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Introduction xviii Climate adaptation refers to the ability of a system to adjust to climate change (including climate variability and extremes) to moderate poten- tial damage, take advantage of opportunities, or cope with the conse- quences. Strategic initiatives, laws, and policies, for instance, fall into this category. Each term, of course, is part of a brave new world that accepts the reality of climate change as an expansion of our growing awareness of humans’ impact on the world around them. One of the first humans to voice the awareness of this reality was George Perkins Marsh, the famous statesman from Vermont who in the 1860s famously stared into the development and advancement that most Americans blindly saw as “progress” and stated that “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent.” This lesson, of course, has proven evident in innumerable instances, such as on Earth’s flora and fauna (including extinctions) both through direct action on living beings themselves (through domestication and transfer) and through indirect action by altering the environment (through changes in land use and pollution). Ecologists have demonstrated that desertification, shifts in forest types or river flow, and even dust bowls are known to have been caused in large part by human living patterns. Is it so unbelievable, then, that the scale of human impacts could be greater yet? As science and satellites provide new insight and information, could humans’ impact be seen to have occurred on a planetary scale? In 21st-century American culture, the term “global warming” has gained a widespread vernacular understanding that includes much more than its lit- eral meaning. In its more expansive forms, the meaning of global warming includes a recent rise in average global temperatures, the identification of human activity as the cause of this trend, grim forecasts in which human beings face huge environmental changes, and finally all sorts of specific rec- ommendations about how we must change our way of life to respond to the problem. All of this baggage is an important part of our story in the following pages. A reference book such as this one seeks to interest the reader and to keep him or her reading, but it must also seek to be a reasonably objective conduit of useful facts and ideas. As such, we must avoid overheated rhetoric, although we may on occasion need to report on such rhetoric from others. At the outset, we should clear up a few terminological confusions. Although the terms “global warming” and “climate change” have been used interchangeably by many journalists and politicians, these terms often are distinct. The term “climate change” is sometimes used to indicate climate variability, referring to the myriad of variations that Earth has undergone