Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Climate change poses many challenges that affect society and the natural world. With these challenges, however, come opportunities to respond. By taking steps to adapt to and mitigate climate change, the risks to society and the impacts of continued climate change can be lessened. The National Climate Assessment, coordinated by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is a mandated report intended to inform response decisions. Required to be developed every four years, these reports provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date evaluation of climate change impacts available for the United States, making them a unique and important climate change document. The draft Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) report reviewed here addresses a wide range of topics of high importance to the United States and society more broadly, extending from human health and community well-being, to the built environment, to businesses and economies, to ecosystems and natural resources. This report evaluates the draft NCA4 to determine if it meets the requirements of the federal mandate, whether it provides accurate information grounded in the scientific literature, and whether it effectively communicates climate science, impacts, and responses for general audiences including the public, decision makers, and other stakeholders.

This new work on energy and environmental modeling describes a broad variety of modeling methodologies, embodied in models of varying scopes and philosophies. Examples range from top-down integrated assessment models to bottom-up partial equilibrium models, to hybrid models.

General circulation models state that the central United States (and other mid-latitude continental regions) will become warmer and drier as the result of greenhouse warming. On this premise the dustbowl period of the 1930s was selected as an analogue of climate change and its weather records imposed on the Missouri--Iowa--Kansas region to assess how current agriculture, forestry, water resources and energy and the entire regional economy would be affected. The same climate was also imposed on a MINK region forty years into the future, by which time climate change may actually be felt, to assess whether technological and societal change would alter the region's vulnerability to climate change. Another premise of the study was that people would not suffer the impacts of climate change passively, but would use availabe tools to ease the stress. The rising atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, expected to be the major cause of greenhouse warming, also works to improve plant growth and reduce plant water use. So the effects of this `Co2 fertilization' were also considered in the analysis. The results, some of them surprising, of this first, fully-integrated analysis of climate change impacts and responses are reported in this book.

Integrated Regional Assessment (IRA) promotes a better understanding of how regions contribute to global environmental change. This book provides a detailed treatment of the methodological challenges of IRA and a set of international examples illustrating the practice of such assessments at the regional scale. The first nine chapters address questions of scale, uncertainty, quantitative versus qualitative approaches, and particular conceptual frameworks for IRA evaluation. The next five chapters illustrate a range of IRA activities combining qualitative and quantitative approaches in innovative ways. The final five chapters review IRA as a process from an implementation perspective. This volume is the culmination of the START/CIRA/IHDP initiative: a collection of international research programs, including the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). The book is an important resource for researchers and policymakers in environmental science and policy.

Summarizes the science of climate change and impacts on the United States, for the public and policymakers.