This volume is a collection of refereed papers based on the presentations made at the Third Conference on East Asia and Western Pacific Meteorology and Climate. The topics discussed at the Conference included the East Asian monsoon and climate, typhoons, and air-sea interactions. The majority of the papers were contributed by scientists from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the rest were invited papers from leading non-Chinese meteorologists in the field. This set of proceedings, the third in the series, is an important update of the two previous volumes and serves as a valuable reference on the latest research into the meteorology and climate of the East Asia and Western Pacific region.

Providing a methodology for evaluating indoor thermal comfort with a focus on children, this book presents an in-depth examination of children’s perceptions of comfort. Divided into two sections, it first presents a history of thermal comfort, the human body and environmental parameters, common thermal comfort indexes, and guidelines for creating questionnaires to assess children’s perceptions of indoor thermal comfort. It then describes their understanding of the concepts of comfort and energy, and the factors that influence that perception. In this context, it takes into account the psychological and pedagogical aspects of thermal comfort judgment, as well as architectural and environmental characteristics and equips readers with the knowledge needed to effectively investigate children’s perspectives on environmental ergonomics. The research field of indoor thermal comfort adopts, on the one hand, physical parameter measurements and comfort indexes (e.g. Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) or adaptive comfort), and on the other, an ergonomic assessment in the form of questionnaires. However the latter can offer only limited insights into the issue of comfort, as children often use different terms than adults to convey their experience of thermal comfort. The books aims to address this lack of understanding with regard to children’s perceptions of indoor thermal comfort. The book is intended for HVAC engineers and researchers, architects and researchers interested in thermal comfort and the built environment. It also provides a useful resource for environmental psychologists, medical and cognitive researchers.

This book is a collective undertaking of all faculty members of the Geography Department, HKBU. It provides readers with a concise and authoritative account of the geography of one of China’s most dynamic development regions — Hong Kong, Macau and the Pearl River Delta region. This book is divided thematically into 4 parts. Part I introduces the unique geographical characteristics of the region. Part II focuses on environmental and landscape dynamics and the impacts of rapid economic development on the natural environment since 1978. Part III ponders on developmental issues, such as urbanization, industrialization, energy development, transportation, socio-economic development and planning issues. Chapters of this part succinctly analyze these issues in the context of regional development and globalization concerns. Part IV discusses the sustainable future of the region.

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.