We have now reached the final chapter on our trip through the problem of modern climate change. In the previous 13 chapters, we explored the fundamental physics that leads us to confidently conclude that humans are now changing the climate and that continuing to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere could bring serious changes to our climate over the next century and beyond. We are not certain how bad this climate change will be, but the upper end of the range (global and annual average warming several degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures) includes warming large enough for many to consider its impacts catastrophic. Even the lower end of the range, about 1.5°C–2°C above pre-industrial temperatures, will be challenging for the world’s poorest as well as our most vulnerable ecosystems. We have also explored a number of possible responses to this risk, including mitigation, adaptation, solar radiation management, and carbon dioxide removal. We have even touched briefly on the political debate over climate change. In this chapter, I will discuss the elements of an effective response to climate change.

In this chapter, we begin our tour through the climate problem by defining weather, climate, and climate change. We also discuss something that few textbooks address: why you should believe this book.

In this chapter students are exposed to various kinds of inflectional processes in the languages of the world. We start with a review of the distinction between inflection and derivation. We then look at the inflectional categories of number, person, gender and noun class, case, tense and aspect, voice, mood and modality, evidentiality and mirativity. We look at the sorts of inflection we find in English and consider why English has so little inflection. We then turn to the concepts of the paradigm and of inflectional classes, and look at the sorts of relations that are found in paradigms (syncretism, suppletion, defectiveness, overabundance). Students learn the distinction between inherent and contextual inflection. The chapter ends with a brief ‘how-to’ on the analysis of inflection.

The Earth’s climate is a complex physical system. Nevertheless, we can still understand much about the climate even without an advanced degree in physics. In this chapter, I introduce the important physics required to understand the climate. Then, in Chapter 4, we will use this physics to construct a simple model of our climate.

This chapter offers a first introduction to morphological theory by looking at several important theoretical debates. We begin by looking at the nature of morphological rules through the lens oftwo models: Item and Arrangement versus Item and Process models. We then consider the issue of lexical integrity, whether rules of syntax and rules of morphology can interact with each other. We consider the problem of blocking, competition, and affix rivalry. We also look at various ways of characterizing constraints on the ordering of affixes. We go on to look at the subject of bracketing paradoxes. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the nature of affixal polysemy.

This chapter begins with brief descriptions of the morphological systems that are found in five languages: Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Samoan, Latin, and Nishnaabemwin. We go on to look at both traditional and contemporary ways of characterizing the morphological systems of languages. Students are introduced to the traditional characterization of languages as isolating, agglutinating, fusional, or polysynthetic, and we look at the ways in which this fourfold classification presents difficulties. We then consider more contemporary ways of comparing the morphology of the languages of the world such as the Indexes of Synthesis, Fusion, and Exponence. Students are also introduced to the notion of head- versus dependent-marking. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of genetic and areal tendencies in morphology and of typological change.

This chapter introduces students to the study of morphology. We look in a preliminary way at the difficulty inherent in defining what we mean by a word and introduce the term morpheme. We introduce the basic concepts of simple versus complex words. Students learn the distinction between word tokens, word types, and lexemes. We end with a brief introduction to the difference between inflection and derivation.

In Chapter 6, we discussed the concept of radiative forcing, which is an imposed change in planetary energy balance. In response, the planet’s temperature adjusts so as to restore energy balance, with the climate sensitivity (Section 6.3) determining how much warming is required. Thus, predictions of future climate require predictions of how radiative forcing will evolve in the future combined with an estimate of the Earth’s climate sensitivity.

In Chapter 4, we showed that the temperature of a planet is a function of the solar constant, the albedo of the planet, and the composition of the atmosphere (Equation 4.5). In Chapter 5, we showed that humans are altering the composition of the atmosphere by adding greenhouse gases to it, thereby increasing the number of layers, so we would expect the planet’s temperature to be increasing. In Chapter 2, we showed that temperature is indeed going up. If that were all there was to climate change, we would be done with the science. But, as we’ll talk about in this chapter, there is more interesting physics that we have to consider to fully understand the evolution and magnitude of modern climate change.