In addition to exploring weather and climate, this chapter describes the energy balance of incoming and emitted solar radiation, which can cause temperature changes. We explore the characteristics of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, such as CO2, CH4, and H2O, and others, that filter and redistribute radiation from the Sun. The discussion that follows also highlights how albedo from clouds, land surfaces, oceans, and particles in the atmosphere can vary widely, influencing the Earth’s energy balance. These processes impact the transport of energy from radiation throughout the Earth subsystem components. The movement of energy is a fundamental aspect of weather and climate.

We must contend with the complexity of the Earth system if we want to predict and mitigate the impacts of human activities, such as climate change and pollution. By taking a systems approach to studying the Earth, we can not only comprehend the potential impacts of human-caused disturbances – we can also develop strategies to mitigate them, some of which are also described inside the chapter.

This chapter charts the evolution of green theorising within International Relations (IR) and situates the Middle East as integral to both the development of global energy regimes and efforts to create global environmental norms and institutions. The chapter shows how green IR theories build upon the study of global environmental politics, political economy, political ecology, and environmental security. The case study of the Yemen conflict highlights how an ageing offshore oil tanker, the Floating Storage and Offloading Safer, became a flashpoint in conflict dynamics between non-state armed actors, international organisations, and regional powers, given the risk of a massive oil spill into the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. The case study emphasises the usefulness of moving beyond conventional units of analysis in IR, such as states, to consider the role of multinational firms and voluntary systems of environmental compliance, as well as shifting analysis to ecological scales, such as watersheds and seas, to fully grasp the cumulative impacts and diverse sources of marine oil pollution. The chapter shows how green theories have questioned fundamental assumptions within IR and opened new avenues of research inquiry.

This chapter provides a short introduction to climate change in the planetary boundaries framework.

Worldwide vegetable production has increased, with onions and tomatoes being the most popular globally. Although technically a root, the potato is widely consumed as a vegetable. Unfortunately, people in rich countries are not eating enough vegetables. The types they do consume are often problematic as well – such as those in processed forms like crisps and sauces, or those that are air-freighted or grown in energy-intensive greenhouses. Emissions would be reduced if consumers changed their habits: eating more fresh, seasonal produce, being more accepting of cosmetic imperfections, and embracing traditional varieties. Though climate change adds risks, yields are unlikely to plummet in the coming decades. Production can be maintained while cutting emissions by modifying growing dates to take advantage of changing weather patterns and by improving soil health. Greenhouse production can be made more resource-efficient as well. In the long term, new varieties must be developed, but consumers ultimately hold the key to managing this transition.

Abstract: What is the basis for the emergence of ‘complex societies’ in the Mediterranean and on its islands? Why did it happen in different places and at different times? In this chapter, we consider the unusual trajectory of Mediterranean social evolution in later prehistory. We show that many Mediterranean societies exhibiting evidence for vertical differentiation developed – counter-intuitively – on islands and coasts, and did so over the broad span from 3000 to 1000 BC. We consider the reasons behind this, illustrating how island environments, demography, structures of wealth distribution, and climatic change may intersect to drive otherwise inexplicable patterning. In doing so, we sketch what a more fully developed theory of Mediterranean social complexity might look like.

The planetary boundaries have mobilized a great deal of responses around what actions are needed to curb global warming. Some social scientists have argued for the value of the concept and its ability to mobilize global responses. Others critique its treatment of one undifferentiated humanity harming the environment. These debates raise key questions: Who is the human in the Anthropocene? Who is harming the environment? For whom and for whose purpose are we ‘saving’ the planet? What knowledge do we need to address the crisis? These questions point out that global responses to halt climate change hide differentiated responsibility for creating the problem but also differentiated impacts across populations and geographies. This chapter seeks to develop and integrate approaches to challenge the structures and mechanisms that prevent adequately understanding and addressing climate change challenges. Through the idea of border crossing, as an example of feminist decolonial geography, the chapter offers opportunities to expand our epistemological canon as an essential vantage point to begin to address the climate crisis without perpetuating colonial and patriarchal inequalities.

Abstract: This chapter reviews the meaning of ‘deserts’ both in modern and ancient terms, while emphasizing the uniqueness and complexity of local conditions within the deserts in close proximity to the Mediterranean. It argues that although geographically speaking arid spaces may not seem sustainable environments for inhabitation, exchange, and contacts, local conditions vary considerably, and larger deserts such as those of North Africa, the Near East, or the Arabian Peninsula must be analysed carefully. In fact, archaeological work in the past two decades has effectively shown the extent to which the deserts were thriving in Antiquity.

Atmospheric aerosol loading is a key planetary variable. As climate change has accelerated, debates over using atmospheric aerosols to reflect solar radiation (a form of geoengineering) have gained pace. This chapter begins by considering how early ethical debates often turned on considerations of risk and moral hazards associated with geoengineering technologies. The chapter’s core focus, however, is on the response of geoengineering proponents to those critiques. Those responses are increasingly consolidating around the idea that experiments with geoengineering ought to take place because, without them, there is no clear basis for gauging risks of technological interventions versus those of climate change. I argue, however, that this response turns on treating experimentation as a site of ethical adjudication. That, however, is itself an ethical decision about how to organize and examine matters of moral concern. I conclude by arguing that efforts to justify solar geoengineering experiments require sound moral arguments that have yet to be made.

