This book is a compilation of selected papers from the 5th International Conference on Building Energy and Environment (COBEE2022), held in Montreal, Canada, in July 2022. The work focuses on the most recent technologies and knowledge of building energy and the environment, including health, energy, urban microclimate, smart cities, safety, etc. The contents make valuable contributions to academic researchers, engineers in the industry, and regulators of buildings. As well, readers encounter new ideas for achieving healthy, comfortable, energy-efficient, resilient, and safe buildings.

This book is a balanced and comprehensive overview of the links between climate and man's advance from pre-history to modern times. It is a synthesis of the many historical and scientific theories regarding man's progress through the ages

Recent decades have seen a degradation of the environmental quality in semi-enclosed seas, which are particularly sensitive to population pressures due to their naturally low flushing rates related to their geometry. The North Sea, Baltic Sea and the Black Sea are amongst the most seriously threatened seas in the Euro-Asian region. Each semi-enclosed sea has a distinct pattern of circulation, transport, mixing, associated with the particular geometry, topography, boundary processes, interior stratification, atmospheric forcing, ice fonnation, straits / sill controls, and the specific inputs of freshwater, nutrients and pollutants. The workshop investigated the distinctive physical and ecological characteristics of the three seas in a comparative manner, in order to identify the types of driving forces and dynamic controls operating on productivity, nutrient cycling, physical transport and mixing mechanisms. A comparative study of these controlling mechanisms would allow us to better understand ecosystem sensitivity in these different environments. The workshop presentations highlighted the complexity of the semi-enclosed seas related to the interaction amongst the physical, chemical and biological fields, and differences in time and space scales in each of the systems. Further, a strong climate signal exists in these systems, manifest in the interannual, interdecadal and longer term variability. Part of the variability appears connected with background climatic variability.

This book is designed for first- and second-year universitystudents (and their instructors) in earth science, environmentalscience, and physical geography degree programmes worldwide. Thesummaries at the end of each section constitute essential readingfor policy makers and planners. It provides a simple but masterlyaccount, with a minimum of equations, of how the Earth’sclimate system works, of the physical processes that have givenrise to the long sequence of glacial and interglacial periods ofthe Quaternary, and that will continue to cause the climate toevolve. Its straightforward and elegant description, with anabundance of well chosen illustrations, focuses on different timescales, and includes the most recent research in climate science bythe United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC). It shows how it is human behaviour that will determinewhether or not the present century is a turning point to a newclimate, unprecedented on Earth in the last several millionyears.