size of the missing sink.

V. M. Kotlyakov, Ed.

Until recently, little was known about some of the 66% of the Earth's surface that is covered with snow and ice during the winter. Indeed, with 30 million cubic kilometers of ice on our planet, a good case can be made for saying that we are living during an ice age.

This publication has 400 pages with more than 1000 maps of the world's regions with snow and ice; specialized maps focus on such areas as the Alps, Caucasus, Pamirs, Karakoram, and Alaska. The cartographic volume is accompanied by a text volume (about 300 pages) in English and Russian that contains new glaciologic data and interpretations, and a separate English-language book (about 200 pages) translates the titles, captions, and legends of all the maps and explains the symbols used.

Compiled by more than 300 glaciologists, geographers, climatologists, and hydrologists during the past 20 years, the atlas is Russia's contribution to the International Hydrological Programme of UNESCO and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme of ICSU. The atlas focuses special attention on the topics of glaciers and glacial processes, snowmelt and runoff, and sea ice. It is designed to document the status of the arctic environments during the 1970s and 1980s and to serve as a benchmark in assessing global warming and its consequences.

The atlas is expected to be published in late 1996, with the press run determined by the number of prepublication orders. Ordering information can be obtained from the Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Staromonetny per. 29, Moscow 109017 Russia; e-mail: geography@glas. arc.org.

J. G. Titus and V. K. Narayanan

Along much of the U.S. coast, sea level is currently rising 2.5 to 3.0 mm/year, and global warming could accelerate that rise by melting glaciers and ice caps and by producing a thermal expansion of the ocean's volume. This report presents the methods and results of a two-part effort to estimate the probability distribution of future sea-level rise implied by the expectations of about 20 climate researchers. It also develops probability-based projections that can be added to local tide-gage trends to estimate future sea level at particular locations.

The resulting estimates of sea-level rise are somewhat lower than previous estimates, primarily because of lower temperature projections that take into consideration the cooling caused by aerosols in the upper atmosphere. Nonetheless, the study came to the following conclusions:

• Global warming is most likely to raise sea level 15 cm by the year 2050 and 34 cm by the year 2100.

• There is a 1% chance that global warming will raise sea level 1 m in the next 100 years and 4 m in the next 200 years.

• By the year 2100, climate change is likely to increase the rate of sea-level rise by 4.2 mm/year.

• Stabilizing emissions by the year 2025 could cut the rate of sea-level rise in half.

• Along most coasts, factors other than anthropogenic climate change will cause the sea to rise more than the rise resulting from climate change alone.

Copies of the report are available from the National Center for Environmental Publications and Information, P.O. Box 42419, Cincinnati, Ohio, 45242.

Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change developed a series of guidelines for assessing the impacts of potential climate change and for evaluating possible adaptation measures to determine their efficacy and appropriateness. The guidelines call for a seven-step assessment process:

1. Define the problem, including setting the precise goals of the assessment; selecting the impacted object to be assessed; choosing the geographic area to be studied; selecting a time horizon for the study; determining what data are already available and what new data will need to be collected; and placing the problem in the context of the political, economic, and social system of the region under study.

2. Select the analytical method to be adopted, considering the experimentation, impact projections, empirical analog studies, and expert judgment.

3. Test the method through feasibility studies, data acquisition and compilation, and/or modeling.

4. Select reasonable scenarios of future environmental and socioeconomic conditions by establishing the present situation; determining the time frame that is appropriate for the limits of predictability, the compatibility of projections, and the type of assessment (point-in-time or continuous) being used; developing a baseline of environmental trends in the absence of climate change; developing a baseline of socioeconomic trends in the absence of climate change; projecting climate change; projecting environmental trends with climate change; and projecting socioeconomic trends with climate change.

5. Assess the impacts of climate change on environmental and socioeconomic conditions in terms of qualitative descriptions, indicators of change, compliance to standards, costs and benefits, geographical analysis, and/or the uncertainties involved.

6. Assess the effects of autonomous adjustments (i.e., actions that might be taken to mitigate or adapt to the effects of climate change).

7. Evaluate each adaptation strategy by defining the objectives of the analysis, specifying the climate impacts of importance, identifying the adaptation options, examining the constraints, quantifying the measures and formulating alternative strategies, weighting objectives and evaluating trade-offs, and recommending the best adaptation measures.

The 1996 version of this annual report starts by defining the challenges that global change poses:

• Understanding seasonal and interannual climate fluctuations,

• Predicting near-term climate change,

• Modeling stratospheric ozone depletion and increased UV radiation, and

• Observing and understanding changes in land cover and in terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

The report explains how 12 federal agencies have cooperated to form the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) to address these challenges and describes the goals and research approaches the USGCRP has adopted. The report then describes multidisciplinary (and multiagency) approaches to global-change research and the international cooperation that has occurred in conducting these investigations. The next section gives summary descriptions of recent research results produced by USGCRP projects. Budgetary overviews of the program, participation in the program by individual federal agencies, and other administrative details of the program are given in the appendixes.

The report is available from the Global Change Research Information Offices, 1825 K St., NW, Suite 805, Washington, D.C., 20500.