Aquaculture is growing rapidly, making more fish protein available worldwide. It also has taken the pressure off capture fishing, where overfishing is rampant. The emissions from aquaculture are generally comparable to those of poultry, but the emissions from shrimp and prawn are quite high. Apart from overfishing, capture fishing suffers from the risks of stocks moving away as the ocean waters become warmer and more acidic. The emissions from aquaculture can be reduced by using renewable energy and by more efficiently managing resources. Fishing communities – both inland and marine – could also produce more if they could connect to markets. They are held back because they are poor, and their livelihoods are threatened by infrastructure development. Vulnerable small island countries should embrace foreign investment in processing to offset revenue losses from fishing rights. Readers are encouraged to apply an approach that examines fish stock health and opportunities to capture economic and nutritional value, so as to understand how aquaculture and capture fishing can ensure food security.

This chapter covers the interactions of urbanization with weather and climate. It begins with definitions of weather, climate, and climate change, and examples of urban interactions with weather and climate. Then urban impacts on temperatures and precipitation are reviewed. Thereafter, the reasons underlying these effects, including city structure, size, waste heat, and pollution, are described. This chapter concludes with explanations of the radiation budget and energy balance, which are central for understanding the city-climate interactions. This concluding sections are tailored to advanced readers with an interest in an in-depth understanding of physical processes underlying city effects on weather and climate.

The varied topography and climate of Iberia posed challenges for prehistoric hominids, as well as for later traders, fishers, farmers, and herders attracted by the peninsula’s mineral wealth, arable land, and diversity of marine and land animals. Iberians arrived from North Africa, Celts later arrived from the north, and Phoenicians and Greeks arrived from the Mediterranean. All of these diverse peoples brought their culture and language to Spain – founding cities, farming the land, mining, herding, trading, and therefore connecting what the Greeks called Iberia to the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Northern Europe.

This chapter discusses Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, which focuses on domesticity and labor aboard a space station during a twenty-four-hour period of circling the earth. It argues that Harvey builds the novel through a focus on four intertwined forms of labor: natural science experiments, space station maintenance, interpersonal talismanic-memorial labor, and the aesthetic-affective-emotional labor of metabolizing human-planet relationality. To focus on this last form of labor, the chapter examines Harvey’s use of myriad formal strategies that call attention to themselves as mediating technologies for encountering the earth’s surface. Furthermore, it highlights the novel’s primary socioecological affects: awe, anxiety, disgust, love, nostalgia, and precarity. To situate the assessment of how Harvey produces planet-scale affect, the chapter considers the overlap and divergence of the concepts planet, planetary, and planetarity. Ultimately, it argues that Harvey productively pressures the more conventional and anthropocentric concerns in the novel with her forceful centering of the earth as an object worthy of non-anthropocentric attention.

This chapter examines early Southern California fiction, such as Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885), exposing how historical nineteenth-century romance whitewashed a diverse transnational and multicultural territory. This chapter argues that by sugarcoating the realities of a violent and racialized colonial conquest, early Southern California fiction romanticized the region and its climate as a refuge where White settlers could improve their health. For Meylor, Ruiz de Burton also underscores the purported whiteness of her Californio characters to gain the empathy of her readers. By the 1920s, this chapter argues, literature had begun to depict LA as an Anglo city about to transition into a growing metropolis, but counter-narratives were already emerging, questioning the racial distortions of the booster economy.

This chapter studies the 2020 photo-essay “A Primordial Culture” by Sri Lankan Canadian multidisciplinary artist Rajni Perera. It centers Perera’s work as the basis of a theory of divine adornment as a creative response to climate catastrophe. Such a theory is derived from an investment in thinking alongside Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ornamentalism and demonstrates how forms of ornament might be complicated and utilized differently in response to Perera’s lone figure roaming unknown terrain following planetary collapse. The chapter weaves in discussions of both the photographs of Perera’s adorned traveler figure and her writing as a mode of describing a future world deeply rooted in, and indebted to, Indigenous, ancient, and anti-colonial feminist cosmologies.

Chapter 7 begins with a discussion of how colonialism and the climate issue in the MENA are strongly linked, and how this relationship affects not only development trajectories, but also the status of the climate as a policy area and women’s representation. The second part of the chapter covers Othering, that is, the portrayal of women as vulnerable victims or saviours, focusing on the dangers of feminizing vulnerability and responsibility, whilst also showcasing how Othering of women in the Global South occurs among female parliamentarians in the MENA. In terms of the global climate crisis, this has led to a situation where the climate issue is not prioritized as much as it could be if the female parliamentarians were more accountable to the electorate and identified more strongly with a broader group of women, that is, beyond the narrow elite segment of the population from which they themselves were recruited. At present, those that are the most passionate about combatting the climate crisis are the youth, whereas those who stand to gain the most are marginalized women — two groups that are nothing like the female parliamentarians, who are supposed to act in their interest.