| Preface to the Second Edition | p. xi |
| Preface to the First Edition | p. xiii |
| Foreword | p. xv |
| List of figures | p. xvii |
| List of tables | p. xxiii |
| List of abbreviations and acronyms | p. xxv |
| About the author | p. xxvii |
| The climate system | p. 1 |
| Why does climate vary from one place to another? | p. 2 |
| Why mountains are colder | p. 4 |
| Winds and currents: the atmosphere and oceans | p. 6 |
| The ocean circulation | p. 9 |
| Ocean gyres and the "Roaring Forties" (or Furious Fifties) | p. 9 |
| Winds and ocean currents push against one another | p. 10 |
| The thermohaline circulation | p. 10 |
| The great heat-transporting machine | p. 15 |
| The "continental" climate | p. 17 |
| Patterns of precipitation | p. 18 |
| From climate to vegetation | p. 27 |
| Biomes: the broad vegetation types of the world | p. 27 |
| An example of a biome or broad-scale vegetation type: tropical rainforest | p. 28 |
| The world's major vegetation types | p. 31 |
| Understanding the patterns | p. 37 |
| What favors forest vegetation | p. 39 |
| Why trees need more warmth | p. 39 |
| Why trees need more water | p. 40 |
| Deciduous or evergreen: the adaptive choices that plants make | p. 43 |
| Cold-climate evergreenness | p. 48 |
| The latitudinal bands of evergreen and deciduous forest | p. 50 |
| Nutrients and evergreenness | p. 50 |
| Other trends in forest with climate | p. 52 |
| Non-forest biomes | p. 53 |
| Scrub biomes | p. 53 |
| Grasslands | p. 53 |
| Deserts | p. 54 |
| Biomes are to some extent subjective | p. 54 |
| Humans altering the natural vegetation, shifting biomes | p. 55 |
| "Predicting" where vegetation types will occur | p. 55 |
| Species distributions and climate | p. 59 |
| Patterns in species richness | p. 60 |
| Plants on the move | p. 67 |
| Vegetation can move as the climate shifts | p. 67 |
| The Quaternary: the last 2.4 million years | p. 67 |
| Biomes in the distant past | p. 75 |
| Sudden changes in climate, and how vegetation responds | p. 75 |
| The increasing greenhouse effect, and future vegetation change | p. 81 |
| Response of vegetation to the present warming of climate | p. 81 |
| Seasons as well as vegetation distribution are changing | p. 86 |
| What will happen as the warming continues? | p. 88 |
| Movement of biomes under greenhouse effect warming | p. 92 |
| Microclimates and vegetation | p. 97 |
| What causes microclimates? | p. 97 |
| At the soil surface and below | p. 98 |
| Above the surface: the boundary layer and wind speed | p. 99 |
| Roughness and turbulence | p. 102 |
| Microclimates of a forest canopy | p. 103 |
| Under the canopy | p. 106 |
| Big plants "make" the microclimates of smaller plants | p. 108 |
| The importance of sun angle | p. 110 |
| Bumps and hollows in the landscape have their own microclimate | p. 112 |
| Life within rocks: endolithic lichens and algae | p. 114 |
| Plants creating their own microclimate | p. 115 |
| Dark colors | p. 115 |
| Protection against freezing | p. 115 |
| Internal heating | p. 115 |
| Volatiles from leaves | p. 116 |
| Utilization of microclimates in agriculture | p. 116 |
| From microclimates to macroclimates | p. 117 |
| The desert makes the desert: Climate feedbacks from the vegetation of arid zones | p. 121 |
| Geography makes deserts | p. 121 |
| But deserts make themselves | p. 122 |
| The Sahel and vegetation feedbacks | p. 127 |
| Have humans really caused the Sahelian droughts? | p. 132 |
| Could the Sahara be made green? | p. 132 |
| A human effect on climate? The grasslands of the Great Plains in the USA | p. 136 |
| The Green Sahara of the past | p. 139 |
| Could other arid regions show the same amplification of change by vegetation cover? | p. 143 |
| Dust | p. 145 |
| Sudden ciimate switches and dust | p. 149 |
| The future | p. 150 |
| Forests | p. 153 |
| Finding out what forests really do to climate | p. 155 |
| What deforestation does to climate within a region | p. 161 |
| Re-afforestation | p. 169 |
| The remote effects of deforestation | p. 169 |
| The role of forest feedback in broad swings in climate | p. 170 |
| Deforestation and the Little Ice Age | p. 170 |
| Deforestation around the Mediterranean and drying in North Africa | p. 173 |
| Forest feedbacks during the Quaternary | p. 173 |
| Volatile organic compounds and climate | p. 176 |
| Forest-climate feedbacks in the greenhouse world | p. 177 |
| Plants and the carbon cycle | p. 181 |
| The ocean | p. 183 |
| Plants as a control on CO2 and O2 | p. 185 |
| Methane: the other carbon gas | p. 187 |
| Carbon and the history of the earth's temperature | p. 188 |
| Plants, weathering and CO2 | p. 189 |
| Plants, CO2 and ice ages | p. 193 |
| Humans and the carbon store of plants | p. 198 |
| The present increase in CO2 | p. 201 |
| The oceans as a carbon sink | p. 204 |
| Seasonal and year-to-year wiggles in CO2 level | p. 205 |
| The signal in the atmosphere | p. 210 |
| The strength of the seasonal "wiggle" in CO2 | p. 212 |
| Accounting errors: the missing sink | p. 213 |
| Watching forests take up carbon | p. 215 |
| Predicting changes in global carbon balance under global warming | p. 217 |
| The direct carbon dioxide effect on plants | p. 221 |
| The two direct effects of CO2 on plants: photosynthesis and water balance | p. 221 |
| Increased CO2 effects at the scale of a leaf | p. 222 |
| Modeling direct CO2 effects | p. 223 |
| What models predict for increasing CO2 and global vegetation | p. 224 |
| Adding climate change to the CO2 fertilization effect | p. 225 |
| Experiments with raised CO2 and whole plants | p. 227 |
| The sort of results that are found in CO2 enrichment experiments | p. 230 |
| A decline in response with time | p. 233 |
| Temperature and CO2 responses interacting | p. 233 |
| A few examples of what is found in Face experiments | p. 234 |
| Forests | p. 234 |
| Semi-desert and dry grassland vegetation | p. 236 |
| Will C4 plants lose out in an increased CO2 world? | p. 237 |
| Other Face experiments | p. 242 |
| Face studies on agricultural systems | p. 242 |
| Some conclusions about Face experiments | p. 244 |
| Will a high CO2 world favor C3 species over C4 species? | p. 244 |
| What factors tend to decrease plant responses to CO2 fertilization? | p. 245 |
| There are other effects of enhanced CO2 on plants apart from growth rate | p. 245 |
| CO2 fertilization and soils | p. 246 |
| CO2 fertilization effects across trophic levels | p. 247 |
| Looking for signs of a CO2 fertilization effect in agriculture | p. 248 |
| Looking for signs of a CO2 fertilization effect in natural plant communities | p. 249 |
| The changing seasonal amplitude of CO2 | p. 252 |
| CO2 levels and stomata out in nature | p. 253 |
| Direct CO2 effects and the ecology of the past | p. 253 |
| Direct CO2 effects on longer geological timescales | p. 256 |
| Ancient moist climates or high CO2 effects? | p. 257 |
| Other direct CO2 effects: in the oceans | p. 258 |
| The future direct CO2 effect: a good or a bad thing for the natural world? | p. 259 |
| Conclusion: The limits to what we can know | p. 260 |
| Bibliography | p. 261 |
| Index | p. 265 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
