The science of climate change has experienced an extraordinary expansion in the period since the mid-1980s and is paralleled by considerable public and political awareness of related issues.
The degree of natural variability in, and the causes of, climate change have become particularly important points of debate and the past decade has seen many publications dealing with these issues. Indeed, the area of climate research as a whole is now so large, and the sources of data so diverse, that many researchers are unaware of significant developments across the field. This collection therefore aims to provide a balanced selection of published papers, so as to make easily available the existing breadth and depth of information.
Taken together, the set of volumes will provide for the researcher (a) a greater awareness of the evidence for natural variability of climate; (b) a perspective on the role of various forcing factors in climate change; (c) a selection of papers that argue both for, and against, the 'solar' and 'anthropogenic' hypotheses as explanations for recent and current climate change; (d) a sense of what future climate will be like, and what remains to be discovered or achieved.