Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change

Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change PDF Author: Michael Collier
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816547513
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
No one in America would deny that the weather has changed drastically in our lifetime. We read about El Niño and La Niña, but how many of us really understand the big picture beyond our own front windows or even the headlines on the Weather Channel? Hydrologists and climatologists have long been aware of the role of regional climate in predicting floods and understanding droughts. But with our growing sense of a variable climate, it is important to reassess these natural disasters not as isolated events but as related phenomena. This book shows that floods and droughts don't happen by accident but are the products of patterns of wind, temperature, and precipitation that produce meteorologic extremes. It introduces the mechanics of global weather, puts these processes into the longer-term framework of climate, and then explores the evolution of climatic patterns through time to show that floods and droughts, once considered isolated "acts of God," are often related events driven by the same forces that shape the entire atmosphere. Michael Collier and Robert Webb offer a fresh, insightful look at what we know about floods, droughts, and climate variability—and their impact on people—in an easy-to-read text, with dramatic photos, that assumes no previous understanding of climate processes. They emphasize natural, long-term mechanisms of climate change, explaining how floods and droughts relate to climate variability over years and decades. They also show the human side of some of the most destructive weather disasters in history. As Collier and Webb ably demonstrate, "climate" may not be the smooth continuum of meteorologic possibilities we supposed but rather the sum of multiple processes operating both regionally and globally on different time scales. Amid the highly politicized discussion of our changing environment, Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change offers a straightforward scientific account of weather crises that can help students and general readers better understand the causes of climate variability and the consequences for their lives.

Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change

Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change PDF Author: Michael Collier
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816547513
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Get Book Here

Book Description
No one in America would deny that the weather has changed drastically in our lifetime. We read about El Niño and La Niña, but how many of us really understand the big picture beyond our own front windows or even the headlines on the Weather Channel? Hydrologists and climatologists have long been aware of the role of regional climate in predicting floods and understanding droughts. But with our growing sense of a variable climate, it is important to reassess these natural disasters not as isolated events but as related phenomena. This book shows that floods and droughts don't happen by accident but are the products of patterns of wind, temperature, and precipitation that produce meteorologic extremes. It introduces the mechanics of global weather, puts these processes into the longer-term framework of climate, and then explores the evolution of climatic patterns through time to show that floods and droughts, once considered isolated "acts of God," are often related events driven by the same forces that shape the entire atmosphere. Michael Collier and Robert Webb offer a fresh, insightful look at what we know about floods, droughts, and climate variability—and their impact on people—in an easy-to-read text, with dramatic photos, that assumes no previous understanding of climate processes. They emphasize natural, long-term mechanisms of climate change, explaining how floods and droughts relate to climate variability over years and decades. They also show the human side of some of the most destructive weather disasters in history. As Collier and Webb ably demonstrate, "climate" may not be the smooth continuum of meteorologic possibilities we supposed but rather the sum of multiple processes operating both regionally and globally on different time scales. Amid the highly politicized discussion of our changing environment, Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change offers a straightforward scientific account of weather crises that can help students and general readers better understand the causes of climate variability and the consequences for their lives.

Living with Floods in a Mobile Southeast Asia

Living with Floods in a Mobile Southeast Asia PDF Author: Carl Middleton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317645162
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between migration, vulnerability, resilience and social justice associated with flooding across diverse environmental, social and policy contexts in Southeast Asia. It challenges simple analyses of flooding as a singular driver of migration, and instead considers the ways in which floods figure in migration-based livelihoods and amongst already mobile populations. The book develops a conceptual framework based on a ‘mobile political ecology’ in which particular attention is paid to the multidimensionality, temporalities and geographies of vulnerability. Rather than simply emphasising the capacities (or lack thereof) of individuals and households, the focus is on identifying factors that instigate, manage and perpetuate vulnerable populations and places: these include the sociopolitical dynamics of floods, flood hazards and risky environments, migration and migrant-based livelihoods and the policy environments through which all of these take shape. The book is organised around a series of eight empirical urban and rural case studies from countries in Southeast Asia, where lives are marked by mobility and by floods associated with the region’s monsoonal climate. The concluding chapter synthesises the insights of the case studies, and suggests future policy directions. Together, the chapters highlight critical policy questions around the governance of migration, institutionalised disaster response strategies and broader development agendas.

