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.

Forests and Global Change, Volume 2: Forest Management Opportunities for Mitigating Carbon Emissions (American Forests, P.O. Box 2000, Washington, DC, 20013, 1996, 379 pp.)

R. Neil Sampson and Dwight Hair, Eds.

This book identifies and analyzes opportunities in forestry to develop policies and programs to mitigate and adapt to prospective climate changes. Many of these actions are desirable on social, environmental, and economic grounds as well as being effective responses to climate change. They include such strategies as converting marginal crop and pasture land to forests; increasing timber growth on forests now used for timber production; increasing the use of wood for energy in place of fossil fuels; improving wood utilization; and reducing fossil-fuel consumption by planting trees to shelter urban and farm structures, cropland, and farm animals from sun and wind and rural roads from drifting snow.

Chapters are devoted to carbon storage in forests; wood-carbon flows after harvest; effects of forest management; increasing timber growth and the associated land-use changes; wood-energy technologies; forest-management strategies and policies; forest responses to climate change; climate-change effects on natural areas; increasing carbon storage through enhanced substitution, recycling, and use of wood; and wildfire effects.

Three appendixes contain estimates of timber volume and forest carbon after clearcutting, after pasture reversion, and under forest management.

Changes in leaf area index, biomass, and net annual production in relation
to stand age. From Forests and Global Change.

Our Changing Planet: The Fiscal Year 1997 U.S. Global Change Research Program (Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, National Science and Technology Council, Washington, D.C., 1996, 162 pp.)

The 1997 version of this annual report explains how 12 federal agencies have cooperated to form the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The purpose of the program is to address the scientific issues associated with global change. The report describes the goals and research approaches the USGCRP has adopted. It identifies and describes the key issues in global climate change:

• seasonal to interannual climate variability;
• decadal to century climate change;
• changes in atmospheric chemistry, stratospheric ozone, and ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth's surface; and
• changes in land cover and in terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

The report then describes the activities the USGCRP engages in to address these issues:

• observing and monitoring global change;
• producing and distributing global-change data and information products;
• supporting long-term, integrated, and exploratory research into chemical, physical, geological, and solar processes that affect the global environment;
• investigating human contributions and responses to global change;
• cooperating with international research efforts; and
• offering opportunities for education and communication about global change.

Budgetary overviews of the program, participation in the program by individual federal agencies, and other administrative details of the program are given in appendixes.

Changes in near-surface temperatures (in degrees C) from about
1860 through 1995. From Our Changing Planet, 1997.

Hard copies of Our Changing Planet are available from the Global Change Research Information Office, 2250 Pierce Rd., University Center, MI, 48710.