During recent decades the stirring up of the processes of globalization
practically in all spheres of present-day civilization activities has
aggravated and brought forth numerous problems resulting from the
nature-society (N-S) interaction. It has become apparent that to solve
these problems it is necessary to develop new concepts and approaches to
the interpretation of global environmental changes that would enable one
to select the first-priority directions in studies and to reliably
assess the state of the nature-society system (NSS). One of these
priorities is to predict global climate change. The growing interest in
the problem of global climate change, determined by its practical
importance and by available contra- dictory estimates of the
anthropogenic contribution to climate change, necessitates a
systematization of knowledge of and data on the observed climate change
and causes of this change. Despite an enormous amount of projects and
programmes of studies of past and present climatic trends, the problem
of reliable prediction of future climate change remains far from being
solved. Emissions to the atmosphere of greenhouse gases (GHGs), mainly
carbon dioxide, is considered as one of the main causes of an expected
climate warming resulting in sufficiently negative consequences for
humankind. Therefore, an attempt has been made in this book to construct
a formalized technology to assess the levelof the greenhouse effectdue
to anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide as well as the effects of
other gas components.