Floods

Floods PDF Author: Libby Koponen
Publisher: True Books: Earth Science (Lib
ISBN: 9780531168837
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
What makes the earth quake, rivers flood, and volcanoes blow their tops? How do natural forces become natural disasters? Buckle your seatbelts and get ready for a bumpy ride to the center of the earth for a look at some of the wildest phenomena in the history of earth science!

Red River Rising

Red River Rising PDF Author: Ashley Shelby
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
ISBN: 9780873515009
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The gripping, true-life story of one of the most destructive floods in U.S. history and its effect on one city and its citizens.

The River People in Flood Time

The River People in Flood Time PDF Author: Terry Rugeley
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804793123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The River People in Flood Time tells the astonishing story of how the people of nineteenth-century Tabasco, Mexico, overcame impossible odds to expel foreign interventions. Tabascans resisted control by Mexico City, overcame the grip of a Cuban adventurer who seized the region for two years, turned back the United States Navy, and defeated the French Intervention of the early 1860s, thus remaining free territory while the rest of the nation struggled for four painful years under the imposed monarchy of Maximilian. With colorful anecdotes and biographical sketches, this deeply researched and masterfully written history reconstructs the lives and culture of the Tabascans, as well as their pre-Columbian and colonial past. Rugeley reveals how over the centuries, one colorful character after another sets foot on the Tabascan stage, only to be undone by climate, disease, and more than anything else, tenacious Tabascan resistance. Virtually the only English-language study of this little-known province, River People in Flood Time explores the ways in which geography, climate, and social relationships contributed to an extraordinarily successful defense against unwelcome meddling from the outside world. River People in Flood Time demonstrates the complex relationship between imperial forces in relation to remote parts of Latin America, and the way that resistance to external pressure helped mold the thoughts, attitudes, and actions of those remote peoples. Nineteenth-century Mexico was more a land of localities than a unified nation, and Rugeley's narrative paints an indelible portrait of one of its least known and most unique provinces.

Between the Floods

Between the Floods PDF Author: Mark van de Logt
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806192550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The creation story of the Sahniš, or Arikara, people begins with a terrible flood, sent by the Great Chief Above to renew the world. Many generations later, another devastating flood nearly destroyed the Arikaras when the newly built Garrison Dam swamped the fertile land of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. Between the Floods tells the story of this powerful Great Plains nation from its mythic origins to the modern era, tracing the path of the Arikaras through the oral traditions and oral histories that preserve and illuminate their past. The Arikaras, like their Hidatsa and Mandan neighbors on the northern plains, lived as both farmers and hunter-gatherers, growing corn and hunting buffalo. Pressure on their villages from other nations, including the Lakhotas, forced displacements and relocations, and once Euro-Americans entered their domain—French fur-traders, the Spanish, and especially Americans after Lewis and Clark—the Arikaras’ strategic location on the Missouri River became both an asset and a liability. Between the Floods follows this resilient semi-sedentary people in their migration and settlement as they confront the challenges of white incursions, tribal conflicts, foreign diseases, the slave trade, and the introduction of horses and metal tools. In the Arikaras’ oral traditions and histories, Mark van de Logt finds a key to their distant past as well as the cultural underpinnings of their resilience and persistence, as faith in their great prophet, Mother Corn, guides them and inspires hope for the future. Enhanced with the insights of archaeology, linguistics, and anthropology, and illustrated with Native maps and ledger art, as well as historic photographs and drawings, Between the Floods brings unprecedented depth, detail, and authenticity to its picture of the Arikaras in the fullness and living presence of their history.

