Future Climate Change

by Mark Maslin (Editor), Samuel Randalls (Editor)

In recent years, future climate change has increasingly been recognized as one of the most important issues of the twenty-first century, challenging the very structure of our global society. No longer just an abstruse scientific concern, it prompts difficult choices for both individuals and governments. Moreover, it is of the first importance to those working in disciplines such as climatology, engineering, economics, sociology, geopolitics, local politics, law, and global health. Emanating from across the social and natural sciences, as well as in the humanities, serious scholarship on future climate change flourishes now as it has never done before, and this new title in the Routledge series, Critical Concepts in the Environment , meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a vast literature – and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by leading scholars in the field, this new Routledge Major Work is a four-volume collection of foundational and cutting-edge contributions. The first volume ( Science ) in the collection deals with the development of the science of global warming and climate change, starting with Tyndall (1861), through to the IPCC synthesis (2007), and ending with the very latest research. Volume two ( Impact Assessments ), meanwhile, assembles the best thinking on how the potential physical, biological, social-political, and economic impacts of climate change are assessed. This volume also includes material on potential surprises that science is starting to investigate, such as the rapid melting of the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets, die back of the Amazon rainforest, release of gas hydrates, and other tipping points. The third volume ( Politics and Solutions ) gathers the most influential research on climate-change solutions; it encompasses global and local politics, engineering, renewable energy, and geoengineering. The final volume in the collection ( Framing the Debate ) brings together key scholarship to question and explore how the climate-change debate has been framed and reframed as a scientific, economic, security, health, development, geopolitical, ethical, and cultural issue. With comprehensive introductions to each volume, newly written by the editors, which place the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Future Climate Change is an essential collection destined to be welcomed as a vital research resource by all scholars and students of the subject.

2064 pages, Hardcover

First published December 20, 2011

About the author

Professor Mark Maslin FRGS, FRSA is the Director of the UCL Environment Institute and Head of the Department of Geography. He is an Executive Director of Carbon Auditors Ltd/Inc. He is science advisor to the Global Cool Foundation and Carbon Sense Ltd. He is a trustee of the charity TippingPoint and a member of Cheltenham Science Festival Advisory Committee. Maslin is a leading scientist with particular expertise in past global and regional climatic change and has publish over 100 papers in journals such as Science, Nature, and Geology. He has been awarded grants of over £28 million, twenty-six of which have been awarded by NERC. His areas of scientific expertise include causes of past and future global climate change particularly ocean circulation and gas hydrates. He also works on monitoring land carbon sinks using remote sensing and ecological models and international and national climate change policies.

Professor Maslin has presented over 45 public talks over the last three years including Oxford, Cambridge, Leeds, RGS, Tate Modern, Royal Society of Medicine, British Museum, Natural History Museum, CLG, and Goldman Sachs. This year he has also join the editorial board of The Geographical Journal. He has supervised 10 Research fellows, 10 PhD students and 19 MSc students. He has also have written 7 popular books, over 25 popular articles (e.g., for New Scientist, Independent and Guardian), appeared on radio, television and been consulted regularly by the BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky News. His latest popular book is the high successful Oxford University Press “Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction” the second edition was published late last year and has sold over 40,000 copies. He was the led author of the first UCL Environment Institute Policy Report, which was the basis of the Channel 4 ‘Dispatches’ program Greenwash (5/3/07). Maslin was also a co-author of the recent Lancet report ‘Managing the health effects of climate change’ and a DIFD Report on Population, Climate Change and the Millennium Development Goals.



Academic Qualifications

University of Cambridge, Darwin College 1989 - March 1993

PhD The study of the palaeoceanography of the N.E. Atlantic during Pleistocene (Supervisor: Sir N. J. Shackleton FRS).

University of Bristol 1986-1989

BSc (Hons) in Physical Geography First Class

Geology & Chemistry was also studied at honours level. Two dissertations were written

an experimental hydrological investigation of the formation of the karst landscape in the mountains of Mallorca.

a literature review investigating the mechanisms causing global glaciation and deglaciation.

Work Experience

May 2007

Head of Department of Geography

Oct 2006

Professor of Physical Geography

Oct 2002




Reader/Associate Professor in Palaeoclimatology at the ECRC, Department of Geography, University College London, U.K.

Jan 1995 onwards

Lecturer in Palaeoceanography, Palaeoclimatology and Physical Geography at the ECRC, Department of Geography, University College London, U.K.

Aug 1993 to Oct 1995

Research Scientist at the Geologisch Paleontologisches Institut, University of Kiel, Germany, working ODP Leg 155 (Amazon Fan) samples.