The Impacts of Climate Change: Chapter 1 - Why discuss the impacts of climate change?

This book is about the impact of climate change on the planet's ecosystem and human beings. In this book, only a few topics have been chosen to highlight the impacts of climate change on the physical and biophysical aspects of the planet. They include melting glaciers and ice sheets, natural disasters, food issues, biodiversity, microorganisms, and marine ecosystems as they all have a direct effect on the human population. The indicators of climate change on the weather patterns, sea levels, wind systems, ocean currents, animal, bird and insect ecology, sea life, corals, marine and intertidal ecology, plant ecology, and plant pathogens have been dealt with in detail and at great length in Climate Change 2nd edition. The major part of this new book relates to the social and political issues as impacted by climate change. The social impacts of climate change stem from: food production problems; population movements and expansion; economics related to ecological changes; societal adaption, attitudes and pressures on urban life. The chapters in this book gives insights into these changes that are taking place in our society. There is no precedent for coping with these issues. The section on political aspects focuses on security, governance, justice, the law and ethics as related to climate change; all of which involve issues that are new and need new solutions and preferably solutions that are universal and can be adopted worldwide. Again, we must look at international cooperation for finding solutions; this is bought home to us in the final chapter on climate refugees. This is a very new problem and can only be solved with collaboration from all governments. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a wake-up call to the world for more international cooperation to solve global issues including the impacts of climate change. Focusing on the issues discussed in this book, we should be better prepared to cope with future impacts of our changing climate. That is the raison d’etre for this volume.