Flash Floods

Flash Floods PDF Author: Kevin Sene
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400751648
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Flash floods typically develop in a period a few hours or less and can arise from heavy rainfall and other causes, such as dam or flood defence breaches, and ice jam breaks. The rapid development, often associated with a high debris content, can present a considerable risk to people and property. This book describes recent developments in techniques for monitoring and forecasting the development of flash floods, and providing flood warnings. Topics which are discussed include rainfall and river monitoring, nowcasting, Numerical Weather Prediction, rainfall-runoff modelling, and approaches to the dissemination of flood warnings and provision of an emergency response. The book is potentially useful on civil engineering, water resources, meteorology and hydrology courses (and for post graduate studies) but is primarily intended as a review of the topic for a wider audience.

The Creeks Will Rise

The Creeks Will Rise PDF Author: William S. Becker
Publisher: Chicago Review Press - Fulcrum
ISBN: 9781682752753
Category : Biotic communities
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"In pursuit of economic growth, the United States and other developed countries are testing the tolerance of the natural world. The results include the loss of valuable ecosystems, global climate change, and the degradation of the planet's ability to support life. Journalist William Becker argues that our mission in the 21st century should be to fix what we have broken in the natural world and to enlist healthy ecosystems in our pursuit of economic and physical security. Becker begins by sounding an alarm about the inability of the dams and levees we built over the last century to handle the severity of sea-level rise and record floods we see today. The Creeks Will Rise delves into some of the historical and philosophical underpinnings that have led to the climate change situation we now find ourselves in. Becker fearlessly takes on the fossil fuel industry, holding it accountable for the enormous contribution it has made to climate change. He also includes recommendations for solutions as well as specific advice and resources for anyone working toward resolving the climate crisis"--Publisher's website.

Will Miami Survive?

Will Miami Survive? PDF Author: Kathleen Sullivan Sealey
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331979020X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 87

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Book Description
This SpringerBrief uses a complexity perspective to integrate risk, finance, and ecological issues in Miami, USA. It focuses on how the modern financial system, particularly the mortgage market, perceives and manages the risk of climate change. Authors Kathleen Sealey, Ray King Burch and P.-M. Binder offer the case study of South Florida to illustrate how landscapes can be either re-purposed to function ecologically when residents relocate or rebuilt to reduce the threat of future flooding, the tools needed to make these decisions, and how financial systems view and influence them. While the need to integrate financial markets into coastal (and environmental) management is increasingly recognized, the difficulty of this task is made greater by the speed of financial innovation and the obscurity and complexity of its practices. This book will discuss the innovative Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact, and the success of public-private partnerships in planning and adapting to sea level rise, but also the broad disconnect with the cash-and-credit-driven real estate market of South Florida. The book presents an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of the coupled human (including finance) and natural systems in coastal cities, thus breaking new ground in the approach towards sustainability research and education. The final chapter introduces the social component of resilience which include pre-disaster outreach with and the potential for decision theory to help people understand and manage risk.

Mississippi Floods

Mississippi Floods PDF Author: Anuradha Mathur
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300084307
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
"Each time the waters of the mighty Mississippi River overflow their banks, questions arise anew about the battle between "man" and "river". How can we prevent floods and the damage they inflict while maintaining navigational potential and protecting the river's ecology?" "The design of the Mississippi and how it should proceed has long been a subject of controversy. What is missing from the discussion, say the authors of this book, is an understanding of the representations of the Mississippi River. Landscape architect Anuradha Mathur and architect/planner Dilip da Cunha draw together an array of perspectives on the river and show how these different images have played a role in the process of designing and containing the river landscape. Analyzing maps, hydrographs, working models, drawings, photographs, government and media reports, painting, and even folklore, Mathur and da Cunha consider what these representations of the river portray, what they leave out, and why that might be. With original silk screen prints and a selection of maps, the book joins historic, scientific, engineering, and natural views of the river to create an entirely new portrait of the great Mississippi."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved