- Summary
- Contents
- Subject index
The SAGE Handbook of Environmental Change is an extensive survey of the interdisciplinary science of environmental change that examines the historic importance and future development of the field over two volumes. With over 40 chapters, the books situate key arguments and debates by examining a retrospective audit of the discipline, its changing nature and diversity of approaches, key theoretical paradigms, its resonances between sub-fields and other disciplines, and its relationships to theory, research and practice. Global in its coverage, scientific and theoretical in its approach, the books bring together an international set of respected editors and contributors to provide an exciting, timely addition to the literature on climate change.
Chapter 29: Human Impacts on the Atmosphere
Human Impacts on the Atmosphere
1 Introduction
The Earth has entered the Anthropocene – the current epoch in which human activities have come to rival and even dominate many of the global biogeochemical cycles in the Earth system (Crutzen, 2002; Steffen et al., 2007). Prior to the Anthropocene, the environmental impacts of human activities were mostly limited to local and sometimes regional scales. Now, however, the human impact has reached the planetary scale, and this impact is clearly reflected in changes in the chemistry and physics of the atmosphere.
The aim of this chapter is to use a number of atmospheric constituents to illustrate some of the main human impacts on the atmosphere, beginning with a short historical perspective on air pollution. ...
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