Handbook of climate change and agroecosystems : impacts, adaptation, and mitigation /

Usually handbooks contain technique sets for investigating specific problems. Editors Hillel and Rosenzweig (both, Columbia Univ. and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) provide a different mind-set. How should one evaluate global climate change, knowing that it involves mechanisms, influence on terrestrial (plant) biology, and policy responses? The text succeeds in its goal of providing "concise, accessible, comprehensive, and comprehensible information on climate change and agriculture." Its sections--divided into "Broad-scale Interactions," "Measuring and Modeling CO^D[2 and Temperature Effects," "Climate, Pests, and Regions," and "Adaptation and Mitigation"--partition the topic into linked but independently understandable segments. Chapter contributors make their papers accessible to the reader. More importantly, they take pains to delineate what is known and what is not known and, therefore, the knowledge gaps that should be pursued in the context of global climate change. Because the topics are presented in terms of sustainable and nonsustainable agricultural systems--and what that means from physical, chemical, and biological perspectives--regardless of whether one believes that global climate change has occurred, the chapters provide useful information about how it needs to be studied to best effect. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and above. M. S. Coyne University of Kentucky