Climate Change and Circular Economics: Human Society as a Closed Thermodynamic System (Emerging Technologies and Materials in Thermal Engineering) - Softcover

Purica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0443299692 ISBN 13: 9780443299698

Publisher: Elsevier, 2024

Synopsis

Climate Change and Circular Economics: Human Society as a Closed Thermodynamic System aims to go beyond the concept of ‘fighting climate change’ to analyze the capacity of human society to evolve in relation to the environment based on a more complex approach. The book stresses the role of resource recovery by innovation in reducing the temperature increase, determined through an irreversible thermodynamic approach. Determining the speed of temperature increase contributed by selected economies and comparing these to environmental recovery time constants shows that emerging economies have a much greater speed and consequently a larger impact on environmental capability to recover.

Chapters progress from an analysis of present society as a dissipative open system to a thermodynamics view of the need for a circular economy, a big data analysis of climate change and risk mitigation, economic indicators, including entropy and economics, risk maps of climate change events risks, and insights into the ‘Gibbs paradox’, which describes the connection of two separate systems (like society and environment).

• Offers a unique, intersectional perspective on climate change
• Introduces generational risk maps for climate change events, opening the possibility for insurance as well as other mitigation and adaptation policies
• Provides methods to determine the contribution of selected economies to temperature increase and speed of increase using irreversible thermodynamics that allows for comparison with environmental recovery time constants
• Ends with a solution of the Gibbs ‘paradox’ that relies not on binary logic, but rather a multivalued modal logic of possibilities that sheds a profound light on the interaction of separate spaces versus their combination

About this title

About the Author

Prof.Ionut Purica is a corresponding member of the Academy of Romanian Scientists (AOSR), and a senior researcher in econophysics. He had worked in the World Bank, ENEA Rome and ICTP Trieste, Italy and RENEL Romania developing nonlinear models for energy systems development and economic decisions. He holds two PhDs: one in energy systems and the other in economics.

From the Back Cover

Climate Change and Circular Economics: Human Society as a Closed Thermodynamic System aims to go beyond the concept of ‘fighting climate change,’ to analyze the capacity of human society to evolve in relation to the environment based on a more complex approach stressing the role of resource recovery by innovation in reducing the temperature increase, determined through an irreversible thermodynamic approach. Determining the speed of temperature increase contributed by selected economies and comparing these to environmental recovery time constants shows that emerging economies have a much greater speed and consequently a larger impact on environmental capability to recover. Chapters progress from an analysis of present society as a dissipative open system, to a thermodynamics view of the need for a circular economy, a big data analysis of climate change and risk mitigation, economic indicators, including entropy and economics, risk maps of climate change events risks, and insights into the ‘Gibbs paradox’, which describes the connection of two separate systems (like society and environment), analyzed based on a multivalued modal logic that delivers a new way of approaching climate challenges.

Edition details

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0443299692
• ISBN 13: 9780443299698
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304