"Presenting scientific theories that conflict with popular assumptions, explaining that global warming is a slow-motion crisis in which the effects of greenhouse gas emissions are not evident in the atmosphere until roughly a half-century after they occur, and proposing detailed solutions including a worldwide overhaul in energy systems that will go beyond the initial diplomatic efforts of the Kyoto Protocol."
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Natural Resources Journal
"Bruce Johansen's three-volume compendium, Global Warming in the 21st Century, is a definitive guide to what has become one of the year's most contorversial topics."
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Kirkus Reviews
"Johansen serves a wake-up call to naysayers, listing the scientific evidence of global warming in terms of its effects on icecaps, oceans, plants, and animals. He also provides examples of how the United States and other nations are (or are not) reacting to this impending catastrophe. . . . Recommended."
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Library Journal
"The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will soon cease to exist. Manhattan will be covered inch by inch by the Atlantic. There is nothing we can do. Johansen compares popular assumptions such as these with the science that agrees or conflicts with them. Johansen notes that greenhouse gas emissions are not evident in the atmosphere until about 50 years after they occur, resulting in a slow-motion crisis. He describes the science behind the crisis and its evolving paradigm and evidence of global warming in weather patterns and trends, explains the phenomenon of melting ice and warming seas around the world, including the aforesaid sea-level rise, and describes mass extinction in plants and animals in global warming and the effects on human health. He offers a comprehensive solution by changing the way we view energy. The bibliography is very impressive."
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SciTech Book News
"A great value of the three-volume work of which this is the first in the breadth of topics presented on the climate change associated with global warming. Introductory chapters provide an excellent review of basic climate-change science, the complexity of the issue, and the underappreciated impact of feedback loops."
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Science Books & Films
"Johansen is an accomplished wordsmith who uses his fluency in the natural sciences and the human condition to fashion a compelling argument for change in the energy industry. Although he couches his apocalyptic view of future global climate change within a context of real events, his anecdotal descriptions of melting glaciers, drowning polar bears looking for Arctic ice, spruce bark beetles destroying forests, Russian peat bogs smoldering, and grass sprouting on the Antarctic peninsula are factual and alarming. The first recorded landing of sea turtles on Kodiak Island in Alaska, northern permafrost that is no longer permanent, the projected loss of the maple sugar industry in New England, increasing numbers of wildfires, and, of course, dramatic increases in summer temperatures in the Arctic and global illustrations of elevated sea levels add impetus to Johansen's concerns. . . . [T]he subject of global climate change is expertly presented. The three-volume set concludes with a list of solutions to the current threat, along with many useful references. Highly recommended. All levels."
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Choice
"This three-volume reference work provides a comprehensive, objective, and up-to-date overview of global warming for the scientifically literate nonspecialist. . . . One of the most comprehensive reference works available on global warming, it belongs in all academic libraries."
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Reference & User Services Quarterly
"Of all the reference books on global warming, none is as thorough, thoughtful and easy to navigate as Bruce Johansen's series. His grasp of the science is as meticulous as his presentation is lucid. Combining clear reporting of the impacts of a warming atmosphere with ground-level descriptions from people affected by these ominous changes, Johansen has provided a lasting and invaluable resource about a subject that will only continue to attract more and more attention in the coming years."
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Ross Gelbspan, author, The Heat is On and Boiling Point
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